Umm, I think people who say things like "20+ years..." haven't been paying attention to the change in rate of large scale social change over the last few decades.

Do you really think anyone could have predicted today in 1997 ? (today as in, Brexit, Trump, Nsa/Privacy, Fb...etc)

Well, The Simpsons in 2000 predicted President Trump.

And I'm not exactly sure what surprises you about the NSA, I think many civil-liberties groups in 1997 would have been happy to talk your ear off about their (reasonable or unreasonable) surveillance concerns.

Sure, but the idea that all of a sudden we aren't going to have MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Google, Facebook, and all these other world-class, leading institutions because of 4 years of Trump is nonsense. If we had 4 years of Trump for 5x as long, then yeah maybe it would start. But that's not going to happen.

The things you mentioned are so insignificant I doubt there will be more than a section about them in the history books.

In 1997 the EU was only 4 years old! Clinton was using submarines to tap undersea cables. AOL was connecting households around the country.

I don't agree that these changes are large scale compared to 20 years ago. Looks like the cycle is repeating itself and only the names have changed.

There were people not using cell phones in 1997 because of the privacy implications.

I guess they were making some assumptions that they would likely apply to modern tech.