8 ms·
The Long Boom (1997)
- uniqueid 6y agoCut to a confused self-driving Tesla careening head-on into a tent-city full of destitute Amazon warehouse workers because an iphone-weilding 'influencer' had just darted into the street to get a shot of herself in front of a violent demonstration by political extremists.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bjelkeman-again 6y agoI enjoyed the writing of early Wired. What duo you read today that resembles it?
- prepend 6y agoI asked Kevin Kelly this in an AMA around 2010 or so and he said that he didn’t read any published magazines that were similar and the closest was an RSS feed of blogs. I followed up with that that list was but never got an answer. I miss Wired. The current magazine is closer to Seventeen than the pub in the 90s and early 00s.
- 70rd 6y agoArs Technica is perhaps the spiritual successor to the Wired of old.
- bjelkeman-again 6y agoWhich one of the few I pay for a subscription for.
- codetrotter 6y agoWas “meme” a word in use in English in 1997 already? I first saw the word “meme” in 2006 or 2007 I think, and I never really thought about how long it may have existed in English, I only know that it originates from a similar word in French, and that it means something like the spread of an idea.
- twright0 6y agoWikipedia gives credit to Dawkins for coining "meme" in 1976. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
- n4r9 6y agoYeah, there was a chapter dedicated to it if I recall. As if the book itself wasn't mind-blowing enough to a teenager.
- shevis 6y agoRichard Dawkins coined the term in his 1976 book titled The Selfish Gene. It was added to the dictionary by Merriam-Webster in 1998.
- pcurve 6y agoYou are right about the timing. Google trend indicates it didn’t really register until 2007
- xo5vik 6y agoTwo books from 1996: Brodie - Viruses of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme; Lynch - Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society
- tomgp 6y agoid doesn’t come from the french. it’s a cognate of gene, to get across the idea of information transmission
- sampo 6y ago> Was “meme” a word in use in English in 1997 already? I would assume so. Susan Blackmore's popular science book on memetics was published in 1999. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meme_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meme_Machine
- bitwize 6y agoYes, except back then it was mainly used by the late 90s equivalent of the TED talk set. Richard Dawkins coined it in The Selfish Gene to refer to ideas that replicate and spread in the manner of genes.
- pcurve 6y agoI love these type of prediction articles from the past. I loved the specificity, depth, and unbridled optimism of the article. Though most of it was wrong in terms of timing, this was bang on: "Around 2010, Intel builds a chip with a billion transistors". Intel released core i7 chip with 1.16 billion transistors in 2010. I guess Moore's law was still in full effect. Even though timing was wrong, I do feel the authors will be eventually proven right on many. Clearly they were intentionally being overly optimistic, by the way they end the article.
- mysterypie 6y ago> prediction articles from the past -- I loved the specificity, depth, and unbridled optimism Talking about Wired's unbridled optimism: I recall a Wired article from approximately 20 years ago that predicted that someone born 20 years later (i.e. born today) would ride the technology curve to infinite lifespan. As he or she got older, more and more longevity problems would be solved keeping pace with your age. Today would be date to be born at which technology could outrace death. I wish I could find the article to re-read it to see how the arguments hold up. A phrase from the article that sticks in my mind is something like if you're born negative 20 years ago, then bingo, where the author meant that "negative 20", from his perspective, is 20 years in the future.
- Isinlor 6y agoIt's still possible that people born today will stop aging at some point e.g. when they get to be 50 years old in 2070. There are some promising venues like CRISPR, mRNA related research or stem cells. There is also very serious possibility of super-humanity AGI in the next 50 years.
- shmageggy 6y agoFascinating to see how something can be so prescient in many specific predictions, from technology to even certain political developments, yet essentially miss the mark on the net outcome. Yes, we've had substantial economic growth, but the sort of emergent benevolence of unfettered globalism hasn't exactly come to pass. Yes, many fewer people now live in extreme poverty, but the gap between rich and poor has become shockingly large and continues to grow, with highly un-democratic ramifications. And the slow motion ecological disaster we're witnessing hasn't been enough to motivate businesses to curtail their negative externalities. I think the author's ideological bias is most revealed by this passage: > Right around 1980, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan begin putting together the formula that eventually leads toward the new economy. At the time it looks brutal: busting unions, selling off state-owned industries, and dismantling the welfare state. In hindsight, the pain pays off.
- ur-whale 6y ago> I think the author's ideological bias is most revealed > gap between rich and poor has become shockingly large Your ideological bias is clearly revealed as well.
- frobisher 6y agoOn the contrary, I think the gap is a statistical fact in many places. e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality
- sampo 6y agoGlobal inequality going down, inequality going down in continental Europe, and Latin America. Inequality increasing in anglosphere. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/07/Top-Incomes-768x549.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/07/Top-Incomes-768x5... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/income-inequality-in-latin-america https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/income-inequality-in-lati... https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality#global-income-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality#global-income-i...
- pjc50 6y agoThis article is the peak of the "end of history" period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center. Its technology and economic prediction for the US startup economy is actually pretty great. But it falls down in assuming that integrating China and Russia into the growing economy would make them freer and more west-aligned. 9/11 was the freak unpredicted event that caused the US to waste over a trillion dollars and start a chain of wars which is still consuming the Middle East.
- fedreserved 6y agoIs 9_11 still a black swan if the powers at be perpetrated the act 9_11 /coronavirus sister acts in their lower grab, crushing of individual liberties
- germinalphrase 6y ago5-10 trillion.
- davidgerard 6y agoI remember this on the front cover of the magazine at the time. It struck me then as the most complacent, self-congratulatory sort of article, worse than the one where they put the cable TV executive on the cover depicted as a Mad Max character.
- peter303 6y agoChina declared the "end of poverty" in China this year. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-56194622 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-56194622 This was 40 year program initiated by the pragmatist Deng Xiaoping, when 800,000 lived in poverty. Poverty is defined as making ten Chinese dollars a day, or about US$1.60.