We’re past the computer age, William Gibson suggests:
You can be living in a third-world village with no sewage, but if you’ve got the right apps then you can actually have some kind of participation in a world that otherwise looks like a distant Star Trek future where people have plenty of everything. And from the point of view of the guy in the village, information is getting beamed in from a world where people don’t have to earn a living. They certainly don’t have to do the stuff he has to do everyday to make sure he’s got enough food to be alive in three days.
On that side of things, Americans might be forgiven for thinking the pace of change has slowed, in part because the United States government hasn’t been able to do heroic nonmilitary infrastructure for quite a while. Before and after World War II there was a huge amount of infrastructure building in the United States that gave us the spiritual shape of the American century. Rural electrification, the highway system, the freeways of Los Angeles—those were some of the biggest things anybody had ever built in the world at the time, but the United States really has fallen far behind with that.
I am a retired civil engineer, and I grew up in the heroic age of big civil engineering. That’s over in the US, but it lives overseas. Of course, much of infrastructure building is extremely wasteful and pointless, especially in Japan and China where the purpose seems to be spending money.
I think it’s pretty much over in Europe, too, the Chunnel being the last big project. Again, the sclerosis and short-term greed of the Ruling Class.