Do you remember progress? Probably, if you do you, then you are an older sort like me, or an oddball collector of paleo-futurism.
Michael Chabon has a wistful eulogy for the future at Long Now.
The odd thing about contemporary market triumphalism is that it celebrates an incapacity to redesign the world. This so-called "realism", which is in fact a deep pessimism, is not really new, but it is a spectacular retreat from the the optimism that prevailed when I was an adolescent with a season pass to Expo '67.
We don't even have World's Fairs anymore.
This may be the explanation of the lack of activism in today's youth. It's not that they like what's going on. They simply don't believe that the course of history can actually be changed by human will. They retreat to sarcasm, at which they excel.
I think it may fall to us boomers again, to make change happen. We mostly believe in the likes of Gandhi or Martin Luther King to actually change the world, but our own courage appears to have vanished along with our naivete.