Yes I think this idea of progress is another narrative or theme in history. There's no rebottling the genie. Like the ither themes, not wrong, but also not enough.

I'm a hopeful kind of guy, though, and it strikes me as cool that we are talking here and we probably wouldn't have been twenty years or two centuries ago. I think I would still choose this era even if I fully knew what it was like to live when tomatoes were real.

Same! And I do think this is important. I'd argue though that, zap us back to when tomatoes where real, and you and I might be having exactly the same conversation. It might have happened while meeting on a train, or while one of us was lost at sea, but there's nothing that makes me believe the quality of our thoughts would be any less.

The only caveat there is that it's unlikely you and I might interact at this level of thinking, but that, I think, is only partially due to the internet itself and more because of an overall improvement in the quality of our lives, which seems more like the result of many technoligies working together.