Ok? It’s still not true, this is just classic ignorant neoliberal propaganda. Even your own source doesn’t support this, unless you go well into the 1800s.
Again this is very simply not true. You are imagineering, not objectively looking at data. Which countries specifically do you see doubling life span? I’m not seeing it.
That I have a device that fits in my pocket and can connect to almost anyone else on the face of the planet, as well as tell me any fact I'd like to hear, or any story I'd like to experience. And it does all this about as fast as my thumbs can type out the request.
And the government uses it to spy on you. Businesses use it to spy on you and gather basically all of your personal data. Privacy has been dead for a number of years now. A hundred years ago people would have rioted.
Paraphrasing Douglas Adams: “If you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. By effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, this has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”
Tears of the feeble, hands of the slaves
Skin of the mothers, mouths of the babes
Building a Tower, belongs to the sky
When the whole thing comes crashing down
Down ask me why…
Its 1923 and the phonograph has been around for 45 years, and local radio has been around for 3 in some areas, so I think they would know what an entertainment device is. A tracking device, like a radio that tells people where you are without your input. These idea would not go over the heads of any citygoer, though you would struggle with any back country folks.
Given this is the era of rising totalitarianism, maybe the surprise would be that there’s no legal penalty for not carrying it; people just choose to to the point life will be difficult if you buck the trend.
I’m at the airport, and the robot waiter is standing at the bar, staring at me in a passive / aggressive manner. Taunting me with its non delivery of my food.
Now, I’m no writer, but there’s a headline in that somewhere.
Lenin’s body lays in the mausoleum on the Red Square for the last 99 years. Impersonators of him and Stalin walk around in their daily routine, asking money for photoes with them. In a shop not far from them, you can purchaze chinese merchandize with a soviet, russian flags, as well as with a monarchist-sympatising one, even though Romanovs are as dead as they were back then. Some items cost over a thousand of rubles, a sum that was enough to buy a factory - and that’s after two recent denomonations. Pretty good that these crowds of international tourists don’t count their money being there, these prices can easily drive someone insane.
NEP was a thing though. Very limited and tightly controlled, but possible. Both NEPmen and foreign capitalists had a brief window while economy was healing.
I don’t think one could be safe throwing them around like that though. Being big probably meant you have a particular relationship with local administration who don’t find you too capitalistic.
See, in 1923 “the USSR fails” wouldn’t surprise people, but “the USSR is a great power and also fails and also is still locally popular” would be hella disorienting.
Why do I picture confused Trotsky, going WTF in his glasses? Yes, it’s going to last 70-so years in spite of your pessimism, no, you aren’t a part of it and assasinated in Mexico, yes, this georgian chud is as power-hungry as he looks, no, unions won’t become the waifu of proletariat, but yes, after the fall of Stalin you’d be pretty much reabilitated and some canadians would even direct a movie about rebelious youngsters named after you.
I'd imagine it's the things that still kinda make it as headlines today, but don't get much coverage anymore because everyone is used to it by now.
"By the way, this weekend's mass shootings led to 10 deaths and 29 injuries total, a little more than last week. Parents, remember to bundle up your kids this fall semester with the latest BulletBlocker Youth Jacket, 10% off if you order today! Now back to the news you actually wanted to hear about: the former U.S. President allegedly commits even more crimes..."
Yeah, but you have to consider that “Italian democracy overthrown by former journalist” and “bank sprayed with tommy gun” was recent news at that point. All that shit would shock people in the 60’s, but in the 20’s the main revelation would be the affordability of bulletproof clothing.
Many countries all around the world possess weapons that could obliterate an entire other country, or their own country if detonated by mistake, and possibly destroy the whole planet.
Well, I don’t think any of the nuclear countries are small enough to be obliterated by an accidental detonation. It would just but a nice hole in Nebraska or Omsk or whatever.
I, and the vast majority of the world, wander around with instant access to the sum total of human knowledge, as well as the ability to instantly talk with anyone else in the world that we know. Face to face in many cases these days. These devices also allow many of us to remember that *we have a universal translator in our pockets, so language isn’t even much of a barrier to communication and understanding each other.The vast majority of us use these wonderous devices to get into arguments with people we are extremely unlikely to ever meet in person.
“Man fired for criticising homosexuality”, or maybe “man imprisoned for refusing to hire black person”.
