@sqrtminusone "smart" is not unidimensional. people can be canny businesspeople and idiotic in philosophy or historiography. (people can make bad products and still be canny businesspeople. lots more than product quality determines business success.) it's a bad idea to short bitcoin. that doesn't imply that bitcoin is in any nontautological sense a high-quality product (or a token representing anything else of high quality). 1/

@sqrtminusone re fear of change, i think it's fair to say that from the postwar period until very recently, technology and innovation have had very positive, almost utopian connotations, and recently that is shifting, inverting even towards quite dystopian expectations. i think you are right that "dawn of the Renaissance" is projecting ex-post hagiography of the Renaissance backwards too loosely. 2/

@sqrtminusone nevertheless, if we change dawn of the renaissance to (a bit ironically!) dawn of the Atomic Age, i think the proposition holds pretty well. science fiction used to predominantly describe the contours, conundra, and paradoxes of world we could recognize as "more advanced" even if we could entertain questions of what was lost along with what was gained. 1984-style dystopias, cyberpunk, were smaller subgenres, minority reports if you will. 3/

@sqrtminusone i think that relationship has now inverted. at least measured by prominence and popularity, contemporary science fiction is predominantly dystopian, with "solar punk" or "star trek"-type fantasies, or more neutral space operas or Asimov's Three Laws speculations now the minority. something has changed, in literature and in life, very quickly i think. /fin