This speaks to me as someone who's critical of many of the hit stories in our popular culture. In the last decade, I've often wondered why our relationship to the future has changed so much since the first days of Star Trek. The easy answer would be to cite all the impending ways the planet is doomed. However, living through the cold war felt, in many ways, more pressingly dire, and Star Trek happened at basically the same time as the cuban missile crisis.
In the context of this essay, our moral future is far less certain. The cold war had an old narrative to it, with easy villains. The world of today makes it more difficult to avoid the nuance. It can even explain why so many AAA game titles fall back to derivative, Tolkien-esque settings.
I wonder that as well. When I ask the question out loud, people usually answer "Well, everything looks so much worse now". I don't think that's the real reason -- Star Trek aired as the Vietnam War heated up, during an era of high-profile political assassinations, and it reached mass popularity in the 70s, which no one at the time regarded as a high point.
What's changed is that we no longer believe in the future, that the future could be better than the present.
Could it just be luck? Some author writes a hit story. That story influences followers. If the original story was a downer then suddenly there are more downer followers. It becomes a kind of culture or bubble that most people are unaware they're viewing everything through that lens.
Further, modern media takes that even further. Plenty of producers, marketing people, people with the purse strings just want more of whatever was popular last year. Which creates a trend to produce more of the same.
Yes, real life events are also an influence but similarly, one extremely popular title can influence followers for years/decades.
To put it another way, if there was no Walt Disney would there be 150+ famous family oriented feel good animated movies that have influenced so much of our culture OR, would we have some entirely different culture because one artist (or team of artists) works didn't have that particular level of influence.
In the context of this essay, our moral future is far less certain. The cold war had an old narrative to it, with easy villains. The world of today makes it more difficult to avoid the nuance. It can even explain why so many AAA game titles fall back to derivative, Tolkien-esque settings.
This has the ring of truth to me.