The Industrial Era Ended, and So Will the Digital Era

In a famous scene in the 1967 movie The Graduate, a family friend takes aside Dustin Hoffman's character, Benjamin Braddock, and whispers in a conspiratorial tone, "Plastics….There's a great future in plastics." It seems quaint today, but back then plastics really were new and exciting. If the movie had been set in another age, the advice to young Braddock would have been different. He might have been counseled to go into railroads or electronics or simply to "Go West, young man!" Every age has things that seem novel and wonderful at the time, but tepid and banal to future generations. Today digital technology is all the rage because after decades of development it has become incredibly useful.