Every kid who tweets about her 9th-grade teacher's inappropriate joke is a whistleblower in the making. 0.001% of them might go on to work for a three-letter agency, and 0.001% of those who do might eventually leak something incriminating. Then some men in black will go through her school records and find that she's had a long-standing "problem with authority". Who knows? Even Snowden, until 2009, believed that whistleblowers should be shot in the balls [1].
Subtle, deeply ingrained assumptions like "the Government says so, so it must be true" or "white men are more trustworthy than blacks" only show up in large-scale aggregate data. It might be so un-obvious that a whole generation of sociologists could make a living studying the tip of the mysterious iceberg. But that's how societies change all the time, it will have tangible political consequences in the long term, and that's all I'm hoping for.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/exclusive-in-2009...
I'm sure you're wonderful to be around at parties!
In fact, a fairly good definition of "civilization" would be "a bloc of people who have organized themselves so as to overpower natural forces and configure their lives in accordance with their own preferences/values/criteria".
TL;DR: I don't go around claiming hurricanes are "optimal", so neither are market crashes.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-mark...
We criticize the baby boomers for being distracted by TV, but I think gen Y is going to prove themselves even more easily distracted, especially considering how shitty their outlook is if they have a whole-scope outlook on the world they live in. It sucks, it has very limited avenues for improvement, and all angles point towards further problems. Why worry when you can distract yourself with trite banality?