And the Industrial Revolution sprung from (Protestant, post-Enlightenment) England. The Luddites and the mystics couldn't stand it, and I have a certain sympathy for their distrust of technology, such as the "dark satanic mills" spoken of by William Blake: looming black towers on the horizon belching smoke. But without the Industrial Revolution, I would not be enjoying my favorite Christmas present this year, which is a year's worth of Spotify premium. I essentially have unfettered access to one of the largest music libraries in human history, and if I ever get restless or bored, this library is curated by an A.I. that gauges my tastes and can recommend new music for me. Thirty years ago I was a teenager relying on the mercy of radio programmers to play something I liked. That seems like the dreariest dark ages by comparison. Yesterday, in less than an hour, I created a playlist on Spotify called "80s," which is at 250 songs and counting, and is full of all the songs from my youth that have nostalgia value for me, including the cheesy ones. There is even a song on it called "The Ballad of Jayne."
The only thing I would add to Greg's list is virtual reality. The Matrix, of course, is a dystopian movie, because the virtual reality everyone was made to experience was just the dreary quotidian life of the late 1990s. But if the potential for virtual reality is limitless, and people can experience anything from adventures to sex to Borgesian libraries to time-travel eras, then I imagine everyone would sign up to be happily enslaved to the technology ("ye shall be as gods"). It would be more like the movie Strange Days, only instead of people having brief rushes of VR excitement, it would be a non-stop euphoria. It's almost as if there's a race between a future heaven and future hell: either civilization will collapse first, and people will live in the rubble of a nightmarish post-apocalyptic landscape, or nano- and bio-technology will succeed quick enough for the human race to get sucked into the endless bliss of a Singularity. My money is on the first scenario, but I am a pessimist. I recently read an interesting book called Sapiens, by an author named Yuval Noah Harari, who I am sure everyone here would loathe as he is an atheist evolutionist secular vegan homosexual Jew who teaches at an Israeli university, but he has another book out about potential futures called Homo Deus, and I think I might read that, too. I find technology both queasy and completely enthralling at the same time.