7 ms·

It's interesting about growing older. I don't know if this is a function of aging or a change in how humanity recons time. When I was younger, a century seemed

by bane 7y ago

It's interesting about growing older. I don't know if this is a function of aging or a change in how humanity recons time. When I was younger, a century seemed like forever. Now it's just 1920 and we have film, music, audio, books and so on from that time period readily available. In many ways 1920 doesn't really seem all that far away to me while 1860, 1870, 1880 (a century from when I was a child) seemed to be forever ago. When I look at film and photos from 1920 I see modern people, people I could see meeting and having relatively modern conversations while when I look at media from the mid 1800s I see ancestors who I share very little with.

ip26 7y ago
When you were in middle school, 1920 was 8 or so lifetimes ago. Now it's closer to only 2-3 lifetimes ago. I'd also reckon you can more easily relate to people who lived with older technology, having lived pre-internet yourself. When you are young, everything just is, and it's hard to relate with living differently.
- gibspaulding 7y ago
  I think the world has at least in many ways changed a lot less between 1920 and today than in the preceding century, or even the preceding few decades. WW1 did a lot to yank the world into modernity: large scale assembly line industry, women working outside of the house, US interventionism, social welfare (the 30's technically, at least in the US), not to mention the entire modern geo-political landscape all happened, v or at least we're accelerated by the war. Obviously they didn't all happen exclusively in the few years of the war itself, however the few decades surrounding it we're certainly a tumultuous time. It seems like if you were to graph the pace of change, there would be a hump around the First World War. I think the coming of the information age is creating another hump, but at the same time it seems like so far, surprisingly little has changed as a result of it.
drewmate 7y ago
I think in terms of change, not all centuries are created equal. All things considered, I think the century from 1870-1970 saw more rapid change than any other in history (including 1920-2020). Planet money did a piece the other week about this idea and how economic growth seems to have slowed down never to return to its 20th century levels. If this idea is true, those in the 1920s share more with us (familiarity with cars, mass media, urbanization) than those just 50 years prior.
AbrahamParangi 7y ago
What you're really describing is the stasis of the last 60 years.
- zo1 7y ago
  You could argue that the world has gotten into some sort of "stagnant" period, despite the technological advances. E.g. We're no where closer to having a utopian-level of control over our government. Something that the rise of ubiquitous tech should have solved. On some level, we're all very averse to the notion as well, almost as if our attitudes to it have not changed and we have not worked on making tech good enough for us to be comfortable with it. Or: Government structures have not changed at all. As a libertarian, I struggle to even conceive how people in the government can even change the structure and ordering of government at this point. We got to our current structures somehow in the past, but we seemed to have stopped the evolution and have almost doubled-down.
  - andbberger 7y ago
    > Something that the rise of ubiquitous tech should have solved. What makes you say that? To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever carried out a rigorous analysis on the stability (in the dynamical systems meaning of the word) of our societies; whether they trend to dystopia or utopia. But it isn't very difficult to argue that the US, at least, is currently trending dystopic. Look no further than citizens united.
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    > Something that the rise of ubiquitous tech should have solved. Why do you think it should have happened already? We’ve only had good lithium ion batteries for a decade or two. Same for the internet, maybe 20 years of widespread use. Solar cells are only just starting to compete with coal. There is much work to do, and we’re doing it but it takes time. Information can travel instantly, that’s an important change, but the process of actually building the semantic router is not trivial. And the tech for affordable off-grid civilization is really juuust maturing right now.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
kinkora 7y ago
I can't remember where i heard this from (it was a podcast) but it was on an economic theory that, if you exclude the internet & computer revolution, humans has not progressed that much in the past 100 years and that we may have entered a period of stagnant growth that may extend a century. Again, internet & computer revolution aside, realistically saying the last "human leap" was the invention of the combustion engine and prior to that, it was the discovery of electricity. So he proves this out by taking an example of what happens if you hit someone on the head and assuming that person sleeps for a long time, how will he feel out of place in the world. Here are the examples I remembered he used (paraphrasing): 1. If you take someone living in the 1700s, knock them on the head, and have them wake up any time till the mid 1800s, to that person, life feels almost the same even though 100s of years have passed. Sure, maybe there are more buildings, more people, more horses, weapons are more or less the same, etc but essentially life is still familiar. 2. Now take someone living in, lets say 1850, knock them out and have them wake up in 1880. Holy shit, suddenly the world is so much brighter and there are "lights" everywhere. What witchcraft is this?? The world will look so different from what he/she remembers them. 3. Now take that same person living in 1880, hit them on the head again and have him/her wake up 35 years later and it is 1915. HOLY DOUBLE CRAP, what is this new fangle machine on wheels on the streets people are on and where have all the horses gone?? Ok I need to go into the toilet and wash my face...OMG WHAT IS THIS FLUSHING THING AND THIS METAL SPROUT CREATES MY OWN CLEAN RIVER??? Walks to the city and wow, look at all these buildings looking like mountains! And not only that, he/she looks up in the sky and sees gigantic "metal birds"...WTF YOU CAN RIDE THEM AND NOW GET FROM LA TO NY in a couple of hours?? The world will look completely magical to them. Now here is the interesting thing - if you take someone from 1920s, hit them on our head, and put them in 2020.. that economist surmises that life will look pretty much the same to that person, not unlike scenario (1) where you take someone from 1700s and put them in the 1800s. Vehicles might look a bit more modern, buildings might look a bit more taller or "sleek-er", there are way much more people but essentially, the world hasn't really change much. Oh, there is this new computer & internet thing but that's it. So yep, it is nothing to do with you. We just happen to live in a time where we have yet to experience a "leap" in invention where life has become completely magical to us. My guess will be, the day space tech becomes a common place and attainable, that will be when the world looks magically different to those of us living today and that generation will feel the same leap as the inhabitants living from 1850~1920.
