Actually, I would conjoin this with “Groundhog Day”.

People in “civilized life” seem to hermetically *seal* themselves off(see Robert Greene: “The Art of Seduction”).

Most are, in fact, empty shells.
Combine this with the unparalleled and world-historical status of the mythologization and *self-absorbtion* that constitutes the American identity.

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/poniewozik/article/0,9565,699790,00.html

As Paul Saffo says that the U.S. won’t be around in half a century(by probabilities) – I say: just let the husk of “American life” as it now stands(your analysis of developments is well done) go the way of demise and the ashen heap.

And…**out of that**, something can be extracted.

From nation-state to city-state(best example: Silicon Valley).

But no “polyannic” notions of change reign here.

McLuhan thought the same vis a vis his notion of “global village” which was popular immediately in his own day:

“The term never inspired a sense in me of “social harmony” – exact opposite.”

*

As to your second question about “love of change and the new”: A good Socratic spirit of the soul would help.

Teach them the **joie de vivre** of reverse-engineering(ie. hacking) human identity.

I actually have no idea how to do this. Education? Guerrilla street art that challenges notions of “set human identity” as dictated by modern organized society? Trying to blow up the damned Matrix?!

(Anything goes in life save activity that is *clearly unethical* and would constitute “clear and present danger”.)

Let people be enabled to be the “Shapers of their Destiny” – something that “organization man”, though “he”(rather, “it”) has its many virtues, outright proscribes!

And note: what I said above regarding “national life” ought not be fallaciously applied to the individual parts: people – themselves!

Making **social – inroads** is key! (for experts to work out..)

Again, I don’t know how to do this.

I’m sure that there’s some kind of literary thing out there of “personal Redemption” to serve as a template; eg. the film “Metropolis”. Whatever.

My recommendation: Have people focus on the debate on the said technologies that occurred in 2000 between Bill Joy(in favor of “top – down” centralization) and Jamais Casio(open – source is integral. Necessary but not sufficient).

That’s accessible enough for the more “average modes”.

The key is not to drive the responsible scientists underground – since they vastly outnumber the “evil geniuses”.

Doing that would create something of a maldynamic.

That’s easy: bring back the era of post-war prosperity, when people earned more than their grandparents and kids could expect to earn more than their parents. I suspect that if you look at the US over the course of its history, neophilia has risen and fallen with the GDP. And an irony: It is the periods of most ardent neophilia, such as the 1920s or 1950s, that often appear to us in retrospect as the most culturally reactionary periods (which is probably related to why science fiction tends to be so aesthetically conservative–the shock of the new drives us back into the arms of linear narrative).

In real terms, incomes peaked in the early ’70s. After that, life began to get harder. Corporations began reducing their investments in R&D, and the government likewise. In the ’80s it looked like Japan would take over the world. In the ’90s the world wide web distracted us up until the dot com crash, and now we are realizing that the rest of the world is bypassing us in mobile technology, thanks to our monopolistic regulations.

The Soviets launched Sputnik 50 years ago while the US rocket industry was still blowing up launch pads. The specter of Soviets putting nuclear warheads anywhere on the planet spooked the US government into getting serious about technological development. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US government has had no great incentive to fund research into surviving all out nuclear war. Now, it is again true that “the business of America is business”, not science.