I've always wondered what exactly happened that sent us into this dystopic madness.

One part of it is definitely the Internet. In the 2000s when they truly realized how they could essentially control our lives with it, the corporations took it over  and turned it into a cesspool.

Now it's even worse....a social and memetic engineering monster that pushes you into echo chambers, tells you what to think, decides what gets to trend each day/hour, and mines your data while beating you over the head with ads. On top of that, anywhere between 60-80% of the Internet, including people you talk to, .are bots and our adversaries use bots to sow division.

It's about to get even worse...AI is about to get behind the steering wheel.

This isn't what the Internet was supposed to be. Go look at the mid-late 90s internet and/or read articles from back then about it.

Smartphones never should've been invented.

ALL of our culture has regressed.

The world also has an entirely different feel to what it was in the 20th century. It's hard to explain...other people feel it to.

I know I'm veering into conspiracy territory but I wonder if some sort of accident happened while TPTB were testing some sort of exotic tech and this caused some sort of alternate timeline/shift and there's simply no way of ever fixing it so we just continue down this alternate path.

Looking at the futuristic stuff from the 20th century is depressing. They had no idea it would turn into this.

Check out retro futurism...

Watt coming in and squeezing out one final album from these guys would be a nice alternate timeline but I think we've already passed the point of anything of substance occuring.

We're going to be really lucky if we can even get one or two more leftovers.

It's a travesty that it had to all play out like this.

They really could've done something great in 2016-17 had they actually gave a shit.

Finally a release date.

It's telling that Axl and Slash are on different songs.

Also take into account bacteria that we brought to Mars could have morphed into some super toxic organism and we could potentially never even know it happened.

I no longer believe manned missions to other planets/moons will ever happen. I think civilization will collapse long before such an achievement occurs.

Nixon should've been hung for cancelling the Saturn program. It destroyed our chances at exploring the Solar System. Instead they greenlit the Shuttle and we jerked off in LEO for decades.

At some point (70s-80s) TPTB decided our future was going to be much different than talked about for decades. Instead of looking out, we looked in.

Now we're in a dystopic hell of our own making and there's no way out.

The thing I hated about the Sopranos there towards the end is how you find out Carmine was right. It's not a family...it's a glorified crew. Tony doesn't nearly as much power as you assume he does in the previous seasons.

Dallas did this same thing. JR is a shell of himself those last few seasons. The guy who could bring the entire state of Texas to its knees can't even get himself out of an insane asylum. Its pathetic.