pjdemers 7y ago
Change is slowing down, at least in developed countries. A person from the US of 2020 would fit in right in 1970, and be able to adapt to 1920, but be lost in 1870. A person from 1970 would adapt a little quicker to 1920, but be almost as lost as us in 1870.
- nickelpro 7y ago
  But someone from 1870 could easily adapt to any time going back through the 17th century. I don't see how that's evidence of change slowing down, it's rapidly accelerating.
  - rubidium 7y ago
    I would guess the parent comment wouldn’t disagree that it had sped up til about 1950 or 1970. But then it has slowed down since. I tend to agree, and that this whole personal computers, web apps, tracking stuff that’s obsessed over here just isn’t that big of deal compared to refrigeration and easy global transportation (to pick 2 from 1850-1950).
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - rottweiler33 7y ago
      > 'I tend to agree, and that this whole personal computers, web apps, tracking stuff that’s obsessed over here just isn’t that big of deal compared to refrigeration and easy global transportation (to pick 2 from 1850-1950).' , he says non-chalantly, pressing enter to transmit his message instantaneously around the world, which is read by people in many different nations before finally being stumbled upon 10 days later by a man living in the middle of the wilderness in Alabama, who wonders in amazement at the opinion he's just read. How can anyone fail to understand how the entire world has changed overnight, permanently, in astounding and still-unfolding ways, as a result of personal computer technology? It's exactly akin to refrigeration, jet aircraft, etc. in its transformative power. Even more, since it's a communications technology, and that is an agent of change moreso than anything else. Check this out: about 20 years ago in the late 90s, as a teenager, the thinking at the time was that "y'all" wasn't considered a real word and would actually get you lectured by some people who would tell you it isn't a word. Today it has spread from coast to coast of the USA, to Australia and England, and about 5 years ago I even saw a teenage girl from Africa using the word on Facebook. Holy fuck. Likewise, "bless your heart" used to be an exclusively Southern phrase. More and more people elsewhere are becoming familiar with it. "Shit show" used to be exclusively a midwestern term. So was "have a good one." Within the past 5 years these have taken hold here in Alabama and are now common to hear, especially the latter. The Internet did this. Overnight we went from telephones at the house (with tone dialing, not that far removed from rotary phones), to cell phones in every pocket, to mini-computers everywhere. And we're instantly "used to" it. The world totally changed in the blink of an eye, and nobody even notices how profound the change really is. Even when there's entire disorders linked to the changes--like the phenomenon of cell phone zombies. Can you imagine a typical person from 1950 trying to understand and fit in to the world of today? Of course we could go back then and kind of blend in, we've seen enough movies to know "how it was." We could cope. But imagine transporting one of those people here today sight unseen and showing them how things are, all the crazy shit that's in the news on a daily basis, the things perceived as normal, I mean just the whole shit show package all at once. How long would it be before he runs screaming back to 1950?
egypturnash 7y ago
I was born in the seventies, and have looked at a lot of cartoons from the 1920s over the course of my life, what with ending up being in the animation industry for a while. Read a lot of comics from around then too as part of surveying the history of that medium, To me the 1920s always felt like the Remote Past. I wonder what someone born now will feel about the 1920s once they are old enough to communicate their opinions.
- rorykoehler 7y ago
  My 8 year old nephew told me my techno playlist sounded like old people's music...
  - pawelk 7y ago
    To my daughter "The Fat of the Land" album by The Prodigy is exactly as old as "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" by The Beatles to me (number of years between respective album releases and our birth years).
    - rorykoehler 7y ago
      The Fat of the Land is old sounding to me too and I was in my last year's of high school when it came out. I'm talking about Berlin big room techno that came out in the 10s.
saltcured 7y ago
I think there is certainly an effect of aging and your changing perspective. I have noticed similar shifts in my thoughts, even about shorter time spans. As a child I remember feeling that there was a huge chasm between the WWII era and the jet/space age. Now, I can contemplate my parents' early lives of roughly 1940-1985 versus my own of roughly 1975-2020. I can imagine how the transitions they experienced through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s may have seemed to them much like how my world evolved in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. While I can surely find some milestone events in my personal life, I do not see stark boundaries I would consider truly different ages/eras for society as a whole. I remember how every recent transition took years and perhaps never completed. I wonder if certain cultural artifacts and stories in history and pop culture give us a more consistent sense of past eras/ages prior to our own experiences. Things like railroads, electrification, automobiles, film, the great depression, airplanes, films with sound, color film, TV, antibiotics... they all were smeared over many years but we can easily ignore that when talking about the past.
goodcanadian 7y ago
Somewhere around her 85th birthday, my grandmother said to me, out of the blue: "You know in school, in history class, 100 years seems like a long time. It's not really."

