I saw this yesterday and thought it may have been the most profound bit of meming I had seen in quite a while:

I don’t know whether we have gone about as far as we can go in pretty well every kind of technology, or whether we have instead reached what John Stuart Mill had described as the stationary-state, but my belief is that we have just stopped advancement and are stagnating. The mobile phone and the PC are pretty good and have been developing but over the past 30-40 years we live in the dreariest period of stagnation possibly in the last 500 years. It’s a pretty good life I suppose, and materially better than in the past. But this is where we are and are going nowhere else, except politically into a new age of feudalism since even politically we are going backwards.

Personal freedom and individual rights are disappearing, even as an ideal. Per capita wealth is on the decline with a fantastic shift in the distribution of income towards those already better off. Everyone else will either stay put, or more likely begin to slip backwards as time moves forward. Hardly anyone notices how their lives have been constricted, but they have been and weirdly near on half the population is grateful for their oppression.

And this was from forty years before that.