Precisely. Pop culture is made to be vacuous, ephemeral, and cyclic. Unfortunately, there are scores of people who eat it up because it's pushed to them. Worse, there are lots of institutions who make a killing off of giving people exactly what they say they want.

The success doesn't bother me; the pandering does.

> If someone thinks we aren't doing the same thing, they're insane.

For varying values of we, anyway. Every generation seems to have its crisis/moral panic du jour. Only a minority ever seems to take a moderate, pragmatic view, and expect neither utopia nor dystopia.

> expect neither utopia nor dystopia.

Maybe the old utopia is the new mundane?

Infant mortality near zero, lifespan 80 years, global communication and travel, almost no hunger or war.

Wouldn't that be considered utopia 100 years ago?

Those are for the West, but the rest of the world is rapidly catching up, too.