Perhaps the loss is a feature and not a bug.

It's been remarked that present culture is over-dominated by the recapitulation of 'baby boomer era culture' (for lack of a better word) and that youth revolutionary culture has been largely subsumed by it. (Is there anything now among 15-30 year olds that is as 'shocking' as rock and roll used to be? I can't say I can find anything. To be sure, there is plenty about which the older generations complain in relation to the younger, but that isn't the same.)

The other thing is, we're never going to stop loss (or, that is, that would be what my money would be on). We'll always be subject to the framing problem. And we might be better off to try and manage our anxiety about the world changing. Because that, to me, seems the real fear: we accept that, for us to exist as we are, the world had to change [at many points] but now we want to arrest, we are the pinnacle of humanity, the only means by which we can remain thus is for either the future never to come (change to be averted indefinitely) or for (as William Gibson pointed out) we have to imagine our future descendants as evolved to the point where their spindly legs and effete physiques barely managed to hold together beneath the crushing power of their ginormous brains[1].

Perhaps this is also connected to why so many complaints are lodged against franchises such as Star Trek and Star Wars and Doctor Who: we're no longer twelve, and we're never going to be again, and we can't get it back no matter how hard we try.

But, also, perhaps it's an idea we're going to have to get used to in a big way, because, if the state of all that currently rapidly decaying early film stock is any indicator, and I would bet that it is, the state of copyright, which will become only more oppressive as the 'knowledge economy' does more of whatever it keeps doing, half of the twentieth century and perhaps everything between now and some truly dystopian societal collapse stands likely to suffocate beneath the oily sea of private ownership where (in some cases) the only person with the rights to a given cultural artifact is the third cousin twice removed of the someone aunt's brother's half-sister's niece by a second marriage, who is currently in a vegetative state, never to emerge; whereas, on the other hand, we have cultural artifacts merely have to owner that anyone can identify at all. So I would be tempted to say that I would wonder if, looking back, future archeologists, if there is any such thing, are going to have quite (generally while imbibing large quantities of alcohol) a time hypothesizing as to why there was such a cultural dark age around this point in history.

Or maybe it's that we have reached and gone past the 'Death of God' (in the actually sense that Nietzsche meant it) and in the interregnum between that which came before and that which came after, we are trying to patch over the destruction of tradition by simply replacing it, trying to fill-in the gap. But, like cracking open someone's chest to replace a meat heart with a plastic toy replica, it just won't work. And neither can it be replaced with a heart from a corpse.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/16/william-gibson...