People are thinking about technology, but in 1923 people were very familiar with breathtaking technological change. The complete reversal of some social norms, on the other hand, would be almost existentially disturbing to these dudes who believe in the great benevolent Christian empires, and in some cases thought ending slavery was a mistake.
I have to wonder what the residents of the 1920’s third world would think. I’m sure there would be many interesting perspectives.
I don’t think you realize how far tech has advanced in 100 years. Commercial flights didn’t really exist in their current form of scheduled flights between airports. Computers didn’t exist beyond mechanical ones that aren’t really comparable. Electricity was only in half of households in 1925. Telephone lines were only local and required manual switching by operators.
Breathtaking technology in the 1920s has nothing on what we can do today.
I mean yeah but the point is that technological advancement was still a common occurance. Like, yeah a sensationalized article about self driving cars would blow some minds but to most i think it wouldn’t really make any bigger waves then basic cars already were at the time. How can they be blown away by the concept of self driving when the vehicle itself is so new and interesting you know? AI is so abstract that even today most people don’t understand it, 100 years ago it’d just be “another new thing” just like it is today… We are actually less accustomed to ground shaking new inventions so I’d argue that 100 years ago a lot of our modern tech would be less exciting given the regularity in which things were changing then.
Social upheaval however is ALWAYS a huge deal, especially for the time. Bear in mind that Progressivism is a fairly new ideology in the States. For literally hundreds of years social change came at a snails pace and took serious, concerted effort. Nowadays we are on average much more open to change and accepting of diversity in all it’s forms, but there’s a reason everyone remembers the name Martin Luther King Jr., versus… Ruth Bader Ginsburg I guess?
“XXI-century people carry in their pockets a machine that lets then see what’s happenning on the other side of the planet as it happens, check the biggest encyclopedia there is without having the go to a library, talk live to people anywhere in the World and which can calculate the most complex mathematical problems in a fraction of a second”.
It’s not technological change that would be unimaginable but rather what ended up being done with it as, at least judging by SciFi films over the years, people tend to look at what they have and more or less lineraly project forward.
I mean, look what what Metropolis expected the future would be or even the 1970s film and TV-series idea of the kind of materials, design and human machine interfaces the future would have (it’s kinda funny to look at the CRT-display-based “future” tech of 70s TV series).
Mind you, socially mankind doesn’t seem to have evolved much in these 100 years, but in terms of Tech and the possibilities openned by it, it has.
It’s a pattern that emerges over and over again. Technology is reasonably easy to predict (we’re still using 1920s physics after all) but the way people will react to and interact with technology is completely impossible to see coming. Like, our guesses are about as good as random chance; that’s why nobody saw PCs and smartphones coming and then turned around and poured a lot of money into 3D TVs and wearables.
I don’t think it would be impossible to model somehow, but I’ve yet to see any convincing work in that direction.
It’s an interesting one, the Tom Swift series from around 1910 has him in rocket ships using wireless photo telephones, electric rifles, and all sorts of sci-fi before world war one - it doesn’t have many female characters, certainly no gay characters.
There is a suffragette character arguing for the right to vote in the 1910 novel, a right women wouldn’t gain for another ten years in the USA - so a hundred years ago they were in an era where the start of social change is beginning but to what extent people would expect that to continue is hard to say.
Metropolis is an interesting example too because they did have more advanced AI than we currently have - the maschinenmench Maria; an often submissive, vulnerable, emotional, manipulative, motherly and generally very stereotypically (for the time) feminine character.
I think people in the 1920s expected in the next century technology to advance a hundred miles and social issues to change maybe an inch. I can think of sci-fi from that era with black characters but none with an expectation of civil rights for those black characters.
Yeah, but electrification, cars, antibiotics, many forms of sanitation, many forms of canning, radio, telephones of any kind, several forms of weapon and powered aircraft in general were new within living memory in the 20s. “It gets (much) better and more accessible” wouldn’t have surprised anyone. If we were going back 200 years you might have a point, and definitely would at 300.
Actually, they didn’t understand how radio crystals (which are very rudimentary semiconductor diodes) worked at the time, but pretty much every other principle of physics used in modern technology was understood at that point. They just needed to finish quantum mechanics, and then figure out a few steps of application.
Fair. I didn’t understand what OP was getting at, so I took them literally. It seemed strange to ignore that white people in the early 20th loved depictions of smiling black people in servant roles.
As for ads targeted at black consumers… now I’m curious. I know there were newspapers targeted at black readers. I wonder if they had ads.
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