I think the article and the book tend to forget the terrible living conditions in cities back then, and instead psychologize them.
More than half of people in big American cities lived overcrowded -- that is, >2 people in a room, INCLUDING KITCHENS! Many rented just a bed for half a day! They slept, and the other half the other person, who worked in night shift, slept on it.
In big cities, the traffic in the streets, with horse carriages riding on cobble stone, and cars, started at 6:00 and lasted till midnight. Steam locomotives made a lot of noise and smoke. That's cortisol, lower immunity, more other consequences.
And bear in mind, not everyone had electricity, not to speak of central heating. You had lots of chimneys everywhere. Not everyone had sewer, tap water and so on. I guess, a good deal of these people migrated to cities from more quiet places, and since there was no notion of harmful environment.
We tend to be surprised why modernism got so much traction, and even the best architects hated cities (e.g. Frank Lloyd Wright, who wrote something like "a city plan is a fibrosis"), but the reasons were everywhere, real and brutal.
So I'm pretty sure the reason for people being nervous, is quite physical, not "people were scared", as you may conclude from the article (although this is not explicitly stated).
[EDIT] Forgot about the social environment. When you move to a big city as an adult, without the college/university to give you social fabric, you're quite lonely. And in big cities this fabric was getting thinner with urbanization. And you're short on money, can afford only a bed, and count every cent. I think it's a more serious reason to get neurotic than times changing too rapidly.
We were also completely coked out of our mind. An issue oddly ignored by the article given they literally mentioned Coca Cola and so are presumably aware of its history. It wasn't until 1903 that Coca Cola removed cocaine from its recipe, but its use and abuse was absolutely widespread everywhere. People were using it recreationally, people no less than Thomas Edison remarked that it (in Vin Mariani [1]) "helped him stay awake." Popes were using it, generals were using, factor owners were pumping their laborers with it to maximize productivity, and much more. It wasn't restricted until 1914 and then defacto banned in 1922.
That's already going to increase anxiety dramatically amongst users, let alone the rest of society walking around in extremely crowded cities where a sizable chunk of the population was completely coked out of their minds at any given moment.
WW1 started (among other things) because the "superpowers" in Europe had been arming each other for quite a while in fear of aggression from the other superpowers (not completely unreasonable, given the wars of the previous century). This, in turn, forced the other superpowers to invest more in armaments and army. To top it off, they made treaties of alliance/military intervention (the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente).
The assassination of the archduke was like flipping a light switch in a house saturated with gas. Austria declares war to Serbia, which is defended by Russia, so Germany has to declare war to Russia; Germany expects France to join Russia so they declare war to France, but their battle plans to conquer France require passing through Belgium. The UK needs Belgium to remain neutral, so they declare war to Germany... and so on. Once the wheels are in motion, and everyone is ready for war, war just happens - whether coke is there or not.
> Many rented just a bed for half a day! They slept, and the other half the other person, who worked in night shift, slept on it.
This is not unheard of for south Asian immigrants in European cities, which typically do hard, low paid work (car cleaners, gig economy delivery "partners" etc).
All that for what ? So people can order take away in Berlin from a place that's 10 minutes away from them by bike, because they clubbed too hard last night. And the profit finds its way to America (doordash owns Wolt).
> All that for what ? So people can order take away in Berlin from a place that's 10 minutes away from them by bike, because they clubbed too hard last night. And the profit finds its way to America (doordash owns Wolt).
But at least people are getting paid right? The alternative is people staying in their hometown and not making any money.
I'm not so sure about that. Accepting the existence of such working conditions for marginal (if not questionable) benefits lowers the working conditions for everyone, and in a system with social benefits & free healthcare it could arguably be net negative in total.
Regarding unemployment in people's hometowns, unfortunately this is not a problem that can be solved with shitty jobs. Even if xxx people find a shitty job, there will be 100*xxx people left over.
And bear in mind, not everyone had electricity, not to speak of central heating. You had lots of chimneys everywhere.
LMAO is this most houses where I live in New Zealand. Smoke coming out of chimneys for people to keep warm, often burning coal. They have electricity of course but it's too expensive to heat their houses.
Let's compare the progress made by the modern world against the life of the tribes on the remote untouched islands.
Unfortunately the stories of success of the modern world were written by the modern world. So what we call as success or progress is only valid in modern world. There is no language or terms that can describe success and agreed upon across these two worlds.
For example, you may be able to wipe out that tribal population within minutes. But that may not mean success or progress, in terms of adaptation to the surroundings. Dinosaurs also ruled the land with their might. But adaptation is something different from being mighty. The context can get much more mightier against you.
Most of scientific and industrial advances were made by people who have no survival struggles and who were greedy for money or reputation. A lot of it was not needed for human adaptation and evolution.
Life on Earth is going to be temporary - the Sun itself already guarantees that on a long timeframe. But on far more immediate time frames there have been countless mass extinction events and countless more will happen - in fact we're well over due for one. One could very well happen tomorrow - there won't necessarily be any warning.
For instance one hypothesis for one of the most devastating mass extinction events was mass volcanic eruptions. The volcanos don't kill you, usually, but they blot out the sky which not only sends temperatures plummeting but kills all plantlife, which then rapidly kills anything that depended on those plants and on up the food chain. Another hypothesis for another mass extinction event was an unfortunately directed gamma ray burst. It would end up killing life off through a similar ends, even if the means to get there is quite different.
It's likely that the only means to 'beat' these events in the longrun is technology and expanding into the cosmos - becoming a multi planetary species first and eventually a multi star system species. That we (and many other species species for that matter) seem to have this instinct to expand as far as we can is probably just one of the most primal survival instincts. Concentrated over-adaption to a localized region and circumstance is how you get the Dodo.
> Unfortunately the stories of success of the modern world were written by the modern world.
While I think that is a profound insight that we should contemplate a lot more than we do instead of taking our value system (the one we all share, not only the ones we disagree with) for granted, I can't help also contemplate how inadequate, or underdeveloped, our language is as a tool to identify such. Hopefully, some day we will have more value-neutral means to properly view the relative isolated conceptual bubbles from which each culture views another. We're not there yet.
A great example of how things were viewed at the time is the poem by AB "Banjo" Patterson: "Mulga Bill's Bycycle", first published in 1896.
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that caught the cycling craze;
He turned away the good old horse that served him many days;
He dressed himself in cycling clothes, resplendent to be seen;
He hurried off to town and bought a shining new machine;
And as he wheeled it through the door, with air of lordly pride,
The grinning shop assistant said, "Excuse me, can you ride?"
"See here, young man," said Mulga Bill, "from Walgett to the sea,
From Conroy's Gap to Castlereagh, there's none can ride like me.
I'm good all round at everything as everybody knows,
Although I'm not the one to talk - I hate a man that blows.
But riding is my special gift, my chiefest, sole delight;
Just ask a wild duck can it swim, a wildcat can it fight.
There's nothing clothed in hair or hide, or built of flesh or steel,
There's nothing walks or jumps, or runs, on axle, hoof, or wheel,
But what I'll sit, while hide will hold and girths and straps are tight:
I'll ride this here two-wheeled concern right straight away at sight."
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that sought his own abode,
That perched above Dead Man's Creek, beside the mountain road.
He turned the cycle down the hill and mounted for the fray,
But 'ere he'd gone a dozen yards it bolted clean away.
It left the track, and through the trees, just like a silver steak,
It whistled down the awful slope towards the Dead Man's Creek.
It shaved a stump by half an inch, it dodged a big white-box:
The very wallaroos in fright went scrambling up the rocks,
The wombats hiding in their caves dug deeper underground,
As Mulga Bill, as white as chalk, sat tight to every bound.
It struck a stone and gave a spring that cleared a fallen tree,
It raced beside a precipice as close as close could be;
And then as Mulga Bill let out one last despairing shriek
It made a leap of twenty feet into the Dead Man's Creek.
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that slowly swam ashore:
He said, "I've had some narrer shaves and lively rides before;
I've rode a wild bull round a yard to win a five-pound bet,
But this was the most awful ride that I've encountered yet.
I'll give that two-wheeled outlaw best; it's shaken all my nerve
To feel it whistle through the air and plunge and buck and swerve.
It's safe at rest in Dead Man's Creek, we'll leave it lying still;
A horse's back is good enough henceforth for Mulga Bill."
May be this is a bit of anachronism but this poem does not read as being anti-bicycle more so than it having hubris and lack of experience with new fangled thing (bicycle).
It does, however, have direct parallels to the developers who believe they can just use AI without a learning curve because they can already write code, fail at doing so, and conclude that AI is terrible instead of learning how to use it.
During the early industrial revolution people used to present themselves for medical help after complaining that the incessant repetitive action and rotation of engines (e.g. beam engines) hundreds of miles away from them was sending them vibrations which disturbed their sleep. Of course they only started having this problem after reading about such contraptions in newspapers.
I know a consulting acoustical engineer who tracks down noise problems for companies and individuals. He goes on about the difficulty of even finding the source of low-frequency noise because of distance and vague directionality. In an extreme case, a rural family was tormented by a constant throbbing sound that turned out to be from a utility station 5 miles away.
Yeah, one house I lived at would get these random silent vibrations that would rattle plates on shelves for about 15 to 20 secs.
Turned out it was one particular ferry in the harbor. It was a smallish catarmaran fast ferry and when it was coming in a curved path it was like a narrow beam of infrasound funnelled between the hulls swept around and rattled our place 5km away. It took quite a while to notice the pattern, but was a great party trick to see it coming and predict the rattle to guests.
Used to get a similar thing in my flat; because Thameswater are absolute shit and need to be bought out already, there had been a water leak near/under the road next to me for some time.
Apparently it leaked to much water into the ground nearby that shocks were transmissible. Whenever a heavy lorry/truck drove along that road late at night, it would shake the building a little and rattle plates in the same way.
When they finally fixed it (after the road got beautifully resurfaced by the council, then dug up 3 days later by...Thameswater) presumably the water fell down into the water table and we've not had any shaking since.
Back when industrial hammers and drop forges were still common in the US (so like 70yr ago now) it wasn't uncommon for people say 10mi away to not feel them but 20mi away to feel them due to the magic of resonances and whatnot.
It’s tempting to see it as people being hypochondriacs, but often when there is an issue only after learning about it you notice that it has been affecting you badly. Noise pollution and air pollution are but two most common examples.
Sure, positive mindset is important, but it can only take you so far when northern wind makes you cough because there is a dozen factories out there, or when you are chronically sleep-deprived because a noise source you might not even know exists switches on at ungodly hours.
Low-frequency sound waves can be brutal. Something can just happen to resonate where you are, but meters away everything is fine. To make things even more interesting, go low enough and you might not actually be hearing it per se, but feeling it with your body. Good luck explaining it to people who can enact change.
Relatedly, Benn Jordan investigated[0] certain sound that some refuse to believe is real yet others suffer from.
To anecdotally support this, a neighbor of mine likes to play their bass super loud at night sometimes. But what’s strange is that the sound is louder in my house than if I go out in the street to listen. Seems like the sound waves go through the ground and then use my house as a sounding board.
It was explained to me that this phenomenon is a product of the noise wavelength matching up with the distance between houses. When you stand between the houses, you are near a null point and may hear nothing at all. But the wall of your house will be acting like a giant speaker diaphragm.
this can definitely happen, and in weird ways too. i thought my neighbor was playing bass super loud at night, and it was reverberating loud enough in my home so that I couldn't even hear a movie in my living room. when I knocked on his door, I was surprised to hear almost nothing and he had just been cooking dinner with low volume music. he shifted his subwoofer about 3 feet (it wasn't even against the wall) and it completely solved the problem
I have been to concerts where if you stood in one part of the venue certain bass notes would turn music into a jumble.
However—since you mention getting out of your (presumably otherwise quiet?) house onto the street—I also encountered a phenomenon in which presence of subtle other noise (which in your case could be tree leaves rustling and so on, and in my case was a literal white noise machine) make a sound that in a completely quiet room would drive me insane significantly less of a problem. This is not to say “it is all in your head” because, well, how you perceive it is what matters at the end of the day.
Hopefully your bass player neighbour could understand and use headphones or practice at a different time.
I mean, on the flip side every semi truck that rides the jake brakes down the hill near me is basically playing the anthem of low rents and the accompanying clientele.
I'm certainly not the only one in my neighborhood who would go postal if I had to live in a "quite" neighborhood where people complain about the noise each other's landscaping services make and call the cops when parties run late.
Loud low sounds can travel very far, especially at night when it’s quiet. I can hear freight trains at night that are over 5 miles away. It wouldn’t surprise me if the beam engine was louder than a freight train, and that nights were even quieter in the early 20th century. Hundreds of miles is a bit much though.
There are confounding factors of course, like direction and what's in between. E.g. do you sleep in a room that's on the opposite side of the house with windows closed and good insulation/windows? You'll probably be totally fine.
Do you sleep in a room that's towards the source and with the window open? Oh you will very very much hear that train, especially if the wind is coming from that direction.
Sleeping outside? Oh you will very much hear that train!
If the train is moving at the right speed the carriages will hit any bump in the track at a frequency that resonates.
You get the same effect over a smaller area with vibratory compactors used in construction. Get the frequency just right and the whole neighborhood can feel it.
I too can hear distant trains at night, especially if it is a still, clear night creating a low-level inversion to channel the sound.
There are several places in Britain (and elsewhere, I imagine) where beam engines have been preserved and are periodically run using live steam. the engines themselves are quiet by modern standards, though I believe the machinery they drove often produced a racket.
Various double-blind studies involving cell-towers also show no effect. Of folks claiming some kind of electromagnetic hypersensitivity, the greatest sensitivity seems to be whether they can see if a power-light is on or not.
Some may have real symptoms, but the cause is something else inside or outside them.
And power lines. I seem to recall reading that some of the health problems may have come from Agent Orange, which was used to clear the power corridor in the 50s
For the longest time I believed that cell tower radiation’s negative impact on living organisms is strictly pseudoscience.