by bane 7y ago

ip26 7y ago

When you were in middle school, 1920 was 8 or so lifetimes ago. Now it's closer to only 2-3 lifetimes ago. I'd also reckon you can more easily relate to people who lived with older technology, having lived pre-internet yourself. When you are young, everything just is, and it's hard to relate with living differently.

gibspaulding 7y ago
I think the world has at least in many ways changed a lot less between 1920 and today than in the preceding century, or even the preceding few decades. WW1 did a lot to yank the world into modernity: large scale assembly line industry, women working outside of the house, US interventionism, social welfare (the 30's technically, at least in the US), not to mention the entire modern geo-political landscape all happened, v or at least we're accelerated by the war. Obviously they didn't all happen exclusively in the few years of the war itself, however the few decades surrounding it we're certainly a tumultuous time. It seems like if you were to graph the pace of change, there would be a hump around the First World War. I think the coming of the information age is creating another hump, but at the same time it seems like so far, surprisingly little has changed as a result of it.

drewmate 7y ago

I think in terms of change, not all centuries are created equal. All things considered, I think the century from 1870-1970 saw more rapid change than any other in history (including 1920-2020). Planet money did a piece the other week about this idea and how economic growth seems to have slowed down never to return to its 20th century levels. If this idea is true, those in the 1920s share more with us (familiarity with cars, mass media, urbanization) than those just 50 years prior.

