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This article, written by someone who died in 2015 and published in Feb 2019, is fascinating, but not for the reason the New Yorker thinks. It's a very solid example of an elderly person suffering from future shock, unable to grasp the changed world around him. 
https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/1355349138729283588
https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/1355349138729283588
If I'd read this when it was written, over 7 years ago, it would have just been another example of Old Man Shouts At Clouds. I probably would have just fisked it, because I can rebut the vast majority of his objections without even thinking. But...
...the last 7 years has put an entirely different complexion on it. Nostalgia was originally considered a disease, a form of melancholy, and future shock is, if you like, an aggressive form of nostalgia. This rebellion against and rejection of the present is obvious in...
... huge amounts of political thought right now. Brexit and Trumpism, for example, are both founded on a rejection of modernity and a yearning for simpler times, when we were "in control" and "sovereign", when white men were in charge and everyone else subservient.
I'm not saying Sacks was a Trumpist or Brexiter – people deal with future shock in multiple ways, one of which is apparently to write essays for the New Yorker. But we have to understand future shock better to understand what we're dealing with in Trumpism and Brexitism.
If you reject modernity, reject the present and all the affordances of technology, you restrict your own opportunities, damage your economic outlook and create a huge emotional burden for yourself – anger, fear, and hatred being perhaps the biggest.
You swim in a sea of resentment as you watch all those awful people – who understand what you don't – enjoying opportunities closed to you, behaving in ways that not only do you not understand, but that you despise. You are desperate for a simpler, happier, more bountiful time...
...a time that never existed, but that you're told by populists and demagogues, was like a heaven compared to the hellish present. And that simplicity is irresistible. It's easier than grappling with a complex, confusing present, and learning how the world works.
If we don't find a way to help these people understand and make peace with modernity, we'll be fighting populist nostalgia forever, because the world is simply not going to get simpler or easier to navigate. Yes, we have to fix the economy, healthcare, education, safety...
...but that's not enough. None of that will help people feel at home in their own skin if the world around them still feels strange and alien and terrifying. I don't know what the answer is, but we do have to find one or we'll always be fighting a rearguard action. -30-
Oh, also, it's important to note that this is a global phenomenon. Just look at Afghanistan, Iran etc in the 60s and 70s, and see how the rejection of modernity has played out there.