Turns out, back in 2016 a German study[0] has found damage to trees near the towers—starting on the side of the tree facing the tower, then spreading to the entire tree.
This study, of course, does not show whether that measurably harms humans, but I stopped thinking those fears and complaints are completely unfounded.
There is a dedicated group of people who believe any electromagnetic emission is affecting them negatively. Searching on "electromagnetic free zones" is quite the rabbit hole. And there's way more to them than the "5G is mind control forced on us by the Illuminati for the New World Order" crowd.
The Parkes radio telescope had issues with fast radio bursts that they couldn't attribute to what they were tracking. Turned out to be a microwave oven in a nearby building where the door was opened before it had stopped.
While I wouldn't subscribe to standing in front will cook you idea, opening the door prematurely does give off radiation. Standing in front of a microwave beam dish may be a different story - knew an ex-Telecom tech who told a possibly tall tale of cooking chicken.
The Telecom guy might have been pulling your leg, but microwave dishes are known to be dangerous if you're in the wrong spot in front of them. (The traditional story is that Percy Spencer noticed a chocolate bar in his pocket get melted by the radar set he was working on. However, the effect had been demonstrated at least a decade earlier.)
What's funny is that you can make a defensible argument that COVID caused 5G.
(Basically, everyone was even more chronically online during the lockdowns, so there was extra money to be made and extra urgency in rolling out telecommunications infrastructure.)
I met a new age architecture consultant (not an actual architect) back in the 90s that was convinced his bag of Epsom salts and a copper spring was protecting him from the cancer causing electromagnetic fields produced by house wiring.
Now we live in obnoxiously loud cities with 24/7 emergency vehicle sirens (hey! there's an emergency somewhere!), loud aircraft flying overhead at all hours, loud low-frequency rumbling from ground vehicles, jet engines, power plants, and all manner of machinery, loud hums from electrical equipment, etc.
Unsurprisingly, this disturbs many people's sleep.
Moving outside of cities doesn't even solve the problem because low frequency noise travels for miles, highways go everywhere, and aircraft are inescapable.
And the EPA has simply abandoned any attempt to regulate noise pollution.
I should add that it was not the sound that was disturbing them, these engines were sometimes on the other side of the country. It was the "unnatural", unending reciprocating motion of the things!
For examples of other books that show how much technology rapidly changed the world, I can't recommend "The Victorian Internet" [0] highly enough. (It describes the impact of the telegraph).
I remember reading the book in the mid to late 2000s and it felt so "current" in describing events of the day e.g.
- local newspapers were basically crushed by "international news" that arrived immediately
- the rate of commerce rapidly accelerated as people could communicate instantly around the world
- financial markets were impacted by the "low latency trading" of the day thanks to financial news being sent via telegraph.
- there is even a section about lawyers debating if contracts and marriages could be signed over the telegraph (like this on in particular as this was a debate in the early ecommerce days)
I was then shocked to find that it has been published in the 1990s. Really is a reminder that "new" technologies are often just updated versions of old technologies.
If you have children, I am often surprised how they seem to think that the previous generation was stone age. Particular example is that my daughter was surprised I would give orders to my broker via fax, and that the latency was practically the same they get on the free tiers of their online 2020s bank (this is France). My trusty old ThinkPad, which still boots as if 30 years hadn't passed, still has all such digitalized sent/received faxes I did in the 90s..
Children in general have a very hard time grasping the idea that their parents' lives resembled their own at all. For another example, look how every generation of teenagers, without fail, thinks they are the first people in the world to invent having sex for fun. I myself didn't understand how my parents used to easily catch me in most of my attempts to get away with trouble, until I realized (as an adult) that they caught me so easily because they tried the same sorts of things as kids themselves. It's just human nature, I guess.
I heard an anecdote recently where the kids asked mom what it was like when they were a kid. Mom collected the mobile devices and turned off the internet.
It's the opposite with my kids. I get the feeling they think their parents were wild party animals (we weren't -maybe only in comparison to today, hell my parents were closer to that). As for the music, for her birthday my daughter recently asked for the first Alice in Chains album - on CD! Yikes.
Ours are jealous of bygone music etc, but on the whole kids treat each other so much better now, I am jealous of that part for them. YMMV of course.
What’s funny is that I hear today’s conservatives moral panicking about kids apparently not having sex or breaking the rules like they used to. The narrative goes that they are too busy just staring at screens and being placated.
Conservatives. I hear conservatives saying this. That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now.
I don’t know how true this fun recession is. The stats say there’s a kernel of truth to it but it’s being exaggerated, and if you talk to young people they say it’s as much about the high cost of anything as digital distraction. It’s become crazy expensive to do things in the real world.
Blaming this on cost doesn’t really make sense. Sex and minor delinquency are extremely cheap forms of entertainment (as long as you successfully avoid pregnancy).
Both of those generally involve you being in the same physical place as some other kids, which requires some combination of transportation and real estate, both of which cost more than they used to.
Meanwhile if they know you can't afford to do anything other than get into trouble somewhere then your parents aren't inclined to give you a ride, so instead you sit at home on your phone.
> That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now.
I suspect that's because what they [0] overtly asked for was not what they actually desired. The true desire was to be obeyed, for their teens to eagerly mold themselves onto stated parental-priorities, disassociating with peers their parents had a bad feeling about, etc.
In other words, control, rather than outcomes.
[0] Here, I'm treating "conservative parents" as a persistent group identity, even though individual membership changes over the decades. The ocean-wave exists even when it's not the same water molecules, etc.
I occasionally notice that people younger than me seem more impressed by smartphones than me (and I assume, maybe incorrectly, my generation).
One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.
To me, the smartphone impressed me for a couple years, but it's just one of many miracles of miniaturization I've lived through - and less qualitatively different than, for example, personal computers or the GUI or the internet going public.
My father noticed a similar phenomenon with Rock n Roll. People younger than him saw it as a musical sea-change, but to him it just sounded like the boogie woogie music the radio already had been playing for a decade.
> One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.
Probably over-analyzing this, but I can see why this might happen:
1. There's an ulterior motive of getting them to treat it safely, as it's one of the more-expensive and breakable things they might be carrying around, and they become obstreperous if it is unavailable.
2. It's probably the most immediate and tangible candidate. They probably aren't going to be around MRI scanners or cryo-cooled qubits or whatever.
They're also designed to be mistaken for sorcery. If you used a PC in the 90s then you have some idea how it works because the inner workings used to be more exposed, error messages had actual contents that could imply something about how you might, yourself, address the problem, etc. Even the bubble-headed marketing people had to learn how to use AS/400 to do their jobs. You can see how a modern phone is the same device only now LCDs place the CRTs and it uses a radio instead of physical wires for internet access etc. You may not be able to easily disassemble the phone but you know roughly what's in it.
Whereas if you've never used a PC, a phone is a black box. You tap the screen and it mysteriously does things. You're discouraged from trying to figure out how or make any changes to it yourself.
And if it's magic you better be careful because who knows what'll happen.
Back in my day, we had a separate (wired) telephone, a camera, a notepad, paper maps, a walkman, and a million other things. Now I just have a phone and it can do all that and lots more.
That's a valid observation, but we both lived through the advent of the modern PC, and the PC eliminated far more tools than that.
It's a convenience to carry around one smart phone instead of a dumb phone, a digital camera, and an iPod... but today that fills me with no more wonder than the advent of any of those three devices on their own.
Smart phones are a pinnacle product that combines materials science, supply chain management, electronic engineering, product design, graphic design, operating system design, application development, computer science, quantum electro-optics, digital signal processing, communication theory, satellite communication, and marketing - all in a small handheld device.
Not only are they absolutely miraculous, but they're commodity products that make the miracle seem routine and mundane.
When I watched the 2007 Apple keynote where Jobs announced the iPhone, it completely blew me away.
These days the smartphone doesn't fill me with awe anymore the same way many earlier and even subsequent inventions still do.
It's possibly because I could carry on quite easily without a smartphone. The greater loss would be for me to live without a mobile phone (of any variety), a computer, or a portable music player.
> Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?
It's the other way around. The iPod touch (introduced September 2007) was basically an iPhone (announced January 2007) without the phone part.
> I mean smart phones are a great achievement, but they were an incremental improvement, nothing to be blown away by?
Feature phones ("dumbphones"), even ones with cameras or music player functionality, were and are extremely limited compared to smartphones like the Palm Treo, which was basically a pocket-sized, wireless internet-connected computer with a much larger, color screen, OS and GUI, installable apps, and a tiny (but usable) keyboard.
Phones using DoCoMo's i-mode (which took off in Japan starting in 1999) were sort of a bridge between feature phones and smartphones. i-mode will finally shut down in 2026.
Not at all. The iPod of the day had a click wheel as an input device. The iPhone introduced us to capacitive touch, multitouch, gesture recognition, full web browsing. Huge leap compared to not only the iPod but the PocketPCs of the day.
> Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?
No, the iPods that were like iPhones (iPod Touch) were after the iPhone, not predecessors. The main iPod at the time of the iPhone introduction ("iPod Classic") had a small, non-touch screen in the top area of the face (except, most of the face taken up by the physical "click wheel" control, and a hard disk for storage, and other immediately pre-iPhone iPod's were basically scaled down versions of the same design (with Flash memory on, IIRC, the Nano and Shuffle, and no screen on the Shuffle.)
Compared to my PC, the smartphones of my friends impressed me because I could they had so many sensors to partake in the world compared to my 'autistic' / 'shut-in' PC which basically only had a keyboard and a pointing device, and couldn't tell which way I was holding it nor a barometre etc.
I was born in the early 70s, and growing up in America's Mountain West had the reverse experience until personal computers and the internet arrived in the early 90s.
From the perspective of my childhood, technology (cars, planes, phones & faxes, rockets, computers, refrigerators and other household appliances, rock music, radio, movies, television, science fiction & fantasy, the machinery of war, factories, farming, medicine, etc) were all elements of society that had advanced in technological progress, but had "always been there". I, of course, knew that there was a world before all that - my great-grandfather, who lived into his 90s and whom I got to know well, had driven a stagecoach as a teenager - but all of those had entered something like their modern form during or in the immediate aftermath of WWII, and to me it seemed like there had been progress, but not systemic change, in all the time since. It helped that all the adults around me largely saw WWII as the defining event of modern history. There was "before the War" and there was "now" (which came after the war).
Partly that was result of being born at the right time - the space program was in full swing, computers were a staple of fiction and large business but no more, the counterculture had come and gone, etc. The world really seemed like a timeless place to me as a child, and then about the time I reached adulthood, the Cold War ended, and the Internet Era arrived, and the world changed (and continued to change).
Because it was in many ways, the same as a generation before that and one before that.
40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved millions of lives since then.
All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized
It sounds callous to dismiss any improvement to medicine as trivial, but frankly I grew up under the assumption that humanity would cure diabetes, cancer, blindness, deafness and perhaps death itself by the end of the millennium.
It's much more noteworthy to me how little medicine has changed than how much.
I was talking with a historian of medicine who surprised me with the observation that the age of cures was past, and that we lived in the age of management. Antibiotics gave us cures, and vaccines eradicated diseases, but those advances had their limits: there is no penicillin for viruses or cancer. Advances since the mid-twentieth century have been more about managing conditions, which is much more profitable. Cure syphilis, and the patient goes away happy; treat AIDS, and the patient will keep buying more treatments as long as he lives.
>treat AIDS, and the patient will keep buying more treatments as long as he lives.
This is oft-repeated but it doesn’t pass the smell test. All it takes is a single principled academic to blow the whistle if there was any active suppression of cures or even research on cures.
In order for that quip to hold water, literally everyone involved in medical research would have to be a corrupt monster maintaining a worldwide conspiracy to keep sick people coming back for more treatments.
I guess I grew up in 'then', and that sort of 'assumption' is so depressing. But I get that some people only want to see medicine, and by extension science, as black-and-white.
"We haven't cured diabetes" (only made massive strides in control and management and came up with whole new classes of drugs that attack root causes). "We haven't cured cancer" (except the ones we have cured, the ones we came up with vaccines to prevent (HPV), and came up with all sorts of innovative and less unpleasant treatments extending lifespan with less side effects), "Haven't cured blindness or deafness" (except for the types we have cured).
And haven't cured death...well, I guess you got us there.
But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.
I agree with you that we’ve made progress. To me, the most impressive achievement has been nearly curing cystic fibrosis and our array of tools for dealing with HIV. And yet I think it’s important to be honest. The age-adjusted diabetes mortality rate per 100k has been pretty much flat for thirty years. Life expectancy growth has been meager and the US has fallen far behind Europe. Overall health/physical fitness/mental health seems to be on a steep decline. 90s and 2000s optimists had high hopes for the world. They would have good reason to be horrified at things today.
If we’re lagging behind Europe, that doesn’t seem to be an issue of progress, right? If they are ahead, then the tech must be here ready. And we’re a bit richer than them, so we could presumably afford to implement whatever policies they are doing. Living just seems to be a higher priority over there…
Meh, it’s just a reflection of there not actually being much medical progress and lifestyle becoming the dominant tie breaker as the few breakthroughs we do have spread through the world.
“We can’t fix most damage to any organ so follow a lifestyle that minimizes it” is not a meaningful medical advance IMO.
>But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.
Good comment until here. This is a strawman.
There is a huge gap between the vision of what medical advances might have brought us with technological breakthroughs and what has actually materialized.
Cloning and stem cell research was supposed to let me grab a new organ whenever I needed it. Instead I’m still waiting for a poor person to get in a car wreck and be declared brain dead so they can scoop out whatever is useful.
Cancer is still killing half of my family members, just different kinds after a cancer breakthrough helped them with an earlier kind. Others are hit by strokes, heart failures, and the occasional horrific Alzheimer’s.
50 years I’ve heard doctors saying “it was just their time” as an excuse for some old person dying. The field barely has a grasp on human biology and we’re barely making inroads.
At what age did you notice that? My daughter is 5 and more often than not assumes that life before her was exactly the same as she experiences. Once in a while though she’ll ask if we had iPads made of wood or something like that which is amusing.
