Wish I'd said that - June 11, 2020

Futurologists (whether utopian or dystopian, and in this instance flapping about the Internet) make “precisely the same mistake that many historians make when writing about the remoter past. And this mistake, it seems to me, is to suppose that to change the material circumstances of life is to alter fundamentally the sense of life itself. But life as it is lived is always pretty much the same, with the same protocols of boredom and excitement, the same glare of midday and gloom of eventide, the same petty ambitions, existential doubts, and immortal longings. We can certainly create the circumstances of greater freedom or greater oppression, but the range of possible variation in life itself, in the simple, irreducible sense of being alive, is far narrower than our chattering classes usually appreciate.”

James Gardner in National Review October 14, 1996