Some news that would be completely mundane today but scary or shocking in the past.
That nearly everyone is carrying a tracking device with them, designed to disguise itself as a convenient entertainment device.
And yet you still can’t ask the device to locate someone.
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.
How would that even register with people from 1923? What is a … “tracking device”? Or an “entertainment device”?
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Maybe a communication device? That’s how it started at least.
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.
I agree I should have phrased that better. Something like a “secret agent following you wherever you go” maybe?
Anything price related. Imagine telling anyone from 1920s that you paid 50 dollars for a piece of clothing.
I paid 3.20 for a small loaf of bread. Fight me.
I would guess pretty much everything about our current world would freak out people from a century ago
“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.
Those type of headlines upset way too many people today. It’s the point of the make America great again slogan.
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.
LAST LIVING WW2 VETERAN DIES AT 104
You can have a heart transplant.
1923 people expected mechanical heart transplants to be available today
humanity generates 16km³ of piss daily.
The suffragettes won 😲 🫨
The 19th amendment was ratified in 1919.
Probably all the climate change shit
Also if you told a guy from 1923 that the world’s most industrialized nation was China they’d probably accuse you of lying
And even nowadays they’d be right to do so…
Least ignorant liberal
What does it say on all your consumer goods again?
Taiwan, Germany, Canada, EU…
I take quality over slave labor and shit falling apart after a year…
I’m sure you don’t own anything made in China then. Canada, famous producer of consumer goods
Whatever little is actually made in Western countries anymore is shit quality designed to fall apart to make more profit just like everything else.
Well I do have one, but only this one item from Germany which I would say is pretty good. A Lamy Safari.
But that is seriously my only thing at home from Germany which I would consider high quality, hell all my Thinkpads are from China after all. Lmao
So they excel at trinkets maybe? Lol
winnie pooh is pleased with your doing
Nothing never happened day:
China is such an excellent test for how gullible someone is. So many people will believe any bad thing they read on the internet about it, no matter how absurd, and no matter how easy it is to disprove.
https://www.shanghaidisneyresort.com/en/entertainment/theme-park/characters-meet-pooh/
So there’s a whole fucking Hundred Acre Wood exhibit, Pooh and all, but I guess if you text someone about it Xi appears from under your bed and black bags you?
WINNIE THE POOH TAIANAMMENNMEN 1989 CHINESE CAN ONLY DO BOOTLEGS
(totes not racist to show an Asian man with yellow skin btw)Can you do
SOCIAL CREDIT so we can do all the greatest hits?have you even seen the video of the thing that never happened?
Are you really trying to deny reality here? I understand you hate China and am even willing to belive it’s ideological and not entirely racist but pretending they’re not a global manufacturing powerhouse is next level nuts.
You guys sure love your emoticons
Nearly anything from the Onion or Florida
OpenAI accepts files/documents now.
In 1923 this would be gibberish.
I miss the niche community “sentences that would have made no sense fifteen years ago.”
Like “Homestuck stans dox Twitter influencer @dril.”
The idea of a thinking machine/mechanical brain would be more than enough to wow them
1923?
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.
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.
You couldn’t buy a factory for rubles in 1923…
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEPman
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_concessions_in_the_USSR
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.
“Russian control of Crimea contested”
“Egyptian controlled Suez blocked”
“France controls British power infrastructure”
That’s mostly due to decreased infant mortality rates, than actually extending our lifespans, so far. That looks like it may be changing rather soon.
Lol the average American lifespan in 1923 was 58 and in my county in 2022 it was 64 and dropping
“doubled”
Humans can be found outside America too.
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.
For Africa and Asia it did.
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.
Yeah, sorry. It would be more correct to say 110 years ago for Asia.
Most international experts consider the outbreak of a third world war unlikely in spite of global surges of violence
Not mundane, but the implications would be horrifying to 1923 society still recovering from “The Great War”.
And funny enough, still misleading about how soon the next one is. Nukes really changed the game (for better or worse) and they don’t have them yet.
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