Necessary link to Maciej Cegłowski's talk "Web Design: The First 100 Years:" https://web.archive.org/web/20230210133927/https://idlewords...

Because the technologies we had were good enough. It turned out that very few people needed to cross an ocean in three hours instead of six hours. On my way to this conference, I flew from Switzerland to San Francisco. It took eleven hours and cost me around a thousand dollars. It was a long flight and kind of uncomfortable and boring. But I crossed the planet in half a day!

Being able to get anywhere in the world in a day is really good enough. We complain about air travel but consider that for a couple of thousand dollars, you can go anywhere, overnight.

The people designing the planes of tomorrow got so caught up in the technology that they forgot to ask the very important question, “what are we building this for?”