> How do we properly incentivize progress and innovation?

There is no progress or innovation without qualifiers.

> safest, most prosperous

And most depressed, most suicidal, most alienated, most amok running, most hysterical, most sophistry laden, most marketing raped, most mass produced, most polluted times ever. Millionaires today are poorer than paupers, artists today are more cloned and out of touch with themselves and the world than random citizens of other times and places. The ones who aren't 100% market whores, anyway, who at least pretend to themselves they're artists. We went from turning our world into meaninglessness to turning our selves into meaningless, mass produced objects.

We can't even afford to make something for the sake of craftsmanship, or leave a blank space blank instead of smearing marketing. We went from everybody and their dog being a member of 20 and running 5 forums to everybody being on Facebook. We went from RSS to fucking Twitter, who "let users express themselves". Companies openly brag about wanting to create "compelling experiences", marketing people dog food their own idiotic slogans and are now honest when repeating them ad nauseam, because they're now actually this small and weak to actually believe actually all of it. We went from browser makers doing whatever to user agents and back to browser makers doing whatever and users just sitting there and hoping some of that will be fun for them, too. We went from metacrawlers to Google. We went from Apple, Atari, Amiga, IBM-PC to -- a few player essentially all doing the same user hostile, uninspired shit. How many newspapers are owned by how many conglomerates? And look at company names. Herply this, derply that. Look at people's names. Are you meaning to look me in the eye and tell me we're not approaching Idiocracy? 500 years was the science-fiction part about it. Give it 20.

But safety and prosperity? Heh. It's the safety of securely being born dead. The biggest threat used to be death, now there is less and less difference between existing for a while, to shove some franchises in the mental and physical orifices, and not having been born. What does it profit a man? What does a man lose? I can't tell you the answer, but I can tell you who you shouldn't ask for that answer; the man who did lose his soul to gain the dissolution of the world, like some Midas turning things to poop. Nietzsche was right about some things, Erich Fromm was right about others, Hannah Arendt was right about everything, Einstein was right about people and who gives two shits about physics anyway, Orwell and Huxley were on to it, and then there's the thousands of others who I don't know but who all said the same things in various ways. Safety and prosperity? Fuck that. Life isn't safe, the whole universe isn't. Only death wants safety, only fear wants more, life wants to live. And yes, life is more fun when it's not reckless, when it is intentional. Food and shelter and medicine are great. That we focus on power and alienation while pretending they have anything to do with safety and prosperity, that we killed the point of living in the first place, that's the problem.

Sorry for ranting, but you don't get to tell me what I've been told or how I judge things. If it's the safest and best in your opinion, fine. But if you simply state that as fact, you brought nothing to an everything fight.