One possibility that could perhaps link all your hypotheses is widespread marketisation. Since the time of the Apollo program more and more domains of production (cultural, academic, scientific, technological, etc.) have been restructured around market incentives, effectively pinning innovation to consumer demand. So when you talk about long lines for iPhones as a desire for a product rather than a public celebration, this might actually tell the whole story: the consequence of marketisation is a redirection of innovative energies away from collective projects and into the satisfaction of individual desires. We don't really experience iPhones as contributing to a shared sense of progress, but rather we each experience our iPhone as a small bit of personal progress. Similarly, when a nation state you identify with (both social-historically and practically via taxes or whatever) puts someone on the moon, you actually do have something to celebrate - in a real sense it is partially your achievement. But when Elon Musk lands on Mars you may be impressed, fascinated, awed, but what reason do you really have to celebrate this achievement, given that it is yoked to someone else's private interests? (And regarding Covid-19, isn't the suspicion underlying all the conspiracy theories just that public measures conceal private interests?)
Obviously whether you take this to be a bad thing or not will be sensitive to your opinion of capitalism. From an enthusiastic perspective collective goals were just abstractions for aggregates of individual goals anyway, and the fact that we engage in them less now just testifies to the success of markets in bypassing clunky centralised mediators to satisfy desire directly. From a more sceptical (e.g. Marx-inspired) perspective collective and private goals might be fundamentally at odds with one another, in which case the privatisation of desire would represent a genuine force of stagnation.
One possibility that could perhaps link all your hypotheses is widespread marketisation. Since the time of the Apollo program more and more domains of production (cultural, academic, scientific, technological, etc.) have been restructured around market incentives, effectively pinning innovation to consumer demand. So when you talk about long lines for iPhones as a desire for a product rather than a public celebration, this might actually tell the whole story: the consequence of marketisation is a redirection of innovative energies away from collective projects and into the satisfaction of individual desires. We don't really experience iPhones as contributing to a shared sense of progress, but rather we each experience our iPhone as a small bit of personal progress. Similarly, when a nation state you identify with (both social-historically and practically via taxes or whatever) puts someone on the moon, you actually do have something to celebrate - in a real sense it is partially your achievement. But when Elon Musk lands on Mars you may be impressed, fascinated, awed, but what reason do you really have to celebrate this achievement, given that it is yoked to someone else's private interests? (And regarding Covid-19, isn't the suspicion underlying all the conspiracy theories just that public measures conceal private interests?)
Obviously whether you take this to be a bad thing or not will be sensitive to your opinion of capitalism. From an enthusiastic perspective collective goals were just abstractions for aggregates of individual goals anyway, and the fact that we engage in them less now just testifies to the success of markets in bypassing clunky centralised mediators to satisfy desire directly. From a more sceptical (e.g. Marx-inspired) perspective collective and private goals might be fundamentally at odds with one another, in which case the privatisation of desire would represent a genuine force of stagnation.