Tangential to that, recently I was reflecting on our move from an “open” society to a “permissive” society. In the open society, everything which is not expressly forbidden is permitted. In the permissive society, everything which is not expressly permitted is forbidden. To give an example: when I was a lad, many years ago, my university library was open to the public. Students, of course, were the only ones permitted to check out books, but anyone could wander the stacks. Now, at the university I work at, only those with university IDs are allowed to even enter the library building, let alone check out books. Increasingly, much of the internet is turning into a gated community, where only those explicitly permitted may enter, as opposed to the relatively lawless Wild West internet of my youth. Paywalls are going up, or people are retreating to social media platforms. Media now works on a rental model, rather than an ownership model–see, for instance, Best Buy’s recent announcement that they will cease to carry DVDs and Blu-Rays, as everyone uses streaming. But of course, you only have access to the content provided the service permits you access.
Returning to the libraries: in a profoundly shortsighted move, my undergraduate physics department decided not long after I left to scrap their quite amply stocked physics library and instead put in a computer center. The reams of journals, the stacks of books, were all transferred to the main undergraduate library. But of course, once you no longer have your own departmental library, you no longer have control of those texts, and it wouldn’t surprise me were the undergraduate library to have disposed of many of those texts on the grounds that they were unnecessary due to Interlibrary Loan. And of course, the physics department would have justified their actions by pointing to the availability of, for example, journals via online subscription services. But when you junk your physical copies of journals in favor of subscription to digital copies, you’re not merely subscribing for future editions but also past editions, which means that if you lose your subscription for whatever reason, you also lose access to not only all subsequent issues but also all previous issues, leaving you with no journals at all. You only have access to those journals which the subscription service permits you to access, rather than the total access that comes with ownership. More and more these days, we live in a tenant society, rather than an owner society.

To a certain extent, Fight Club only came into being as a reaction to the cultural phenomenon of Friends, book then film.
I see The Matrix as a Gnostic red herring, much like the transgendered fate of its directors.
Thesis, antithesis but no synthesis here. Gen X has remained trapped in the corporate value system needed to rear families and pay mortgages, while their bemused generational heirs have pursued identity politics driven by the enormous cultural power of the higher education sector since the 1990s.