AbrahamParangi 7y ago

What you're really describing is the stasis of the last 60 years.

zo1 7y ago
You could argue that the world has gotten into some sort of "stagnant" period, despite the technological advances. E.g. We're no where closer to having a utopian-level of control over our government. Something that the rise of ubiquitous tech should have solved. On some level, we're all very averse to the notion as well, almost as if our attitudes to it have not changed and we have not worked on making tech good enough for us to be comfortable with it. Or: Government structures have not changed at all. As a libertarian, I struggle to even conceive how people in the government can even change the structure and ordering of government at this point. We got to our current structures somehow in the past, but we seemed to have stopped the evolution and have almost doubled-down.
- andbberger 7y ago
  > Something that the rise of ubiquitous tech should have solved. What makes you say that? To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever carried out a rigorous analysis on the stability (in the dynamical systems meaning of the word) of our societies; whether they trend to dystopia or utopia. But it isn't very difficult to argue that the US, at least, is currently trending dystopic. Look no further than citizens united.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  > Something that the rise of ubiquitous tech should have solved. Why do you think it should have happened already? We’ve only had good lithium ion batteries for a decade or two. Same for the internet, maybe 20 years of widespread use. Solar cells are only just starting to compete with coal. There is much work to do, and we’re doing it but it takes time. Information can travel instantly, that’s an important change, but the process of actually building the semantic router is not trivial. And the tech for affordable off-grid civilization is really juuust maturing right now.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

kinkora 7y ago

I can't remember where i heard this from (it was a podcast) but it was on an economic theory that, if you exclude the internet & computer revolution, humans has not progressed that much in the past 100 years and that we may have entered a period of stagnant growth that may extend a century. Again, internet & computer revolution aside, realistically saying the last "human leap" was the invention of the combustion engine and prior to that, it was the discovery of electricity. So he proves this out by taking an example of what happens if you hit someone on the head and assuming that person sleeps for a long time, how will he feel out of place in the world. Here are the examples I remembered he used (paraphrasing): 1. If you take someone living in the 1700s, knock them on the head, and have them wake up any time till the mid 1800s, to that person, life feels almost the same even though 100s of years have passed. Sure, maybe there are more buildings, more people, more horses, weapons are more or less the same, etc but essentially life is still familiar. 2. Now take someone living in, lets say 1850, knock them out and have them wake up in 1880. Holy shit, suddenly the world is so much brighter and there are "lights" everywhere. What witchcraft is this?? The world will look so different from what he/she remembers them. 3. Now take that same person living in 1880, hit them on the head again and have him/her wake up 35 years later and it is 1915. HOLY DOUBLE CRAP, what is this new fangle machine on wheels on the streets people are on and where have all the horses gone?? Ok I need to go into the toilet and wash my face...OMG WHAT IS THIS FLUSHING THING AND THIS METAL SPROUT CREATES MY OWN CLEAN RIVER??? Walks to the city and wow, look at all these buildings looking like mountains! And not only that, he/she looks up in the sky and sees gigantic "metal birds"...WTF YOU CAN RIDE THEM AND NOW GET FROM LA TO NY in a couple of hours?? The world will look completely magical to them. Now here is the interesting thing - if you take someone from 1920s, hit them on our head, and put them in 2020.. that economist surmises that life will look pretty much the same to that person, not unlike scenario (1) where you take someone from 1700s and put them in the 1800s. Vehicles might look a bit more modern, buildings might look a bit more taller or "sleek-er", there are way much more people but essentially, the world hasn't really change much. Oh, there is this new computer & internet thing but that's it. So yep, it is nothing to do with you. We just happen to live in a time where we have yet to experience a "leap" in invention where life has become completely magical to us. My guess will be, the day space tech becomes a common place and attainable, that will be when the world looks magically different to those of us living today and that generation will feel the same leap as the inhabitants living from 1850~1920.

pjdemers 7y ago

Change is slowing down, at least in developed countries. A person from the US of 2020 would fit in right in 1970, and be able to adapt to 1920, but be lost in 1870. A person from 1970 would adapt a little quicker to 1920, but be almost as lost as us in 1870.

nickelpro 7y ago
But someone from 1870 could easily adapt to any time going back through the 17th century. I don't see how that's evidence of change slowing down, it's rapidly accelerating.
- rubidium 7y ago
  I would guess the parent comment wouldn’t disagree that it had sped up til about 1950 or 1970. But then it has slowed down since. I tend to agree, and that this whole personal computers, web apps, tracking stuff that’s obsessed over here just isn’t that big of deal compared to refrigeration and easy global transportation (to pick 2 from 1850-1950).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - rottweiler33 7y ago
    > 'I tend to agree, and that this whole personal computers, web apps, tracking stuff that’s obsessed over here just isn’t that big of deal compared to refrigeration and easy global transportation (to pick 2 from 1850-1950).' , he says non-chalantly, pressing enter to transmit his message instantaneously around the world, which is read by people in many different nations before finally being stumbled upon 10 days later by a man living in the middle of the wilderness in Alabama, who wonders in amazement at the opinion he's just read. How can anyone fail to understand how the entire world has changed overnight, permanently, in astounding and still-unfolding ways, as a result of personal computer technology? It's exactly akin to refrigeration, jet aircraft, etc. in its transformative power. Even more, since it's a communications technology, and that is an agent of change moreso than anything else. Check this out: about 20 years ago in the late 90s, as a teenager, the thinking at the time was that "y'all" wasn't considered a real word and would actually get you lectured by some people who would tell you it isn't a word. Today it has spread from coast to coast of the USA, to Australia and England, and about 5 years ago I even saw a teenage girl from Africa using the word on Facebook. Holy fuck. Likewise, "bless your heart" used to be an exclusively Southern phrase. More and more people elsewhere are becoming familiar with it. "Shit show" used to be exclusively a midwestern term. So was "have a good one." Within the past 5 years these have taken hold here in Alabama and are now common to hear, especially the latter. The Internet did this. Overnight we went from telephones at the house (with tone dialing, not that far removed from rotary phones), to cell phones in every pocket, to mini-computers everywhere. And we're instantly "used to" it. The world totally changed in the blink of an eye, and nobody even notices how profound the change really is. Even when there's entire disorders linked to the changes--like the phenomenon of cell phone zombies. Can you imagine a typical person from 1950 trying to understand and fit in to the world of today? Of course we could go back then and kind of blend in, we've seen enough movies to know "how it was." We could cope. But imagine transporting one of those people here today sight unseen and showing them how things are, all the crazy shit that's in the news on a daily basis, the things perceived as normal, I mean just the whole shit show package all at once. How long would it be before he runs screaming back to 1950?

egypturnash 7y ago

I was born in the seventies, and have looked at a lot of cartoons from the 1920s over the course of my life, what with ending up being in the animation industry for a while. Read a lot of comics from around then too as part of surveying the history of that medium, To me the 1920s always felt like the Remote Past. I wonder what someone born now will feel about the 1920s once they are old enough to communicate their opinions.

rorykoehler 7y ago
My 8 year old nephew told me my techno playlist sounded like old people's music...
- pawelk 7y ago
  To my daughter "The Fat of the Land" album by The Prodigy is exactly as old as "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" by The Beatles to me (number of years between respective album releases and our birth years).
  - rorykoehler 7y ago
    The Fat of the Land is old sounding to me too and I was in my last year's of high school when it came out. I'm talking about Berlin big room techno that came out in the 10s.

saltcured 7y ago

I think there is certainly an effect of aging and your changing perspective. I have noticed similar shifts in my thoughts, even about shorter time spans. As a child I remember feeling that there was a huge chasm between the WWII era and the jet/space age. Now, I can contemplate my parents' early lives of roughly 1940-1985 versus my own of roughly 1975-2020. I can imagine how the transitions they experienced through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s may have seemed to them much like how my world evolved in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. While I can surely find some milestone events in my personal life, I do not see stark boundaries I would consider truly different ages/eras for society as a whole. I remember how every recent transition took years and perhaps never completed. I wonder if certain cultural artifacts and stories in history and pop culture give us a more consistent sense of past eras/ages prior to our own experiences. Things like railroads, electrification, automobiles, film, the great depression, airplanes, films with sound, color film, TV, antibiotics... they all were smeared over many years but we can easily ignore that when talking about the past.

goodcanadian 7y ago

Somewhere around her 85th birthday, my grandmother said to me, out of the blue: "You know in school, in history class, 100 years seems like a long time. It's not really."