I'd also recommend this book. It's sitting on my shelf - I had to hunt down a copy as I remembered reading it when I was a kid. Couldn't find a digital/kindle copy but I feel like reading the paper version works with the topic of the book, too.
Super well written and very cool to read about not just the technology side of telegraphy but the culture as well, and how it still roughly mirrors culture found when the book was written all the way up till now.
The Penny Post, introduced in England in 1840, may have been an even greater catalyst of social change. Within urban areas, communication latency was surprisingly low. Londoners got five deliveries per day.
You might also like "When Old Technologies Were New", which describes about how electricity and communication in the home changed society.
For instance, it tells the possibly apocryphal story of how the telephone allowed male suitors to call reach young women directly and thereby bypass both protective parents and long-time traditional romantic competitors. Getting a phone call was so exceptional that people had not yet built up any social defenses for it.
Doesn't make a lot of sense, since the same families that would have had a servant or parent answer the door would answer the telephone the same way. It's not like young misses were carrying phones in their skirt pockets. A more widely-accepted explanation for dating is economic: young women forced into apartment living and jobs in the city as their families lost the farm and couldn't keep their adult children anymore.
- Bailey, Beth L. (1988). From Front Porch to Back Seat. Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Henry, O. (1906). "The Unfinished Story". The Four Million. McClure, Phillips & Co.
That book - first published in 1998 - was one of my favorites for a while. An overt theme was the the astounding parallels between early-internet culture and the social practices of telegraph operators. At night (particularly) they'd stay "online", shooting the breeze with each other, forming long distance friendships - even romances! - and semi-anonymously socializing in ways that felt immediately and intimately familiar to those of us were on the internet around that time. I think that 'net is nearly as dead as the telegraph, so I wonder how the book lands for readers who didn't experience that milieu.
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century" by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
It’s about how if you think about distance as spacetime, that trains moved cities closer together by making the distance between them shorter. They shrink the world.
The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham
About how Soviet era projects thought they could throw pure labor at massive scale engineering problems to overcome any problem, to their detriment.
An interesting thing about communication systems depicted in "The Victorian Internet" is that it was an internet. Messages could be routed between postal services, telegraph, bicycle messengers, pneumatic tube systems, etc.
I would also recommend "The Information" by James Gleick. It covers all of known history so of course the scope is much broader, but there are familiar themes that accompany communication breakthroughs e.g. a train with a fleeing bank robber moves faster than the speed of our communication so we are all going to die.
Also people forget that up to the 1830s, going from Paris to Marseille was a 2 week journey (unless you were a royal courier switching horses every 40 km, who could do it in a few days), and that sending a message across the Atlantic and getting a reply a 2 month affair. In the late 1860, going from Paris to Marseille was done in about 15 hours by train; it only got gradually faster since then (nowadays, 3h30, by train or by plane).
I love the show the Knick because it’s about the crazy medical advances during that period - it has the crazy innovation feel instead of the typical period setting - watch it if you can - Clive Owen and Steven Soderburgh
Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day is an interesting read on this and explores the rapid changes in a far more human way than anything else I have read on the period. He renders it as the period when technology and knowledge ceased being things of the select few and become a large enough part of the average person's life, and this being what caused the real change; knowledge fundamentally changed society's relationship with the unknown and technology played a shell game with what is inconvenient. His treatment of photography and the development of film is really interesting and does an amazing job of showing what we lost as well as what we gained.
I'm reminded of how time pieces such as sundials changed societies, and how some ancients almost lost their minds due to this new development.
“The Gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish the hours---confound him, too Who in this place set up a sundial
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small pieces
! . . . I can't (even sit down to eat) unless the sun gives leave. The town's so full of these confounded dials . . .”
― Plautus
Finally someone who understands me. Whatever becomes measurable, becomes controllable, which is the antidote to freedom, wildness, life (to some extent)..
My favorite Samuel Delany story is about a woman in a village who invents writing, and teaches it to all the children. She makes a rule that you're never allowed to write down people's names, as it will inevitably lead to keeping records comparing people, and thus leading to strife...
I believe it's in Tales of Neveryon, 'the tale of old venn.' The whole series is extremely incentive and goes on some very different directions... The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals in 'Flight from Neveryon' was also particularly mind blowing.
Being able to have simplicity of working on a task until it is done when society didn't have these per hour scheduling concepts. I remember hearing this referenced when learning about Amish and Native American cultures. Essentially, this is what were doing. When it is finished, we move on to next. No arbitrary start/stop time because some hand on a dial is pointing at a certain number.
Note that Plautus was a comic writer, so you have to take it with a grain of salt. I'd treat is like a Seinfeld observational humor joke -- realistic but exaggerated.
Kinda interesting to ask what would have gone different if the infrastructure was in place to make electric cars 'good enough' as far as charging infrastructure.
As I understand it, the core problem back then was the batteries would mass half the car and lose a third of their maximum capacity in just 500 charging cycles.
Back when cars were new, there was no infrastructure for petrol either, that was something you got in tiny quantities from a pharmacy. (The diesel engine can run on vegetable oil, but I don't think Mr Rudolf Diesel himself ever did that?)
Infrastructure requires demand, and energy density and convenience of a contemporary battery versus gas engine means that no one was going to demand batteries when ICE was an option. We only figured the downside much later.
Being invented doesn't mean that they became commonly used. Many ancient inventions took thousands of years to rollout and be adopted by the vast majority of humans.
Perhaps, but the quote also doesn't read to me like someone ranting about a new invention, just one that he wished had never been invented. Just like I might find myself occasionally cursing whoever invented the idea of an office building, even though it predates me.
I don’t really get what this comment is suggesting. It is seemingly sarcastic, because obviously Amazon didn’t exist at the time. But Amazon didn’t invent the concept of long distance trade…
The Mediterranean was a tightly connected civilizational region, so if a certain invention was in use anywhere, it would spread at the speed of a sailing ship to the rest of the coast.
Already prior to the rise of the Roman Empire, there was a massive network of Phoenician and Greek colonies that would trade with one another constantly, from Cadiz to the Levant. The sea was a highway to them.
Amazon did not exist, but cunning merchants absolutely did, and they knew how to make money by selling attractive goods.
I do believe that time keeping, computers, and other technology are overused and overly relied on. (There is also damaging other stuff due to these technology, which is another issue. There are other issues too; these are clearly not the only thing.) They have their uses, but should not be excessive at the expense of anything else. If they fail, then you won't do unless you know and have not destroyed the older possibility, and if they do not fail, then you may be trapped by them. You should not need to know what time it is to sit down to eat, or to wake up and to sleep, etc.
Anyone interested in a fictional take on this period could consider Pynchon's "Against the Day", although it is no light challenge. It takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the years following WW1 and, appropriately, tells a sprawling, disorienting story that feels overwhelming at times.
> “Automobilism is an illness, a mental illness. This illness has a pretty name: speed... [Man] can no longer stand still, he shivers, his nerves tense like springs, impatient to get going once he has arrived somewhere because it is not somewhere else, somewhere else, always somewhere else.”
Previously:
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
They manufactured bicycles, then the apex of precision mass produced products, and they also had a quite scientific approach to the design of their aircraft, with wind tunnels, for example.
They were also the first to understand that steering the airplane was best done by warping the airfoils. Now we do it with rudders and elevators and flaps, then they did the whole surface.
They were also the first to devise a mathematical propeller theory that enabled them to have 90% efficient propellers. The flat propellers used by others were only 50% efficient.
I remember reading Theodore Roosevelt's biography by Edmund Morris and being shocked how he was basically able to text everyone he needed to be in contact with while president through the telegraph system.
If you think america moved too fast in the beginning of the century, try Russian Empire. Not only the same technological marvels as everywhere in the west, but also three revolutions and several wars. Change of government from monarchy to parlamentarism to socialism.
Also, countless posts, painters and new genres of art.
If you know Russian, Dusk Of The Empire podcast is pretty cool.
> Blom begins with Stravinsky, whose famous orchestral work The Rite of Spring was inspired by ancient Russian dance rituals. A melange of old folk music and arresting dissonance, the piece’s first performance in Paris 1913 triggered one of the most infamously violent reactions of any concert-hall audience in history. As Blom puts it bluntly, “all hell broke loose”:
> “During the first two minutes the public remained quiet,' Monteux [a musician] later recalled, “then there were boos and hissing from the upper circle, soon after from the stalls. People sitting next to one another began to hit one another on the head with fists and walking sticks, or whatever else they had to hand. Soon, their anger was turned against the dancers and especially against the orchestra... Everything to hand was thrown at them, but we continued playing. The chaos was complete when members of the audience turned on one another, on anyone supporting the other side. A heavily bejewelled lady was seen slapping her neighbour before storming off, while another one spat in her detractor's face. Fights broke out everywhere and challenges to duels were issued.”
There’s something about the image of a concert hall full of rich, fancy people erupting in a melee that is just delightful
The excellent book, “Rites Of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age”—which uses this infamous incident as a jumping-off point from which to explore Modernity as an incipient artistic and social phenomenon that accelerates during the interwar period—concludes that this account of the crowd’s reaction was, at the very least, highly embellished, and not dissimilar to tall tales about crowds fleeing from the Lumière brothers’ image of a train bearing down upon them. But since these stories are contemporary to the events, they do nevertheless tell us something important about the spirit of the age.
Two months earlier there had been the so-called Skandalkonzert in Vienna, conducted by Arnold Schoenberg: "...it was during Berg's songs that the fighting began. At the trial, Straus commented that the thud of Buschbeck's punch had been the most harmonious sound at the entire concert. For Berg's work the Skandalkonzert had lasting consequences: the songs were not performed again until 1952, and the full score did not appear in print until 1966."
The main reason for the commotion during the Paris premiere seems to be the publicity which whipped up the audience on both sides and made a clash inevitable. The Russian ballet had been playing the snobbery of the Paris audience for Stravinsky's two previous ballets, but misjudged the response in the third.
The subsequent performances, the London premiere, and the Paris concert premiere in 1914 all went off without a hitch. And the status of the Rite has only steadily increased ever since.
As Taruskin says, the music of the Rite is actually not very difficult to appreciate[1]:
> While it was at first a sore test for orchestra and conductor, and while it took fully half a century before music analysts caught up with it, The Rite has never been a difficult piece for the audience.
> The sounds of the music make a direct and compelling appeal to the listener’s imagination, and the listener’s body. In conjunction with Stravinsky’s peerless handling of the immense orchestra they have a visceral, cathartic impact. They leave—and to judge from the history of the score’s reception, have always left—most listeners feeling exhilarated. It is only the mythology of The Rite that would suggest anything else.
Basically two seperate Theatre movements, one favored by the posh thr other favored by the working class. The two scenes came to an actual riot on Astor Place and lead to the wealthy retreating from class mixing.
Not to harsh your schadenfreude buzz, but this is not the right image. Classical music was mass culture at the time.
Opera, in particular, was popular with all classes. (There's a delightful sequence in, I think?, "The Leopard" of brick-layers coming to blows over the merits of one singer versus another.) Recordings of famous singers were the first "hit" gramaphone records. Enrico Caruso sold out concerts all over the world - and (in legend, at least) sometimes gave impromptu balcony concerts to disappointed punters gathered in the street below.
You know, I just listened to it [1] and I can see why there was such a strong visceral reaction to the piece! "Dissonant" is definitely the right description. It's almost painful to listen to, especially if you were expecting normal concert music. Is it enough to cause a riot? Maybe!
I can't imagine what it would have been like to grow up with horse and carriages only to see us landing on the moon before you die. That's some serious societal whiplash.
I do like to imagine future generations looking back on the era of the internal combustion engines with absolute horror.
"You won't believe this, but for like 200 years, any time a person wanted a machine to move stuff, those apes would carry around tens of gallons of some crazy toxic combustible fluid which they'd spray into a heavy block of metal then bung 20,000 volts of electricity through it to make it explode. Just to spin a wheel! Then they'd pump the poisonous fumes out from the rear of the machine like a cloud of evil flatulence. Into the same air they breathed! There were literally billions of these machines all over the planet. Everyone owned one! There was so much of it, the planet started getting hotter! It was crazy!!"
I'm envy of people of the past having real freedom in their lives. I wouldn't be surprised that future generation would envy of us, who have the freedom to move fast anywhere.
Tech changed at a much faster and drastic pace then compared to now. Another example the first ever nightclub opened and ran from the early 1870s until 1910.
The Haymarket Historical Marker https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=121028
That will pale in comparison to how future generations view plastics.
Imagine if we ate and drank out of lead paint containers constantly for decades before discovering their health impacts. That's basically what has happened with plastics.
Here's one for you: There's a 10–15% chance, even barring radical life extension tech, that I'll live long enough to see the moon completely disassembled by von Neumann replicators.
There's several things that it depends on which are TRL 1-3, but are known to be at least theoretically possible. Based on how long it takes to get other things from TRL 1 to working device, I think it's most likely to take longer than my current remaining life expectancy even to be even odds, but not by such a large margin as to be infinitesimal odds.
This seems enormously optimistic to me, both as a technological assertion and a cultural one. Like even if we could build self-assembling nano-machines (nota bene: we can't even build self assembling macroscopic machines) why would we use them to disassemble the moon? I mean a 0.1 % chance, maybe. But 10% chance? Nuts.
Culturally? Nuts, sure, but you've been following the news right? Humans are nuts.
> we can't even build self assembling macroscopic machines
TRL-1 tends to imply such statements :)
… although, is that actually true? For macroscopic, I mean? Given factories exist and robot arms are part of them, are you sure nobody has used a robot arm to assemble an identical robot arm from a pile of robot arm parts? I've not heard of anyone actually doing so, but are you sure that's never been done?
This can only be done if the VN machines are able to form a useful cloud away from the moon immediately after they've disassembled the surface layer. If they aren't allowed to do that, it would take 415 millennia: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1.244e29+J+%2F+%281kW%2...
But you can make it twice as fast by getting the first layer to lift the second layer to cislunar orbit, then combine the power of both layers; then four times as fast etc. etc.
