Ask HN: Do you feel like you live in the future?

  "We eat in restaurants, buy branded toiletries, build 
  skyscrapers, create legislative institutions, travel in 
  flying machines, write poetry, and search for meaning in 
  relationships, temples, and scientific books. Humans have 
  discovered antibiotics, sent probes into space, decimated 
  rainforests, shared a billion views of clips of kitten 
  behaviour, and decoded their own genomes.


  But there is one thing that humans have singularly failed 
  to do, and that is to properly understand their own behaviour. "

  — Robert Aunger and Valerie Curtis:
  Gaining Control: How human behavior evolved




  The Thirties had seen the first generation of American 
  industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil 
  sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners; your basic 
  Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of 
  decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some 
  pencil sharpeners looked as though they'd been put 
  together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change 
  was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, 
  you'd find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a 
  certain kind of sense, because the most successful 
  American designers had been recruited from the ranks of 
  Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a 
  series of elaborate props for playing at living in the 
  future. 
  - William Gibson