How are the old days described in the novel, Torch?

From the text:

In the time when we had boxes in our hands which sang and talked to us from far away, when the mechanical birds carried people over mountains and across oceans, and pictures shone many miles, and journeys were made by lighting fires inside carts instead of hitching donkeys. . . . When men had returned from the moon, and out of grains of sand had made machines to think and write and work the abacus . . .