In an interview in 2021, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen discussed an impending cultural divide. “The vast majority of humanity,” he said, “lacks Reality Privilege their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.” He promised to build digital products for precisely this kind of consumer, “no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in”.?
You can go through life with a thousand epigrams or deep quotes that you might come back to over two, four, six decades. Then, the disrupters pop up, those techno fascists, the tinkers and culture blasters. These sociopaths who get the limelight then become part of a new set of epigrams, but not grand ones,
Younger populations are usually considered an economic gift for countries. When the share of the working-age population (15 to 64) is larger than the non-working-age share, there is usually a boost in economic productivity, known as a demographic dividend.