What has happened to 'cool'?

There will always be some kind of sea change in technology, where a younger generation finds another variation of cool. Facebook is long over its cool phase and it’s simply waiting for the rebel of the next generation to be old enough to change it. High school and college can occur for the duration of just one presidency, and so far those rebels have been liberals.

Liberals are cool by nature—it’s almost in the DNA. You can’t have a conservative SNL for example, as the nature of comedy has changed so radically since the 1960s. You can’t have a conservative Beatles, certainly not a Stones, or a Sex Pistols. One thing all seminal periods in contemporary history have had in common was Cool. What is happening now is not Cool, and might not have what it takes to be seminal in terms of how cool gave us the computer technology we have today. The next cool might be farming and food trucks, but it will also be pervaded by now four generations since the existential cool of Camus and Kerouac.

Millennials seem to have already set the foundation for the future economy by developing all the cool technologies from the 20th century that never materialized, like self-driving or flying cars, sensors, implants, immortality treatments and so on, just for consummation. Yesterday's tomorrows are as faded and brittle as a Popular Mechanics magazine from 1959. Today's yesterdays are more interesting in that they give us another reason to revisit why those technologies are useful in an egalitarian sense (like agriculture), instead of as luxuries and conveniences.

From the fantastic book, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America: