When I was growing up, I recall reading these magazines, and it made me really excited about technological progress and the future. I found these sorts of ambitious ideas and grand scale engineering to be really inspirational.
This is the kind of vision that’s sorely lacking under western capitalism where the best and brightest minds end up wasting their talents working on utterly useless, and often harmful, garbage like Facebook or Twitter.
Instead of people figuring out how to advance humanity and solve big problems in the world, they’re working on figuring out how to shove as many ads as possible in people’s faces.
There’s a stark contrast between the west and China in this regard. China has a vision for the future and it implements large scale engineering projects today. It’s pretty much the only place where real meaningful technological advancement is happening at scale today. This is the power of central planning and communism!
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
― Socrates
The idea that the youth of today are more spoilt and lazy and interested in only the superficial is as old as youth itself.
Though obviously this youthful obsession with things that are “in” is actively encouraged by capitalism for sure. You’re not wrong about capitalism commodifying everything, including human relationships, but it isn’t the fault of kids today. If anything, I think things like streamers show promise for them, as they would rather watch a person having a good time, an actual person, rather than another mindless tv show their parents would’ve consumed at their age.