The Long Now

I reviewed Stephenson's Anathem last month. After I read the book I looked at some other reviews and related material. That led me to the Long Now Foundation (wikipedia page here). They are an organization that is afraid that our modern culture is causing us to treat the future with too short of an attention span. They are dedicated to change that. Especially interesting is the clock they are designing, which is supposed to run for 10,000 years.
The FP Gal and I were talking about this the other day. When I was growing up there were plenty of articles and talk about life in the future, usually settled on the year 2000. That type of talk seems to have stopped. About the only time you hear mention of the year 2100 is in regard to climate change. We don't even talk much about more recent dates like 2050 or even 2020. I was reading discussion of the economy in 2010 and it seemed hoplessly far off (in the sense that no one has a firm grip on what it will actually be like).
We seem to be more and more of a nostalgia culture, constantly revisiting past fashions. Seriously, when was the last new clothes fashion? Modern cars look much the same way that they did 15 years ago (and they don't look nearly as good as they did 50 or 60 years ago). Musical theater has stopped doing anything new. Art (both sculpture and paintings) is only interesting in the sense of how irritating the artist can be.
Movies are being made at a greater pace than ever before but the big studios are becoming increasingly reliant on other mediums to give them stories. If it's not a sequel, it's almost certainly based on a novel, TV show, comic book or theme park ride. New stories are few and far between. Novels are a lone exception, with plenty of brand new writing coming out each year.
I don't know what this all adds up to but I don't think it's a good sign as a culture.