> Let's start by explaining smartphones They had electric telegraphs, telephone and radio, so I'd explain it as miniaturized wireless telephones and typewriter

> Let's start by explaining smartphones They had electric telegraphs, telephone and radio, so I'd explain it as miniaturized wireless telephones and typewriters combined, additionally with capabilities of paperless networked teleprinters of a kind. Some of the stations would be libraries with expert librarians on hand to tirelessly answer your questions. > then Twitter and Facebook I believe this is already covered. Anyone can now own a small personal broadcast station. > try to explain how a cryptocurrency works. I'd use the analogy of a network of tabulating machines with accumulators controlled by inputs according to something quite like point to point teleprinters instead of by punch cards. Records with a copy on each machine, would store on a very flexible type of automatically configurable control panel board with a special arrangement of relay circuits capable of acting as a memory, rather than in boxes of cards. Such a machine could track some quantity, addable and subtractable like a currency. I would then bring up the difficulty of protecting against liars and double spending. One solution might be to connect each machine to automatic slot machines and have them play till there was a winner who then got to broadcast an append to the record with the longest history in their collection of records. I'd also note that the more slot machines there were, the more slots were magically added to each. The idea being to make it costly for any one view to dominate the network. Far from perfect but the gist could be communicated to anyone with a bit of imagination. Modern technologies have had a large impact on life but can be connected to 1920s tech. This is unlike the gap from the 1820s to 1920s that saw electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, radio broadcasting, telephone, electricity and electric engineering, atomic physics, flight, automobiles and more.