I don't know the upper limit before the main constraint is cooling.
Without getting into hairy calculations, if you really thought this was possible with a high probability, you'd accept $20 bucks and agree to give me a big payout (say $4000) in the future (say when you retire) because you think there is a large chance you'd never have to pay.
We could game this out and figure out exactly what a rational bet is, but you get my point. It seems very hard to believe you think there is a 10-15% chance. Those are probabilities at which you would be making major moves to hedge.
Dismantling the moon would disrupt the Earth's orbit, so the most likely version of this scenario is not beneficial/benign (e.g, grey goo scenario), so you need to factor in the chance that you'll be dissasembled before you see it happen to the moon.
> Dismantling the moon would disrupt the Earth's orbit
Not by itself. I basically agree with your broader point, of course, but on this particular detail, if someone's goal is to turn the moon into something like a Culture Orbital with the Earth at the centre*, the overall momentum of the system doesn't need to change.
* Or the old barycentre at the centre. This is also a terrible idea, please don't do this. Apart from anything else, mistakes are inevitable and large chunks of moon/O will rain down on us.
> Disoriented by the speed of modern times, Europeans and Americans suffered from record-high rates of anxiety and a sense that our inventions had destroyed our humanity.
Yeah our lives are mostly noise, we flip between working and "chilling" with virtually no inbetween idleness anymore.
Go look at the clouds, or better the stars, for some time. But don't do it tool long because you might start wondering why the fuck you're wasting so much time and energy fulfilling other people's TODO lists
Yeah I think people might be downplaying the fact that some different choices on automobiles could have led to drastically different outcomes with respect to the health of cities, suburbs, and communities
I mean sure, people still had babies, and the babies (us) adapted to the new environment, viewing it as "inevitable"
But that doesn't mean we can't make better choices around governance and technology going forward, or that we're not making bad choices right now
I would never wish to live like the average human 100 years+ ago. Most people lived in squalor, died easily, toiled their entire lives.
We live in absolute luxury and comfort today compared to pretty much any point in history.
It gets very tiresome hearing people complain about how hard they have it these days, which is just factually untrue. What I actually think the problem is, is apathy. People are looking to blame anything else for how they feel in life, rather than take ownership.
I see so many times people complaining about how fast modern life is, and yet they have a very real choice to go and live mostly off grid. There are communities all around the world where pro-active people have had the same thoughts and feelings, and actually had the guts to do something about it. This is all available to you right now, with the added benefit that it isn't even permanent if you don't like it (unlike 100+ years ago when there was no choice).
Or maybe everything is cause and effect, there is no free will, and what people feel or do is completely predetermined and outside their ability to change.
Maybe, but what about per capita? More people participating equals more people killed, but at the same time i dont think you need high technology to engage in a mass slaughter, swords work just as well.
A sword can kill one person at a time. A gun can kill 10 people at a time. A bomb can kill a hundred people. A nuclear bomb can kill thousands.
You can certainly commit mass slaughter with less technology. But then you need either a) more people to do the slaughtering, or b) more time. Technology makes it possible for a few people to slaughter many people in very little time.
It started before cars. But cars have devastating effect on how we built our environment, which has negative impact on social life, health and climate change.
USA had a nearly constant per person economic growth rate of 2%/year in the last ~150 years, perhaps going as far back as the beginning of industrial revolution.
Extrapolating such curves into the future suggests the current AI revolution is simply the last and latest node in a string of revolutions and it's nothing special.
If you think about it, having the world's all information at your fingertips (google), and in your pocket (iphone) might have been equally revolutionary. And before that came TV, radio, car, train, boat, plane, electricity, gas engine, steam engine etc as revolutions.
There's nothing that suggests the economic output per person is accelerating beyond the historical 2%/year. What could be reasons? Perhaps limited electricity, compute, AI model quality, computer speed etc.
So, the more analytical side of me thinks what we're experiencing is nothing extraordinary. It's just another revolution in a string of many :)
Obviously, my other, the more human side gets scared and feels afraid about the meaning of life, and humanity's place in it.
Yes, for information and reference we already had Wikipedia and billions of web pages indexed in Google, searchable by keyword. For questions we had reddit, StackOverflow and forums. For chatting we had social networks, chatting with real humans. For image we had only search, but within billions of images. Faster than gen AI, and made by humans. For code we had hundreds of thousands of repos.
We already had the genAI goodies for 2 decades. It's not going to be such a shocking change.
Statistical next-token predictors that aren’t even correct some of the time, and are currently crafted to pass tests, isn’t what I would consider revolutionary.
They’re neat tools. They help some people (a much, much smaller group of people than most think) be a bit more productive.
If LLMs are considered revolutionary, we are stagnating.
> Physicians warned that "diseases of the wheel" came by "the almost universal use of the bicycle" and that "serious evils" might befall the youth who rode without restraint. Moralists condemned women who “pedaled along gleefully, having discarded their corsets and put on more practical clothing, including trousers.”
Modern takes on gender roles feel as deeply unserious to me as this take. Whenever I hear about the tradwife trend or hear some pundit blaming the "fertility crisis" on women liberation it sounds just like these 20th century takes.
I did a trip a couple of years ago to Lincolnshire to look up where various ancestors had come from in the late 1800s and was surprised to find that while nothing much happens there now, it was a kind of silicon valley in the 1850s with everyone raising venture capital and building large houses from the riches of the railway boom.
PS: This is also "backed up by Gemini" with the google search phrase "is first 737 flight closer to first wright brother flight than now?" .... but I'd rather do the math.
Huh. I'm an idiot. For some reason I figured that in three years time the "time between wright brother first flight and 737 flight" would vary by 3 years. But no. That is a constant.
So to revise my statement, in six years your statement will be true....
There seems to be a lot of publicity promoting this topic. It seems more than just "a book", it's a whole policy direction that is being promoted, and that requires the ideas being actively seeded.
A favorite book on the period is "Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914" by Frederic Morton. Freud's city was one of the centers of Europe's neuroses. It was also a center of political ferment under the lid weighted down by the Hapsburg monarchy.
Notably, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, and Tito were all there at the same time.
I recently finished an audiobook that describes the history of cocaine and opiate use in that era. The drugs were unregulated until addiction became an issue. I'm interested in how drugs shape our society so I appreciate books like this that fill in the missing history.
David Farber - Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed [Audiobook]
It was extremely widespread in Russian Empire too. To the extent that not only poets and artists used morphine and cocaine, but also some high ranking officials. One of the police chiefs, for example, was both morphinist and alcoholic.
In other news, radioactivity was embraced to the point that radium was used everywhere (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls) and shoe stores were offering x-rays.
Today, even the Internet's positive impact is wildly debated, the LLM copyright issues are wildly debated and no data exists for the long term impact of LLM usage on the reasoning faculties (if you tell me that the article was not posted to discredit LLM skeptics, I have a bridge to sell you).
And then radiation became a staple in medicine with the proliferation of radioimaging and radiosurgery. But then the Therac 25 thing and Chernobyl happened, and we're in this scare #2 era since.
It would seem to me that the public sentiment of stuff is not very trustworthy in general, especially at its typical intensity. Both when it's negative or positive. The word "multimedia" still makes me gag a little, for example.
In the book The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the ways the eponymous Count flaunts his unfathomable wealth is by posting many horses to wait for him in advance all along the highways, allowing his carriage to travel all across France in a single night by continually changing to fresh horses. Even his wealthy rivals are astonished by this feat. So while it may have been technologically possible it would have been very expensive.
> Google says that horses can go up to 70 km/h (45mi/h).
That is the fastest speed for a Thoroughbred racehorse over a mile. It's not sustainable for long. The horse record for 100 miles is 17MPH, on a really good Arabian.[1] 6MPH is a good working pace for a horse. 8-12 MPH at the trot, which can be kept up for a hour or two by many horses in good condition.
According to this [0] thread, typical car travel speeds were between 10 and 20 mph. They even mention specifics like:
> in 1904 in NYC the limit was set to 12 mph inside of the city and 15 mph outside of it.
With that 12 mph figure being a little under the average running speed of the record holder marathon runner (26.2 miles in 2 hours flat, so 13.1 mph).
Now of course, most people are not record holding athletes, so sustaining these speeds on foot is not really happening for most. But you can definitely at least keep up for the duration of a sprint. So no real need for a horse even, your own legs can make do, despite these speeds being supposedly unnatural.
You can also sustain these speeds with a bicycle today, not sure about the bicycles of then.
That's basically a full out sprint for a relatively fast horse. Most can't sustain that for long and definitely not with a lot of load. Steam, gas, and diesel engines were and are capable of sustaining that for long durations with greater load, hence why it seems so jarring. Especially for large loads, even the earliest trucks were probably moving must faster than draft horses.
Can be break the systems that keep leading us to the next such war. For example the lack of true representation for the people. The seige of governments by the rich and "elite". Stupid decisions made by people who kill their kids for a buck (referencing climate change). Dismantling of international conventions that were the result of people from a harder time saying "hold on... this is too fucked".
I think the article and the book tend to forget the terrible living conditions in cities back then, and instead psychologize them.
More than half of people in big American cities lived overcrowded -- that is, >2 people in a room, INCLUDING KITCHENS! Many rented just a bed for half a day! They slept, and the other half the other person, who worked in night shift, slept on it.
In big cities, the traffic in the streets, with horse carriages riding on cobble stone, and cars, started at 6:00 and lasted till midnight. Steam locomotives made a lot of noise and smoke. That's cortisol, lower immunity, more other consequences.
And bear in mind, not everyone had electricity, not to speak of central heating. You had lots of chimneys everywhere. Not everyone had sewer, tap water and so on. I guess, a good deal of these people migrated to cities from more quiet places, and since there was no notion of harmful environment.
We tend to be surprised why modernism got so much traction, and even the best architects hated cities (e.g. Frank Lloyd Wright, who wrote something like "a city plan is a fibrosis"), but the reasons were everywhere, real and brutal.
So I'm pretty sure the reason for people being nervous, is quite physical, not "people were scared", as you may conclude from the article (although this is not explicitly stated).
[EDIT] Forgot about the social environment. When you move to a big city as an adult, without the college/university to give you social fabric, you're quite lonely. And in big cities this fabric was getting thinner with urbanization. And you're short on money, can afford only a bed, and count every cent. I think it's a more serious reason to get neurotic than times changing too rapidly.
We were also completely coked out of our mind. An issue oddly ignored by the article given they literally mentioned Coca Cola and so are presumably aware of its history. It wasn't until 1903 that Coca Cola removed cocaine from its recipe, but its use and abuse was absolutely widespread everywhere. People were using it recreationally, people no less than Thomas Edison remarked that it (in Vin Mariani [1]) "helped him stay awake." Popes were using it, generals were using, factor owners were pumping their laborers with it to maximize productivity, and much more. It wasn't restricted until 1914 and then defacto banned in 1922.
That's already going to increase anxiety dramatically amongst users, let alone the rest of society walking around in extremely crowded cities where a sizable chunk of the population was completely coked out of their minds at any given moment.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani
I always wondered why WW1 started. Maybe they were coked up?
WW1 started (among other things) because the "superpowers" in Europe had been arming each other for quite a while in fear of aggression from the other superpowers (not completely unreasonable, given the wars of the previous century). This, in turn, forced the other superpowers to invest more in armaments and army. To top it off, they made treaties of alliance/military intervention (the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente).
The assassination of the archduke was like flipping a light switch in a house saturated with gas. Austria declares war to Serbia, which is defended by Russia, so Germany has to declare war to Russia; Germany expects France to join Russia so they declare war to France, but their battle plans to conquer France require passing through Belgium. The UK needs Belgium to remain neutral, so they declare war to Germany... and so on. Once the wheels are in motion, and everyone is ready for war, war just happens - whether coke is there or not.
> Many rented just a bed for half a day! They slept, and the other half the other person, who worked in night shift, slept on it.
This is not unheard of for south Asian immigrants in European cities, which typically do hard, low paid work (car cleaners, gig economy delivery "partners" etc).
All that for what ? So people can order take away in Berlin from a place that's 10 minutes away from them by bike, because they clubbed too hard last night. And the profit finds its way to America (doordash owns Wolt).
> All that for what ? So people can order take away in Berlin from a place that's 10 minutes away from them by bike, because they clubbed too hard last night. And the profit finds its way to America (doordash owns Wolt).
But at least people are getting paid right? The alternative is people staying in their hometown and not making any money.
I'm not so sure about that. Accepting the existence of such working conditions for marginal (if not questionable) benefits lowers the working conditions for everyone, and in a system with social benefits & free healthcare it could arguably be net negative in total.
Regarding unemployment in people's hometowns, unfortunately this is not a problem that can be solved with shitty jobs. Even if xxx people find a shitty job, there will be 100*xxx people left over.
Not unheard of here in Australia either.
Yes, I forgot to add this. I saw some shocking examples from Honk Kong, I think, where immigrants rent just a bed-cell.
And bear in mind, not everyone had electricity, not to speak of central heating. You had lots of chimneys everywhere.
LMAO is this most houses where I live in New Zealand. Smoke coming out of chimneys for people to keep warm, often burning coal. They have electricity of course but it's too expensive to heat their houses.
Let's compare the progress made by the modern world against the life of the tribes on the remote untouched islands.
Unfortunately the stories of success of the modern world were written by the modern world. So what we call as success or progress is only valid in modern world. There is no language or terms that can describe success and agreed upon across these two worlds.
For example, you may be able to wipe out that tribal population within minutes. But that may not mean success or progress, in terms of adaptation to the surroundings. Dinosaurs also ruled the land with their might. But adaptation is something different from being mighty. The context can get much more mightier against you.
Most of scientific and industrial advances were made by people who have no survival struggles and who were greedy for money or reputation. A lot of it was not needed for human adaptation and evolution.
Life on Earth is going to be temporary - the Sun itself already guarantees that on a long timeframe. But on far more immediate time frames there have been countless mass extinction events and countless more will happen - in fact we're well over due for one. One could very well happen tomorrow - there won't necessarily be any warning.
