Digital despair

Neal Stephenson identifies the paradox of a tech-centered society that is attracted to visions of technology failing:

At the mass-market consumer level, we have a strange state of affairs in which people are eager to vote with their dollars, pounds and Euros for the latest tech but they flock to movies depicting a relentlessly depressing view of the future, and resist any tech deployed on a large scale, in a centralized way, such as wind turbine farms.

Previously: The impact of the future