Are 'They' ready to look at the world differently

I have read the Penny Arcade Webcomic for many, many years. It asks a salient question, is the world coming full circle?
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/09/16/farm-minimization

One of the blogs I read, Face to Face, had an article about this trend a few months ago. The author thinks that everyone sees that the American Empire is stagnating, so everyone wants to get back to nature. The European Empires in the 1800s had the same trends.

This is a recapitulation of the pattern in European empires that were bloated, stagnating, and about to enter precipitous decline and collapse, around the late 19th and early 20th century. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Arts & Crafts movement, primitivist Post-Impressionism, and so on and so forth. The American empire was still expanding at that point, so although we did partake of Gilded Age libertarian degeneracy, it was nowhere near the levels of fin-de-siecle European empires. But now that our imperial lifespan has entered that autumnal stage, we will also behave that way -- in its good and bad ways.

The more I watch the streamers, especially the Vtubers, the more I've become aware of how broad the loss of faith in civilization and ever-marching progress has become. They are entirely online people, they are far more tech-hopeful than normies, they all live in cities, and as part of the entertainment sector, they're all left / progressive / etc.

They, and their audiences who watch them in droves, ought to be the most utopian and evangelist about civilization, urbanization, and the continual forward march of progress, whatever it means to them.

And yet the video game culture as a whole, including them, has decisively abandoned urban utopianism

You can read the whole article at his blog. I know that I got into MineCraft for a little while. And then I realized that I should mine and craft in real life, and make real things. So that is what I have done, with a SKIP in my step.

That, and on Friends of Road 4109's recent work day, I pointed out to the younger folks that we were doing IRL minecraft. They laughed, and later someone played Diggy Diggy Hole.

I think the UK trend of reinstating odd traditions, like dressing up in costumes and rolling cheeses down hills is part of this movement. They had a 'sheep drive and livery fair' in London last weekend, 40 sheep from Gloucester herded over London bridge (toll free), although I don't suppose London has had much of a sheep sale in a few years...

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