For instance one hypothesis for one of the most devastating mass extinction events was mass volcanic eruptions. The volcanos don't kill you, usually, but they blot out the sky which not only sends temperatures plummeting but kills all plantlife, which then rapidly kills anything that depended on those plants and on up the food chain. Another hypothesis for another mass extinction event was an unfortunately directed gamma ray burst. It would end up killing life off through a similar ends, even if the means to get there is quite different.
It's likely that the only means to 'beat' these events in the longrun is technology and expanding into the cosmos - becoming a multi planetary species first and eventually a multi star system species. That we (and many other species species for that matter) seem to have this instinct to expand as far as we can is probably just one of the most primal survival instincts. Concentrated over-adaption to a localized region and circumstance is how you get the Dodo.
> the life of the tribes on the remote untouched islands.
Which ones? Or is it just romantic conjecture?
Perhaps by 'untouched' they mean uncontacted? The Sentinelese people of North Sentinel Island are a well-known example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples
The poster also says about how we could wipe a remote tribe out in minutes. Something similar has been in the news recently with an AI angle: https://thethaiger.com/news/world/chatgpt-leak-exposes-plot-...
On the other hand, dinosaurs may have survived if they had a space program! :)
Maybe they did…
> Unfortunately the stories of success of the modern world were written by the modern world.
While I think that is a profound insight that we should contemplate a lot more than we do instead of taking our value system (the one we all share, not only the ones we disagree with) for granted, I can't help also contemplate how inadequate, or underdeveloped, our language is as a tool to identify such. Hopefully, some day we will have more value-neutral means to properly view the relative isolated conceptual bubbles from which each culture views another. We're not there yet.
A great example of how things were viewed at the time is the poem by AB "Banjo" Patterson: "Mulga Bill's Bycycle", first published in 1896.
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that caught the cycling craze; He turned away the good old horse that served him many days; He dressed himself in cycling clothes, resplendent to be seen; He hurried off to town and bought a shining new machine; And as he wheeled it through the door, with air of lordly pride, The grinning shop assistant said, "Excuse me, can you ride?"
"See here, young man," said Mulga Bill, "from Walgett to the sea, From Conroy's Gap to Castlereagh, there's none can ride like me. I'm good all round at everything as everybody knows, Although I'm not the one to talk - I hate a man that blows. But riding is my special gift, my chiefest, sole delight; Just ask a wild duck can it swim, a wildcat can it fight. There's nothing clothed in hair or hide, or built of flesh or steel, There's nothing walks or jumps, or runs, on axle, hoof, or wheel, But what I'll sit, while hide will hold and girths and straps are tight: I'll ride this here two-wheeled concern right straight away at sight."
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that sought his own abode, That perched above Dead Man's Creek, beside the mountain road. He turned the cycle down the hill and mounted for the fray, But 'ere he'd gone a dozen yards it bolted clean away. It left the track, and through the trees, just like a silver steak, It whistled down the awful slope towards the Dead Man's Creek.
It shaved a stump by half an inch, it dodged a big white-box: The very wallaroos in fright went scrambling up the rocks, The wombats hiding in their caves dug deeper underground, As Mulga Bill, as white as chalk, sat tight to every bound. It struck a stone and gave a spring that cleared a fallen tree, It raced beside a precipice as close as close could be; And then as Mulga Bill let out one last despairing shriek It made a leap of twenty feet into the Dead Man's Creek.
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that slowly swam ashore: He said, "I've had some narrer shaves and lively rides before; I've rode a wild bull round a yard to win a five-pound bet, But this was the most awful ride that I've encountered yet. I'll give that two-wheeled outlaw best; it's shaken all my nerve To feel it whistle through the air and plunge and buck and swerve. It's safe at rest in Dead Man's Creek, we'll leave it lying still; A horse's back is good enough henceforth for Mulga Bill."
The Sydney Mail, 25 July 1896.
This is basically a Black Mirror type story….but from 1896.
And it’s about bicycles.
Fascinating.
May be this is a bit of anachronism but this poem does not read as being anti-bicycle more so than it having hubris and lack of experience with new fangled thing (bicycle).
A guy refusing any training and then immediately getting hurt doesn't really feel to me like it has the same skepticism for the actual technology.
Especially when basically the same thing could happen with a horse.
This! It's about what a clown this guy is and laughing at a small comeuppance.
It does, however, have direct parallels to the developers who believe they can just use AI without a learning curve because they can already write code, fail at doing so, and conclude that AI is terrible instead of learning how to use it.
Wow. Thanks for sharing. Here is the poem in a clearer formatting with images: https://allpoetry.com/Mulga-Bill's-Bicycle
If you have kids this has excellent illustrations...
https://www.amazon.com.au/Mulga-Bills-Bicycle-Deborah-Niland...
During the early industrial revolution people used to present themselves for medical help after complaining that the incessant repetitive action and rotation of engines (e.g. beam engines) hundreds of miles away from them was sending them vibrations which disturbed their sleep. Of course they only started having this problem after reading about such contraptions in newspapers.
I know a consulting acoustical engineer who tracks down noise problems for companies and individuals. He goes on about the difficulty of even finding the source of low-frequency noise because of distance and vague directionality. In an extreme case, a rural family was tormented by a constant throbbing sound that turned out to be from a utility station 5 miles away.
Yeah, one house I lived at would get these random silent vibrations that would rattle plates on shelves for about 15 to 20 secs.
Turned out it was one particular ferry in the harbor. It was a smallish catarmaran fast ferry and when it was coming in a curved path it was like a narrow beam of infrasound funnelled between the hulls swept around and rattled our place 5km away. It took quite a while to notice the pattern, but was a great party trick to see it coming and predict the rattle to guests.
Used to get a similar thing in my flat; because Thameswater are absolute shit and need to be bought out already, there had been a water leak near/under the road next to me for some time.
Apparently it leaked to much water into the ground nearby that shocks were transmissible. Whenever a heavy lorry/truck drove along that road late at night, it would shake the building a little and rattle plates in the same way.
When they finally fixed it (after the road got beautifully resurfaced by the council, then dug up 3 days later by...Thameswater) presumably the water fell down into the water table and we've not had any shaking since.
Back when industrial hammers and drop forges were still common in the US (so like 70yr ago now) it wasn't uncommon for people say 10mi away to not feel them but 20mi away to feel them due to the magic of resonances and whatnot.
It’s tempting to see it as people being hypochondriacs, but often when there is an issue only after learning about it you notice that it has been affecting you badly. Noise pollution and air pollution are but two most common examples.
Sure, positive mindset is important, but it can only take you so far when northern wind makes you cough because there is a dozen factories out there, or when you are chronically sleep-deprived because a noise source you might not even know exists switches on at ungodly hours.
Low-frequency sound waves can be brutal. Something can just happen to resonate where you are, but meters away everything is fine. To make things even more interesting, go low enough and you might not actually be hearing it per se, but feeling it with your body. Good luck explaining it to people who can enact change.
Relatedly, Benn Jordan investigated[0] certain sound that some refuse to believe is real yet others suffer from.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zy_ctHNLan8
To anecdotally support this, a neighbor of mine likes to play their bass super loud at night sometimes. But what’s strange is that the sound is louder in my house than if I go out in the street to listen. Seems like the sound waves go through the ground and then use my house as a sounding board.
It was explained to me that this phenomenon is a product of the noise wavelength matching up with the distance between houses. When you stand between the houses, you are near a null point and may hear nothing at all. But the wall of your house will be acting like a giant speaker diaphragm.
this can definitely happen, and in weird ways too. i thought my neighbor was playing bass super loud at night, and it was reverberating loud enough in my home so that I couldn't even hear a movie in my living room. when I knocked on his door, I was surprised to hear almost nothing and he had just been cooking dinner with low volume music. he shifted his subwoofer about 3 feet (it wasn't even against the wall) and it completely solved the problem
I have been to concerts where if you stood in one part of the venue certain bass notes would turn music into a jumble.
However—since you mention getting out of your (presumably otherwise quiet?) house onto the street—I also encountered a phenomenon in which presence of subtle other noise (which in your case could be tree leaves rustling and so on, and in my case was a literal white noise machine) make a sound that in a completely quiet room would drive me insane significantly less of a problem. This is not to say “it is all in your head” because, well, how you perceive it is what matters at the end of the day.
Hopefully your bass player neighbour could understand and use headphones or practice at a different time.
I mean, on the flip side every semi truck that rides the jake brakes down the hill near me is basically playing the anthem of low rents and the accompanying clientele.
I'm certainly not the only one in my neighborhood who would go postal if I had to live in a "quite" neighborhood where people complain about the noise each other's landscaping services make and call the cops when parties run late.
Loud low sounds can travel very far, especially at night when it’s quiet. I can hear freight trains at night that are over 5 miles away. It wouldn’t surprise me if the beam engine was louder than a freight train, and that nights were even quieter in the early 20th century. Hundreds of miles is a bit much though.
Train at 5 miles is nothing. Can confirm.
There are confounding factors of course, like direction and what's in between. E.g. do you sleep in a room that's on the opposite side of the house with windows closed and good insulation/windows? You'll probably be totally fine.
Do you sleep in a room that's towards the source and with the window open? Oh you will very very much hear that train, especially if the wind is coming from that direction.
Sleeping outside? Oh you will very much hear that train!
The engine would have been significantly less noisy than a diesel locomotive. It's almost eerie how quiet they can be, given how big they are.
The pump it drove could have been loud, though.
If the train is moving at the right speed the carriages will hit any bump in the track at a frequency that resonates.
You get the same effect over a smaller area with vibratory compactors used in construction. Get the frequency just right and the whole neighborhood can feel it.
I too can hear distant trains at night, especially if it is a still, clear night creating a low-level inversion to channel the sound.
There are several places in Britain (and elsewhere, I imagine) where beam engines have been preserved and are periodically run using live steam. the engines themselves are quiet by modern standards, though I believe the machinery they drove often produced a racket.
Something similar happened in more modern times with a cell tower, although it's over a decade ago now: https://gizmodo.com/locals-complain-of-radio-tower-illness-t...
Various double-blind studies involving cell-towers also show no effect. Of folks claiming some kind of electromagnetic hypersensitivity, the greatest sensitivity seems to be whether they can see if a power-light is on or not.
Some may have real symptoms, but the cause is something else inside or outside them.
And power lines. I seem to recall reading that some of the health problems may have come from Agent Orange, which was used to clear the power corridor in the 50s
For the longest time I believed that cell tower radiation’s negative impact on living organisms is strictly pseudoscience.
Turns out, back in 2016 a German study[0] has found damage to trees near the towers—starting on the side of the tree facing the tower, then spreading to the entire tree.
This study, of course, does not show whether that measurably harms humans, but I stopped thinking those fears and complaints are completely unfounded.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27552133/
There is a dedicated group of people who believe any electromagnetic emission is affecting them negatively. Searching on "electromagnetic free zones" is quite the rabbit hole. And there's way more to them than the "5G is mind control forced on us by the Illuminati for the New World Order" crowd.
The Parkes radio telescope had issues with fast radio bursts that they couldn't attribute to what they were tracking. Turned out to be a microwave oven in a nearby building where the door was opened before it had stopped.
While I wouldn't subscribe to standing in front will cook you idea, opening the door prematurely does give off radiation. Standing in front of a microwave beam dish may be a different story - knew an ex-Telecom tech who told a possibly tall tale of cooking chicken.
https://theconversation.com/how-we-found-the-source-of-the-m...
The Telecom guy might have been pulling your leg, but microwave dishes are known to be dangerous if you're in the wrong spot in front of them. (The traditional story is that Percy Spencer noticed a chocolate bar in his pocket get melted by the radar set he was working on. However, the effect had been demonstrated at least a decade earlier.)
What's funny is that you can make a defensible argument that COVID caused 5G.
(Basically, everyone was even more chronically online during the lockdowns, so there was extra money to be made and extra urgency in rolling out telecommunications infrastructure.)
They definitely should not own one of these then: https://somasynths.com/ether/. But it is lots of fun for me.
I met a new age architecture consultant (not an actual architect) back in the 90s that was convinced his bag of Epsom salts and a copper spring was protecting him from the cancer causing electromagnetic fields produced by house wiring.
Now we live in obnoxiously loud cities with 24/7 emergency vehicle sirens (hey! there's an emergency somewhere!), loud aircraft flying overhead at all hours, loud low-frequency rumbling from ground vehicles, jet engines, power plants, and all manner of machinery, loud hums from electrical equipment, etc.
Unsurprisingly, this disturbs many people's sleep.
Moving outside of cities doesn't even solve the problem because low frequency noise travels for miles, highways go everywhere, and aircraft are inescapable.
And the EPA has simply abandoned any attempt to regulate noise pollution.
I should add that it was not the sound that was disturbing them, these engines were sometimes on the other side of the country. It was the "unnatural", unending reciprocating motion of the things!
> Of course they only started having this problem after reading about such contraptions in newspapers.
Sadly the memories of having worked with the machines persists
For examples of other books that show how much technology rapidly changed the world, I can't recommend "The Victorian Internet" [0] highly enough. (It describes the impact of the telegraph).
I remember reading the book in the mid to late 2000s and it felt so "current" in describing events of the day e.g.
- local newspapers were basically crushed by "international news" that arrived immediately
- the rate of commerce rapidly accelerated as people could communicate instantly around the world
- financial markets were impacted by the "low latency trading" of the day thanks to financial news being sent via telegraph.
- there is even a section about lawyers debating if contracts and marriages could be signed over the telegraph (like this on in particular as this was a debate in the early ecommerce days)
I was then shocked to find that it has been published in the 1990s. Really is a reminder that "new" technologies are often just updated versions of old technologies.
0 - https://amzn.to/4frEGyC
(NOTE: the link above takes you to a later edition)
If you have children, I am often surprised how they seem to think that the previous generation was stone age. Particular example is that my daughter was surprised I would give orders to my broker via fax, and that the latency was practically the same they get on the free tiers of their online 2020s bank (this is France). My trusty old ThinkPad, which still boots as if 30 years hadn't passed, still has all such digitalized sent/received faxes I did in the 90s..
