Another way of looking at this is that the end of screen savers means the end of a small culture.

I don't remember where I got this idea but I coded up a screensaver very quickly once. The idea was it periodically would make a 1/2 x 1/2 size copy of the screen and then copy it to the bottom right, bottom left and top center of the screen. This converges on a fixpoint called the Serpinski Gasket. On Windows it was pretty easy to write such screen savers. I'd be interested in doing it under X Windows but the people who maintain X Windows (or DEs) are not interested in maintaining end-user-facing variety in screen savers. And if you can do it it means that rogue software can exfiltrate image captures of your running programs.

I also want to quickly mention PointCast [1] as an example of another current in the screensaver sea.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_(dotcom)