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There’s always ever a hand full of designers that manage to put themselves in a position where they are having fun appropriating technological change and shaping the visual language of our culture. Most designers just have to follow trends. But since, when looking at the past, you see the exciting stuff, you tend to forget it was probably dull and uninspired for the most part back then too!
Therefore, less sweeping generalisations and more specific analysis would be useful.

For example, I have have a bit of a problem with the use of the author’s. ’we’ «Instead of deep processes of discovery, we make minimalistic versions of movie posters» Well, i don’t do that. I can’t identify with this image of the designer, even if I know it works for some people as I see these blogs too.

Look at http://www.manystuff.org/ and http://dribbble.com/

Both sites targeted to designers, but obviously not to the same people.

«I am worried that designers as a group are starting to have the wrong conversations with form.»

Designers as a group don‘t exist. So which kind designers are having what kind of relationship with form?

That we are surrounded by images made by other people shouldn’t necessary be a problem: we learn through imitation. So what is different this time around?

I just don’t understand how anyone can be reactionary about our contemporary world, without also seeing how much possibility all of this offers to re-imagine visual communication, how little of the potential of open source technology and methodology is yet being employed in design.
I get super a enthousiastic, when a well known designer like Jonathan Puckey works with Jürg Lehni to create a vector graphics platform for canvas and realises it has to be open source and community driven for it to work http://paperjs.org/

Or when people start to put typefaces on Github for collaborative development https://github.com/klepas/open-baskerville (disclaimer: i work on this project), or when Design collectives start to work with libre toolsets http://osp.constantvzw.org/ (disclaimer: i work in this collective)

I just see a really interesting time where the world of software technology is opening up and becoming more accessible, and designers are finally in the position to appropriate and make their own all this technological change.