How easily we can know anything, yet how diligently we fail to learn anything.
Nothing as sobering as showing a techno-optimist what the future really looks like
We walk around with a little rectangle in our pocket that gives us access to the sum total of human knowledge, but we mostly use it for looking at funny captioned pictures, the same pictures over and over just with different captions.
It’s called a phone but no one ever uses it as one.
Also, the “video telephone” that everyone always so desperately awaited from the future? Yeah, we have that; no, nobody uses it, because we can’t be bothered to dress up for a phone call.
I also thought no one used facetime until I worked retail recently… The amount of people I saw come in on a facetime calls where they both just had their cameras pointed at the ceiling was bizarre and boggling.
I’m going to go on a different angle on this one and say that we are much tougher on sexual harassment. I feel like a lot of people from the 1950s who have grown up on pulp sci-fi like Flash Gordon could accept a lot of modern technology and the internet as basically just magic. To be fair is how a lot of modern people also accept it. But I don’t think they would be able to process the move towards egalitarianism that we have taken.
That is not to say that modern society is egalitarian only that we have made good strides in achieving that aim.
Edit: Turns out Gordon is from the '70s, but other pulp sci-fi exist so my statement stands.
The price of housing
Also nearly everything else. Computers would be an obvious exception, a couple years ago I paid USD$40 for a smartwatch with specs exceeding a $2000 computer from around year 2000, and millions of times more powerful than computers from the 50s which cost millions of dollars at the time.
Why the Nazis are back, and in America of all places
Ronald Reagan was President for 8 years.
Not to mention the Bush imbeciles.
Why is every comment just about the US? Skin color, school shooter drills, actor president, support for Russians by US politicians…
Lemmy try something more international:
France and Germany have founded the European Union.
First Japan, and now China (and Taiwan) and Korea are the technological superpowers.
Car industry in the UK basically doesn’t exist anymore.
Cuba is still communist af and yet looks like a chill place.
Czechoslovakia has split. (Funny how even 30 years after the fact some people don’t believe it, so I can imagine it being inconceivable before.)
There are 8 billon people.
We still don’t have nuclear-powered flying cars.
Depends a lot on the color of their skin.
The remote control T_T
“Yes, they are allowed to be on the same bus as us. No, we don’t call them that anymore”
“Bus? No we bulldozed hundreds of neighborhoods to build highways so now everyone has to have a car”
And we had a pretty great black president.
#3 Why we still haven’t got colonies on the moon
#2 Climate change
#1 That fascism is back
