deserves scrutiny: Kevin Kelly (we've worked together on a couple of projects in the past and I've found him incredibly insightful) posits a very interesting premise that I thinkscrutiny:

The idea of progress has been slowly dying. I think progress lost its allure at the ignition of the first atom bomb at the end of WWII. It has been losing luster since. Even more recently the future has become boring and unfashionable. No one wants to live in the future.

The jet packs don't work, and the Daily Me is full of spam. Nobody finds the Future attractive any longer.

The only thing left to believe in is collapse. That's not boring!

The end of civilization would be terribly exciting, and unlike any future we could imagine, probably more likely. Dystopias are a favorite science fiction destination now. We all are collapsitarians these days.

This is a conclusion that I think Nietzsche would concur with. In short: it implies that without a real challenge that tests the limits of our creativity as individuals or as a species-civilization, we wither. It that light, the growing doom is a violent psychological reaction to the terrible soul-draining ennui of Fukuyama's " end of history ."

Glad to find that I'm not the only one pondering this element of the zeitgeist.