Children in general have a very hard time grasping the idea that their parents' lives resembled their own at all. For another example, look how every generation of teenagers, without fail, thinks they are the first people in the world to invent having sex for fun. I myself didn't understand how my parents used to easily catch me in most of my attempts to get away with trouble, until I realized (as an adult) that they caught me so easily because they tried the same sorts of things as kids themselves. It's just human nature, I guess.
My late grandmother had a pithy turn of phrase when I would act like she "just didn't get it".
"Kiddo, every generation thinks they invented sex and fast music."
I heard an anecdote recently where the kids asked mom what it was like when they were a kid. Mom collected the mobile devices and turned off the internet.
It's the opposite with my kids. I get the feeling they think their parents were wild party animals (we weren't -maybe only in comparison to today, hell my parents were closer to that). As for the music, for her birthday my daughter recently asked for the first Alice in Chains album - on CD! Yikes.
Ours are jealous of bygone music etc, but on the whole kids treat each other so much better now, I am jealous of that part for them. YMMV of course.
What’s funny is that I hear today’s conservatives moral panicking about kids apparently not having sex or breaking the rules like they used to. The narrative goes that they are too busy just staring at screens and being placated.
Conservatives. I hear conservatives saying this. That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now.
I don’t know how true this fun recession is. The stats say there’s a kernel of truth to it but it’s being exaggerated, and if you talk to young people they say it’s as much about the high cost of anything as digital distraction. It’s become crazy expensive to do things in the real world.
Blaming this on cost doesn’t really make sense. Sex and minor delinquency are extremely cheap forms of entertainment (as long as you successfully avoid pregnancy).
Both of those generally involve you being in the same physical place as some other kids, which requires some combination of transportation and real estate, both of which cost more than they used to.
Meanwhile if they know you can't afford to do anything other than get into trouble somewhere then your parents aren't inclined to give you a ride, so instead you sit at home on your phone.
> That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now.
I suspect that's because what they [0] overtly asked for was not what they actually desired. The true desire was to be obeyed, for their teens to eagerly mold themselves onto stated parental-priorities, disassociating with peers their parents had a bad feeling about, etc.
In other words, control, rather than outcomes.
[0] Here, I'm treating "conservative parents" as a persistent group identity, even though individual membership changes over the decades. The ocean-wave exists even when it's not the same water molecules, etc.
'Conservatives' is a label that you put on people whose views are currently seen as conservative.
If there is a wild part at all then it isn't that 'they' are saying it, but what we came to view as conservative.
In a couple of years you might find yourself in that whining bucket.
> In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now.
Are you complaining about 'conservatives theses days'?
I occasionally notice that people younger than me seem more impressed by smartphones than me (and I assume, maybe incorrectly, my generation).
One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.
To me, the smartphone impressed me for a couple years, but it's just one of many miracles of miniaturization I've lived through - and less qualitatively different than, for example, personal computers or the GUI or the internet going public.
My father noticed a similar phenomenon with Rock n Roll. People younger than him saw it as a musical sea-change, but to him it just sounded like the boogie woogie music the radio already had been playing for a decade.
> One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.
Probably over-analyzing this, but I can see why this might happen:
1. There's an ulterior motive of getting them to treat it safely, as it's one of the more-expensive and breakable things they might be carrying around, and they become obstreperous if it is unavailable.
2. It's probably the most immediate and tangible candidate. They probably aren't going to be around MRI scanners or cryo-cooled qubits or whatever.
They're also designed to be mistaken for sorcery. If you used a PC in the 90s then you have some idea how it works because the inner workings used to be more exposed, error messages had actual contents that could imply something about how you might, yourself, address the problem, etc. Even the bubble-headed marketing people had to learn how to use AS/400 to do their jobs. You can see how a modern phone is the same device only now LCDs place the CRTs and it uses a radio instead of physical wires for internet access etc. You may not be able to easily disassemble the phone but you know roughly what's in it.
Whereas if you've never used a PC, a phone is a black box. You tap the screen and it mysteriously does things. You're discouraged from trying to figure out how or make any changes to it yourself.
And if it's magic you better be careful because who knows what'll happen.
I'm 40 and very impressed by smartphones.
Back in my day, we had a separate (wired) telephone, a camera, a notepad, paper maps, a walkman, and a million other things. Now I just have a phone and it can do all that and lots more.
That's a valid observation, but we both lived through the advent of the modern PC, and the PC eliminated far more tools than that.
It's a convenience to carry around one smart phone instead of a dumb phone, a digital camera, and an iPod... but today that fills me with no more wonder than the advent of any of those three devices on their own.
Smart phones are a pinnacle product that combines materials science, supply chain management, electronic engineering, product design, graphic design, operating system design, application development, computer science, quantum electro-optics, digital signal processing, communication theory, satellite communication, and marketing - all in a small handheld device.
Not only are they absolutely miraculous, but they're commodity products that make the miracle seem routine and mundane.
When I watched the 2007 Apple keynote where Jobs announced the iPhone, it completely blew me away.
These days the smartphone doesn't fill me with awe anymore the same way many earlier and even subsequent inventions still do.
It's possibly because I could carry on quite easily without a smartphone. The greater loss would be for me to live without a mobile phone (of any variety), a computer, or a portable music player.
> When I watched the 2007 Apple keynote where Jobs announced the iPhone, it completely blew me away.
Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?
I mean smart phones are a great achievement, but they were an incremental improvement, nothing to be blown away by?
> Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?
It's the other way around. The iPod touch (introduced September 2007) was basically an iPhone (announced January 2007) without the phone part.
> I mean smart phones are a great achievement, but they were an incremental improvement, nothing to be blown away by?
Feature phones ("dumbphones"), even ones with cameras or music player functionality, were and are extremely limited compared to smartphones like the Palm Treo, which was basically a pocket-sized, wireless internet-connected computer with a much larger, color screen, OS and GUI, installable apps, and a tiny (but usable) keyboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Treo
Phones using DoCoMo's i-mode (which took off in Japan starting in 1999) were sort of a bridge between feature phones and smartphones. i-mode will finally shut down in 2026.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode
Smartphones also generally looked very different pre-iPhone and post-iPhone.
> "What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties," DeSalvo said. "It's just one of those things that are obvious when you see it."
https://www.engadget.com/2013-12-19-when-google-engineers-fi...
> It's the other way around. The iPod touch (introduced September 2007) was basically an iPhone (announced January 2007) without the phone part.
Oh, thanks, I got my history the wrong way round!
Not at all. The iPod of the day had a click wheel as an input device. The iPhone introduced us to capacitive touch, multitouch, gesture recognition, full web browsing. Huge leap compared to not only the iPod but the PocketPCs of the day.
Listen to the audience reaction when he shows how you scroll a list view: https://youtu.be/VQKMoT-6XSg?si=OmbgSG7nmEpdAETl&t=970
> Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?
No, the iPods that were like iPhones (iPod Touch) were after the iPhone, not predecessors. The main iPod at the time of the iPhone introduction ("iPod Classic") had a small, non-touch screen in the top area of the face (except, most of the face taken up by the physical "click wheel" control, and a hard disk for storage, and other immediately pre-iPhone iPod's were basically scaled down versions of the same design (with Flash memory on, IIRC, the Nano and Shuffle, and no screen on the Shuffle.)
Compared to my PC, the smartphones of my friends impressed me because I could they had so many sensors to partake in the world compared to my 'autistic' / 'shut-in' PC which basically only had a keyboard and a pointing device, and couldn't tell which way I was holding it nor a barometre etc.
I was born in the early 70s, and growing up in America's Mountain West had the reverse experience until personal computers and the internet arrived in the early 90s.
From the perspective of my childhood, technology (cars, planes, phones & faxes, rockets, computers, refrigerators and other household appliances, rock music, radio, movies, television, science fiction & fantasy, the machinery of war, factories, farming, medicine, etc) were all elements of society that had advanced in technological progress, but had "always been there". I, of course, knew that there was a world before all that - my great-grandfather, who lived into his 90s and whom I got to know well, had driven a stagecoach as a teenager - but all of those had entered something like their modern form during or in the immediate aftermath of WWII, and to me it seemed like there had been progress, but not systemic change, in all the time since. It helped that all the adults around me largely saw WWII as the defining event of modern history. There was "before the War" and there was "now" (which came after the war).
Partly that was result of being born at the right time - the space program was in full swing, computers were a staple of fiction and large business but no more, the counterculture had come and gone, etc. The world really seemed like a timeless place to me as a child, and then about the time I reached adulthood, the Cold War ended, and the Internet Era arrived, and the world changed (and continued to change).
Because it was in many ways, the same as a generation before that and one before that.
40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved millions of lives since then.
All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized
It sounds callous to dismiss any improvement to medicine as trivial, but frankly I grew up under the assumption that humanity would cure diabetes, cancer, blindness, deafness and perhaps death itself by the end of the millennium.
It's much more noteworthy to me how little medicine has changed than how much.
I was talking with a historian of medicine who surprised me with the observation that the age of cures was past, and that we lived in the age of management. Antibiotics gave us cures, and vaccines eradicated diseases, but those advances had their limits: there is no penicillin for viruses or cancer. Advances since the mid-twentieth century have been more about managing conditions, which is much more profitable. Cure syphilis, and the patient goes away happy; treat AIDS, and the patient will keep buying more treatments as long as he lives.
> Antibiotics gave us cures, and vaccines eradicated diseases, but those advances had their limits: there is no penicillin for viruses or cancer.
We are actually working on vaccines for viruses and for cancer.
>treat AIDS, and the patient will keep buying more treatments as long as he lives.
This is oft-repeated but it doesn’t pass the smell test. All it takes is a single principled academic to blow the whistle if there was any active suppression of cures or even research on cures.
In order for that quip to hold water, literally everyone involved in medical research would have to be a corrupt monster maintaining a worldwide conspiracy to keep sick people coming back for more treatments.
There's no conspiracy to suppress cures, but research funding is more attainable the larger the eventual profit.
I guess I grew up in 'then', and that sort of 'assumption' is so depressing. But I get that some people only want to see medicine, and by extension science, as black-and-white.
"We haven't cured diabetes" (only made massive strides in control and management and came up with whole new classes of drugs that attack root causes). "We haven't cured cancer" (except the ones we have cured, the ones we came up with vaccines to prevent (HPV), and came up with all sorts of innovative and less unpleasant treatments extending lifespan with less side effects), "Haven't cured blindness or deafness" (except for the types we have cured).
And haven't cured death...well, I guess you got us there.
But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.
I agree with you that we’ve made progress. To me, the most impressive achievement has been nearly curing cystic fibrosis and our array of tools for dealing with HIV. And yet I think it’s important to be honest. The age-adjusted diabetes mortality rate per 100k has been pretty much flat for thirty years. Life expectancy growth has been meager and the US has fallen far behind Europe. Overall health/physical fitness/mental health seems to be on a steep decline. 90s and 2000s optimists had high hopes for the world. They would have good reason to be horrified at things today.
If we’re lagging behind Europe, that doesn’t seem to be an issue of progress, right? If they are ahead, then the tech must be here ready. And we’re a bit richer than them, so we could presumably afford to implement whatever policies they are doing. Living just seems to be a higher priority over there…
Meh, it’s just a reflection of there not actually being much medical progress and lifestyle becoming the dominant tie breaker as the few breakthroughs we do have spread through the world.
“We can’t fix most damage to any organ so follow a lifestyle that minimizes it” is not a meaningful medical advance IMO.
Thanks to modern weight-loss drugs (many of them repurposed diabetic meds) lifestyle might become less important.
That reaction to my comment seems like a pavlovian response - like a response to past interactions with social media culture warriors.
It's not a sound assumption that everyone must either be "impressed by the progress of medicine within my lifetime" or "anti-science".
>But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.
Good comment until here. This is a strawman.
There is a huge gap between the vision of what medical advances might have brought us with technological breakthroughs and what has actually materialized.
Cloning and stem cell research was supposed to let me grab a new organ whenever I needed it. Instead I’m still waiting for a poor person to get in a car wreck and be declared brain dead so they can scoop out whatever is useful.
Cancer is still killing half of my family members, just different kinds after a cancer breakthrough helped them with an earlier kind. Others are hit by strokes, heart failures, and the occasional horrific Alzheimer’s.
50 years I’ve heard doctors saying “it was just their time” as an excuse for some old person dying. The field barely has a grasp on human biology and we’re barely making inroads.
At what age did you notice that? My daughter is 5 and more often than not assumes that life before her was exactly the same as she experiences. Once in a while though she’ll ask if we had iPads made of wood or something like that which is amusing.
Maybe you should get a wooden iPad case - they look amazing. ;-)
Usually when they become teenagers. Smug little know-it-alls!
I'd also recommend this book. It's sitting on my shelf - I had to hunt down a copy as I remembered reading it when I was a kid. Couldn't find a digital/kindle copy but I feel like reading the paper version works with the topic of the book, too.
Super well written and very cool to read about not just the technology side of telegraphy but the culture as well, and how it still roughly mirrors culture found when the book was written all the way up till now.
PBS did a special on how TV news came to dominance with coverage of the JFK assassination called "JFK: Breaking the News".
https://www.pbs.org/video/jfk-breaking-the-news-d7borr/
Similarly, CNN essentially became the mainstay with live coverage of the start of Desert Storm in '91.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Gulf_War
The Penny Post, introduced in England in 1840, may have been an even greater catalyst of social change. Within urban areas, communication latency was surprisingly low. Londoners got five deliveries per day.
You might also like "When Old Technologies Were New", which describes about how electricity and communication in the home changed society.
