Although as designers we have long been aware of the human considerations of our work, we no longer have the luxury of practising the art of design divorced from much larger cultural issues than style, function, ergonomics and safety. While so far Australia and many of the social democracies may have escaped the worst of the infection, it's doubtful that they can stay free of it forever. Eddington, Einstein, Bell, Bohm and Hiley demonstrated the surprising interrelationship of subatomic phenomena. Cultural critics are not so surprised. In the enterprises of science this unity frequently appears in complex interrelationship with a reductionist passion for separation, but that's another story.
Cultures manage the interface between dream and action by managing memory.
In this effort amnesia is a powerful resource, because that which is forgotten can become that which is discovered. The meta-narrative dies hard, and probably physics does more than any other discipline to keep it on life support. This is not necessarily a bad thing, although I tend to view it with suspicion. Dreams of unity serve an important cultural purpose. At the close of the mechanical age they emerge in an episteme in which commodification increases isolation, substituting instead a simulacrum of connectivity.