For instance, it tells the possibly apocryphal story of how the telephone allowed male suitors to call reach young women directly and thereby bypass both protective parents and long-time traditional romantic competitors. Getting a phone call was so exceptional that people had not yet built up any social defenses for it.
https://a.co/d/fnBimUx
Doesn't make a lot of sense, since the same families that would have had a servant or parent answer the door would answer the telephone the same way. It's not like young misses were carrying phones in their skirt pockets. A more widely-accepted explanation for dating is economic: young women forced into apartment living and jobs in the city as their families lost the farm and couldn't keep their adult children anymore.
- Bailey, Beth L. (1988). From Front Porch to Back Seat. Johns Hopkins University Press. - Henry, O. (1906). "The Unfinished Story". The Four Million. McClure, Phillips & Co.
That book - first published in 1998 - was one of my favorites for a while. An overt theme was the the astounding parallels between early-internet culture and the social practices of telegraph operators. At night (particularly) they'd stay "online", shooting the breeze with each other, forming long distance friendships - even romances! - and semi-anonymously socializing in ways that felt immediately and intimately familiar to those of us were on the internet around that time. I think that 'net is nearly as dead as the telegraph, so I wonder how the book lands for readers who didn't experience that milieu.
The Golden Age of Telegraph Literature - The 19th-century genre showcased technology anxieties - telegraph literature from the 19th century was surprisingly modern https://slate.com/technology/2014/11/telegraph-literature-fr...
Two other good books are
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century" by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
It’s about how if you think about distance as spacetime, that trains moved cities closer together by making the distance between them shorter. They shrink the world.
The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham
About how Soviet era projects thought they could throw pure labor at massive scale engineering problems to overcome any problem, to their detriment.
I read that book. It is indeed a wonderful history, especially for people who think digital communications are something new :-)
An interesting thing about communication systems depicted in "The Victorian Internet" is that it was an internet. Messages could be routed between postal services, telegraph, bicycle messengers, pneumatic tube systems, etc.
I would also recommend "The Information" by James Gleick. It covers all of known history so of course the scope is much broader, but there are familiar themes that accompany communication breakthroughs e.g. a train with a fleeing bank robber moves faster than the speed of our communication so we are all going to die.
Also people forget that up to the 1830s, going from Paris to Marseille was a 2 week journey (unless you were a royal courier switching horses every 40 km, who could do it in a few days), and that sending a message across the Atlantic and getting a reply a 2 month affair. In the late 1860, going from Paris to Marseille was done in about 15 hours by train; it only got gradually faster since then (nowadays, 3h30, by train or by plane).
https://amzn[.]to/4frEGyC is a referral link, and referral links are not canonical links, which the guidelines implore us to use.
The above url resolves to the following (which I have rendered safe/non-clickable by slightly mangling the url with “[.]” in place of “.”):
https://www.amazon[.]com/dp/B07JW5WQSR?bestFormat=true&k=the...
Here is a non-referral link to the same product page:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JW5WQSR
The book has its own Wikipedia page, which would have been a non-commercial option, which would lessen any potential conflict of interest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet
I love the show the Knick because it’s about the crazy medical advances during that period - it has the crazy innovation feel instead of the typical period setting - watch it if you can - Clive Owen and Steven Soderburgh
https://youtu.be/08V4RHGuGqE?si=pyXBEJ4PpR0o1M5r
The heavy use of synth in the score does a great job setting the mood.
Incredible show
The acceleration is evident in public health trends as well, especially in perinatal and childhood deaths and infectious disease.
The last 150-200 years really is remarkable historically speaking. I don't think we've grasped what to do with it completely.
I believe it'll take centuries before a new equilibrium is reached. There's likely a lot of challenges and strifes to come in this century alone.
Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day is an interesting read on this and explores the rapid changes in a far more human way than anything else I have read on the period. He renders it as the period when technology and knowledge ceased being things of the select few and become a large enough part of the average person's life, and this being what caused the real change; knowledge fundamentally changed society's relationship with the unknown and technology played a shell game with what is inconvenient. His treatment of photography and the development of film is really interesting and does an amazing job of showing what we lost as well as what we gained.
I'm reminded of how time pieces such as sundials changed societies, and how some ancients almost lost their minds due to this new development.
“The Gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish the hours---confound him, too Who in this place set up a sundial To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small pieces ! . . . I can't (even sit down to eat) unless the sun gives leave. The town's so full of these confounded dials . . .” ― Plautus
Finally someone who understands me. Whatever becomes measurable, becomes controllable, which is the antidote to freedom, wildness, life (to some extent)..
My favorite Samuel Delany story is about a woman in a village who invents writing, and teaches it to all the children. She makes a rule that you're never allowed to write down people's names, as it will inevitably lead to keeping records comparing people, and thus leading to strife...
I haven’t read that one, do you know of a collection that has it?
I believe it's in Tales of Neveryon, 'the tale of old venn.' The whole series is extremely incentive and goes on some very different directions... The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals in 'Flight from Neveryon' was also particularly mind blowing.
There's a good Ted Chiang story about how writing conflicts with a village's tradition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...
I’m ethically torn whether to upvote this
Being able to have simplicity of working on a task until it is done when society didn't have these per hour scheduling concepts. I remember hearing this referenced when learning about Amish and Native American cultures. Essentially, this is what were doing. When it is finished, we move on to next. No arbitrary start/stop time because some hand on a dial is pointing at a certain number.
Note that Plautus was a comic writer, so you have to take it with a grain of salt. I'd treat is like a Seinfeld observational humor joke -- realistic but exaggerated.
> some ancients almost lost their minds due to this new development
Platus lived 254 – 184 BC. Sundials are from 1500BC. While it's a great quote, it certainly wasn't a new invention when he wrote it.
Electric cars were invented in 1881 a full 4 years before the first internal combustion car.
Kinda interesting to ask what would have gone different if the infrastructure was in place to make electric cars 'good enough' as far as charging infrastructure.
As I understand it, the core problem back then was the batteries would mass half the car and lose a third of their maximum capacity in just 500 charging cycles.
Back when cars were new, there was no infrastructure for petrol either, that was something you got in tiny quantities from a pharmacy. (The diesel engine can run on vegetable oil, but I don't think Mr Rudolf Diesel himself ever did that?)
The batteries of the time were far less energy-dense and charged slowly. Lead-acid was the norm for EVs.
Infrastructure requires demand, and energy density and convenience of a contemporary battery versus gas engine means that no one was going to demand batteries when ICE was an option. We only figured the downside much later.
We figured out the effects of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere not a decade after the first working car prototype was build: https://www.rsc.org/images/arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf
False equivalence to the white courtesy phone...
Being invented doesn't mean that they became commonly used. Many ancient inventions took thousands of years to rollout and be adopted by the vast majority of humans.
Perhaps, but the quote also doesn't read to me like someone ranting about a new invention, just one that he wished had never been invented. Just like I might find myself occasionally cursing whoever invented the idea of an office building, even though it predates me.
Sure, but is there anything in that quote that suggests it's a reaction to new technology rather than just a rumination on existing technology?
Yep, they definitely could have bought it from Amazon.
I don’t really get what this comment is suggesting. It is seemingly sarcastic, because obviously Amazon didn’t exist at the time. But Amazon didn’t invent the concept of long distance trade…
The Mediterranean was a tightly connected civilizational region, so if a certain invention was in use anywhere, it would spread at the speed of a sailing ship to the rest of the coast.
Already prior to the rise of the Roman Empire, there was a massive network of Phoenician and Greek colonies that would trade with one another constantly, from Cadiz to the Levant. The sea was a highway to them.
Amazon did not exist, but cunning merchants absolutely did, and they knew how to make money by selling attractive goods.
Using a vertical stick to track the sun's position goes back much, much further.
I do believe that time keeping, computers, and other technology are overused and overly relied on. (There is also damaging other stuff due to these technology, which is another issue. There are other issues too; these are clearly not the only thing.) They have their uses, but should not be excessive at the expense of anything else. If they fail, then you won't do unless you know and have not destroyed the older possibility, and if they do not fail, then you may be trapped by them. You should not need to know what time it is to sit down to eat, or to wake up and to sleep, etc.
Anyone interested in a fictional take on this period could consider Pynchon's "Against the Day", although it is no light challenge. It takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the years following WW1 and, appropriately, tells a sprawling, disorienting story that feels overwhelming at times.
> “Automobilism is an illness, a mental illness. This illness has a pretty name: speed... [Man] can no longer stand still, he shivers, his nerves tense like springs, impatient to get going once he has arrived somewhere because it is not somewhere else, somewhere else, always somewhere else.”
Previously:
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
-- Blaise Pascal (~1650)
Pascal’s quote rings differently today.
I'm curious how. We have a lot more potential distractions now, but the same inability to just be.
Some would say we should log off and take a walk outside. Meet some people in real life.
Loneliness
For some good writing on boredom, check out Joseph Brodsky’s In Praise of Boredom - a short speech from 1989.
If I remember correctly, the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics; which, I guess, was kind of a big deal, back then.
They manufactured bicycles, then the apex of precision mass produced products, and they also had a quite scientific approach to the design of their aircraft, with wind tunnels, for example.
They were also the first to understand that steering the airplane was best done by warping the airfoils. Now we do it with rudders and elevators and flaps, then they did the whole surface.
Surely that would've been watches, not bicycles.
They were also the first to devise a mathematical propeller theory that enabled them to have 90% efficient propellers. The flat propellers used by others were only 50% efficient.
Nice! I never realized that they were working in the "hi tech" of the time.
Their accomplishments make more sense to me now!
They are sadly underestimated as technologists.
The wing warping patent applied to flaps too, as Curtis found after a long legal battle.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
I remember reading Theodore Roosevelt's biography by Edmund Morris and being shocked how he was basically able to text everyone he needed to be in contact with while president through the telegraph system.
Lincoln started that I believe during the civil war. https://www.history.com/articles/abraham-lincoln-telegraph-c...
If you think america moved too fast in the beginning of the century, try Russian Empire. Not only the same technological marvels as everywhere in the west, but also three revolutions and several wars. Change of government from monarchy to parlamentarism to socialism. Also, countless posts, painters and new genres of art.
If you know Russian, Dusk Of The Empire podcast is pretty cool.
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCL7ox52jCNuMcckQSc0o5HQ#botto...
I thought this bit was fascinating:
> Blom begins with Stravinsky, whose famous orchestral work The Rite of Spring was inspired by ancient Russian dance rituals. A melange of old folk music and arresting dissonance, the piece’s first performance in Paris 1913 triggered one of the most infamously violent reactions of any concert-hall audience in history. As Blom puts it bluntly, “all hell broke loose”:
> “During the first two minutes the public remained quiet,' Monteux [a musician] later recalled, “then there were boos and hissing from the upper circle, soon after from the stalls. People sitting next to one another began to hit one another on the head with fists and walking sticks, or whatever else they had to hand. Soon, their anger was turned against the dancers and especially against the orchestra... Everything to hand was thrown at them, but we continued playing. The chaos was complete when members of the audience turned on one another, on anyone supporting the other side. A heavily bejewelled lady was seen slapping her neighbour before storming off, while another one spat in her detractor's face. Fights broke out everywhere and challenges to duels were issued.”
There’s something about the image of a concert hall full of rich, fancy people erupting in a melee that is just delightful
The excellent book, “Rites Of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age”—which uses this infamous incident as a jumping-off point from which to explore Modernity as an incipient artistic and social phenomenon that accelerates during the interwar period—concludes that this account of the crowd’s reaction was, at the very least, highly embellished, and not dissimilar to tall tales about crowds fleeing from the Lumière brothers’ image of a train bearing down upon them. But since these stories are contemporary to the events, they do nevertheless tell us something important about the spirit of the age.
Two months earlier there had been the so-called Skandalkonzert in Vienna, conducted by Arnold Schoenberg: "...it was during Berg's songs that the fighting began. At the trial, Straus commented that the thud of Buschbeck's punch had been the most harmonious sound at the entire concert. For Berg's work the Skandalkonzert had lasting consequences: the songs were not performed again until 1952, and the full score did not appear in print until 1966."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skandalkonzert
The main reason for the commotion during the Paris premiere seems to be the publicity which whipped up the audience on both sides and made a clash inevitable. The Russian ballet had been playing the snobbery of the Paris audience for Stravinsky's two previous ballets, but misjudged the response in the third.
The subsequent performances, the London premiere, and the Paris concert premiere in 1914 all went off without a hitch. And the status of the Rite has only steadily increased ever since.
As Taruskin says, the music of the Rite is actually not very difficult to appreciate[1]:
> While it was at first a sore test for orchestra and conductor, and while it took fully half a century before music analysts caught up with it, The Rite has never been a difficult piece for the audience.
> The sounds of the music make a direct and compelling appeal to the listener’s imagination, and the listener’s body. In conjunction with Stravinsky’s peerless handling of the immense orchestra they have a visceral, cathartic impact. They leave—and to judge from the history of the score’s reception, have always left—most listeners feeling exhilarated. It is only the mythology of The Rite that would suggest anything else.
[1] https://avant.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/Richard-Taruskin-Res...
If this is your cup of tea, it's worth reading about the Astor Place riots over Shakespeare performances in NYC
I was about to comment on this, Astor Place Riot - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astor_Place_Riot
Basically two seperate Theatre movements, one favored by the posh thr other favored by the working class. The two scenes came to an actual riot on Astor Place and lead to the wealthy retreating from class mixing.
I most certainly will, thank you for the suggestion!
> concert hall full of rich, fancy people
Not to harsh your schadenfreude buzz, but this is not the right image. Classical music was mass culture at the time.
Opera, in particular, was popular with all classes. (There's a delightful sequence in, I think?, "The Leopard" of brick-layers coming to blows over the merits of one singer versus another.) Recordings of famous singers were the first "hit" gramaphone records. Enrico Caruso sold out concerts all over the world - and (in legend, at least) sometimes gave impromptu balcony concerts to disappointed punters gathered in the street below.
You know, I just listened to it [1] and I can see why there was such a strong visceral reaction to the piece! "Dissonant" is definitely the right description. It's almost painful to listen to, especially if you were expecting normal concert music. Is it enough to cause a riot? Maybe!
1) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EkwqPJZe8ms
I can't imagine what it would have been like to grow up with horse and carriages only to see us landing on the moon before you die. That's some serious societal whiplash.
I do like to imagine future generations looking back on the era of the internal combustion engines with absolute horror.
"You won't believe this, but for like 200 years, any time a person wanted a machine to move stuff, those apes would carry around tens of gallons of some crazy toxic combustible fluid which they'd spray into a heavy block of metal then bung 20,000 volts of electricity through it to make it explode. Just to spin a wheel! Then they'd pump the poisonous fumes out from the rear of the machine like a cloud of evil flatulence. Into the same air they breathed! There were literally billions of these machines all over the planet. Everyone owned one! There was so much of it, the planet started getting hotter! It was crazy!!"
I'm envy of people of the past having real freedom in their lives. I wouldn't be surprised that future generation would envy of us, who have the freedom to move fast anywhere.
Tech changed at a much faster and drastic pace then compared to now. Another example the first ever nightclub opened and ran from the early 1870s until 1910. The Haymarket Historical Marker https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=121028
That will pale in comparison to how future generations view plastics.
Imagine if we ate and drank out of lead paint containers constantly for decades before discovering their health impacts. That's basically what has happened with plastics.
Plastic isn’t remotely as toxic as lead
Lead was used as a sweetener in food for hundreds of years
And pewter cups and plates for thousands
Indeed.
Here's one for you: There's a 10–15% chance, even barring radical life extension tech, that I'll live long enough to see the moon completely disassembled by von Neumann replicators.
How could you possibly come up with 10-15%?
Eyeballing a sigmoid curve for TRL development times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level
There's several things that it depends on which are TRL 1-3, but are known to be at least theoretically possible. Based on how long it takes to get other things from TRL 1 to working device, I think it's most likely to take longer than my current remaining life expectancy even to be even odds, but not by such a large margin as to be infinitesimal odds.
This seems enormously optimistic to me, both as a technological assertion and a cultural one. Like even if we could build self-assembling nano-machines (nota bene: we can't even build self assembling macroscopic machines) why would we use them to disassemble the moon? I mean a 0.1 % chance, maybe. But 10% chance? Nuts.
Culturally? Nuts, sure, but you've been following the news right? Humans are nuts.
> we can't even build self assembling macroscopic machines
TRL-1 tends to imply such statements :)
… although, is that actually true? For macroscopic, I mean? Given factories exist and robot arms are part of them, are you sure nobody has used a robot arm to assemble an identical robot arm from a pile of robot arm parts? I've not heard of anyone actually doing so, but are you sure that's never been done?
Essentially, completely sure. Also, purely energetically, disassembling the moon basically could not occur on the timescale of a few years.
Energetically, it would take 1.244e29 J to disassemble the moon: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=binding+energy+moon
This can only be done if the VN machines are able to form a useful cloud away from the moon immediately after they've disassembled the surface layer. If they aren't allowed to do that, it would take 415 millennia: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1.244e29+J+%2F+%281kW%2...
But you can make it twice as fast by getting the first layer to lift the second layer to cislunar orbit, then combine the power of both layers; then four times as fast etc. etc.
I don't know the upper limit before the main constraint is cooling.
Without getting into hairy calculations, if you really thought this was possible with a high probability, you'd accept $20 bucks and agree to give me a big payout (say $4000) in the future (say when you retire) because you think there is a large chance you'd never have to pay.
We could game this out and figure out exactly what a rational bet is, but you get my point. It seems very hard to believe you think there is a 10-15% chance. Those are probabilities at which you would be making major moves to hedge.
Dismantling the moon would disrupt the Earth's orbit, so the most likely version of this scenario is not beneficial/benign (e.g, grey goo scenario), so you need to factor in the chance that you'll be dissasembled before you see it happen to the moon.
> Dismantling the moon would disrupt the Earth's orbit
Not by itself. I basically agree with your broader point, of course, but on this particular detail, if someone's goal is to turn the moon into something like a Culture Orbital with the Earth at the centre*, the overall momentum of the system doesn't need to change.
* Or the old barycentre at the centre. This is also a terrible idea, please don't do this. Apart from anything else, mistakes are inevitable and large chunks of moon/O will rain down on us.
> Disoriented by the speed of modern times, Europeans and Americans suffered from record-high rates of anxiety and a sense that our inventions had destroyed our humanity.
Were they wrong?
If they're right, our humanity was destroyed long before any of us were born.
So... how would we know?
Maybe "destroyed" is too strong a word. I would say "suppressed" is better, at least for some people.
Spend 3 days in deep nature, or meditate etc, and you can uncover your humanity....
Yeah our lives are mostly noise, we flip between working and "chilling" with virtually no inbetween idleness anymore.
Go look at the clouds, or better the stars, for some time. But don't do it tool long because you might start wondering why the fuck you're wasting so much time and energy fulfilling other people's TODO lists
Yeah I think people might be downplaying the fact that some different choices on automobiles could have led to drastically different outcomes with respect to the health of cities, suburbs, and communities
I mean sure, people still had babies, and the babies (us) adapted to the new environment, viewing it as "inevitable"
But that doesn't mean we can't make better choices around governance and technology going forward, or that we're not making bad choices right now
I would never wish to live like the average human 100 years+ ago. Most people lived in squalor, died easily, toiled their entire lives.
We live in absolute luxury and comfort today compared to pretty much any point in history.
It gets very tiresome hearing people complain about how hard they have it these days, which is just factually untrue. What I actually think the problem is, is apathy. People are looking to blame anything else for how they feel in life, rather than take ownership.
I see so many times people complaining about how fast modern life is, and yet they have a very real choice to go and live mostly off grid. There are communities all around the world where pro-active people have had the same thoughts and feelings, and actually had the guts to do something about it. This is all available to you right now, with the added benefit that it isn't even permanent if you don't like it (unlike 100+ years ago when there was no choice).
(waits for the downvotes)
Maybe.
Or maybe everything is cause and effect, there is no free will, and what people feel or do is completely predetermined and outside their ability to change.
Flip a coin.
Humanity had its inherent problems well before any technology was invented.
Yes but technology exacerbated them. The great wars of the 20th century killed 10s of millions of people, 10x more per year than any other conflict.
Maybe, but what about per capita? More people participating equals more people killed, but at the same time i dont think you need high technology to engage in a mass slaughter, swords work just as well.
A sword can kill one person at a time. A gun can kill 10 people at a time. A bomb can kill a hundred people. A nuclear bomb can kill thousands.
You can certainly commit mass slaughter with less technology. But then you need either a) more people to do the slaughtering, or b) more time. Technology makes it possible for a few people to slaughter many people in very little time.
Even ancient wars wiped out whole peoples. Like the Carthaginians.
We could kill the same number of people today with a single conventional air strike.
Percentage of population-wise, I presume we are killing far fewer people.
I don't presume that and I also don't see what difference it makes.
Man-made climate change is also new experience for humanity.
It started before cars. But cars have devastating effect on how we built our environment, which has negative impact on social life, health and climate change.
I’m not anxious about rapid technological change.
I care about the fact that technology is used to undermine democracy and destroy social cohesion.
Yeah but like 23 dudes can have more money than god, so this is a moral imperative.
USA had a nearly constant per person economic growth rate of 2%/year in the last ~150 years, perhaps going as far back as the beginning of industrial revolution.
Extrapolating such curves into the future suggests the current AI revolution is simply the last and latest node in a string of revolutions and it's nothing special.
If you think about it, having the world's all information at your fingertips (google), and in your pocket (iphone) might have been equally revolutionary. And before that came TV, radio, car, train, boat, plane, electricity, gas engine, steam engine etc as revolutions.
There's nothing that suggests the economic output per person is accelerating beyond the historical 2%/year. What could be reasons? Perhaps limited electricity, compute, AI model quality, computer speed etc.
So, the more analytical side of me thinks what we're experiencing is nothing extraordinary. It's just another revolution in a string of many :)
Obviously, my other, the more human side gets scared and feels afraid about the meaning of life, and humanity's place in it.
Yes, for information and reference we already had Wikipedia and billions of web pages indexed in Google, searchable by keyword. For questions we had reddit, StackOverflow and forums. For chatting we had social networks, chatting with real humans. For image we had only search, but within billions of images. Faster than gen AI, and made by humans. For code we had hundreds of thousands of repos.
We already had the genAI goodies for 2 decades. It's not going to be such a shocking change.
Statistical next-token predictors that aren’t even correct some of the time, and are currently crafted to pass tests, isn’t what I would consider revolutionary.
They’re neat tools. They help some people (a much, much smaller group of people than most think) be a bit more productive.
If LLMs are considered revolutionary, we are stagnating.
> Physicians warned that "diseases of the wheel" came by "the almost universal use of the bicycle" and that "serious evils" might befall the youth who rode without restraint. Moralists condemned women who “pedaled along gleefully, having discarded their corsets and put on more practical clothing, including trousers.”
Modern takes on gender roles feel as deeply unserious to me as this take. Whenever I hear about the tradwife trend or hear some pundit blaming the "fertility crisis" on women liberation it sounds just like these 20th century takes.
The quote about speed (of cars) at the beginning is somewhat curious.
That's because in 1910 cars were a lot slower than trains.
Ah, the French, the source of jokes from the Industral Revolution, sans Lord Verne.
As if they weren't things like horse carriages 2000 years ago. Pedants.
I did a trip a couple of years ago to Lincolnshire to look up where various ancestors had come from in the late 1800s and was surprised to find that while nothing much happens there now, it was a kind of silicon valley in the 1850s with everyone raising venture capital and building large houses from the riches of the railway boom.
Based on the title I thought that the article was going to include the Mexican Revolution, which also started in 1910.
> From Abundance
Should we assume that there is a co-ordinated publicity campaign to promote this topic?
Not mentioning The Incredible Mr Toad is a miss
One example that was recently pointed out to me: the first 737 was closer in time to the wright brothers first flight than to today
I mean, did you check that?
Wright brothers:[0] 1903
"They made the first controlled, sustained flight of an engine-powered, heavier-than-air aircraft with the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903"
737-100 :[1] 1967
"the initial 737-100 made its first flight in April 1967"
1967 - 1903 = 64
2025 - 1967 = 58
So in three years your statement will be true. As of now, it is false - unless you count the start of 737 development time I guess?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737
PS: This is also "backed up by Gemini" with the google search phrase "is first 737 flight closer to first wright brother flight than now?" .... but I'd rather do the math.
Huh. I'm an idiot. For some reason I figured that in three years time the "time between wright brother first flight and 737 flight" would vary by 3 years. But no. That is a constant.
So to revise my statement, in six years your statement will be true....
My apologies.
Is there a reason so many articles are referencing the book Abundance?
There seems to be a lot of publicity promoting this topic. It seems more than just "a book", it's a whole policy direction that is being promoted, and that requires the ideas being actively seeded.
The article's author co-wrote Abundance.
A favorite book on the period is "Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914" by Frederic Morton. Freud's city was one of the centers of Europe's neuroses. It was also a center of political ferment under the lid weighted down by the Hapsburg monarchy.
Notably, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, and Tito were all there at the same time.
Sadly we seem to have lost our sense for good.
I recently finished an audiobook that describes the history of cocaine and opiate use in that era. The drugs were unregulated until addiction became an issue. I'm interested in how drugs shape our society so I appreciate books like this that fill in the missing history.
David Farber - Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed [Audiobook]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxm0hYnGezA
It was extremely widespread in Russian Empire too. To the extent that not only poets and artists used morphine and cocaine, but also some high ranking officials. One of the police chiefs, for example, was both morphinist and alcoholic.
Came for insufferable comments, left satisfied.
The last paradigm shift was radio, everything since then has been evolution and miniaturization.
I'll take "Complete lack of self-awareness combined with an overabundance of unintentionally ironic posting on HN" for $500, please!
In other news, radioactivity was embraced to the point that radium was used everywhere (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls) and shoe stores were offering x-rays.
Today, even the Internet's positive impact is wildly debated, the LLM copyright issues are wildly debated and no data exists for the long term impact of LLM usage on the reasoning faculties (if you tell me that the article was not posted to discredit LLM skeptics, I have a bridge to sell you).
And then radiation became a staple in medicine with the proliferation of radioimaging and radiosurgery. But then the Therac 25 thing and Chernobyl happened, and we're in this scare #2 era since.
It would seem to me that the public sentiment of stuff is not very trustworthy in general, especially at its typical intensity. Both when it's negative or positive. The word "multimedia" still makes me gag a little, for example.
> cultural critics of the early 1900s were confident that it was unnatural for people to move so quickly
Google says that horses can go up to 70 km/h (45mi/h). Did cars (and bicicles) go so fast then?
In the book The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the ways the eponymous Count flaunts his unfathomable wealth is by posting many horses to wait for him in advance all along the highways, allowing his carriage to travel all across France in a single night by continually changing to fresh horses. Even his wealthy rivals are astonished by this feat. So while it may have been technologically possible it would have been very expensive.
> Google says that horses can go up to 70 km/h (45mi/h).
That is the fastest speed for a Thoroughbred racehorse over a mile. It's not sustainable for long. The horse record for 100 miles is 17MPH, on a really good Arabian.[1] 6MPH is a good working pace for a horse. 8-12 MPH at the trot, which can be kept up for a hour or two by many horses in good condition.
[1] https://www.chronofhorse.com/article/world-endurance-record-...
There is a long distance man vs horse race, which is sometimes won by horse, and sometimes by man.
According to this [0] thread, typical car travel speeds were between 10 and 20 mph. They even mention specifics like:
> in 1904 in NYC the limit was set to 12 mph inside of the city and 15 mph outside of it.
With that 12 mph figure being a little under the average running speed of the record holder marathon runner (26.2 miles in 2 hours flat, so 13.1 mph).
Now of course, most people are not record holding athletes, so sustaining these speeds on foot is not really happening for most. But you can definitely at least keep up for the duration of a sprint. So no real need for a horse even, your own legs can make do, despite these speeds being supposedly unnatural.
You can also sustain these speeds with a bicycle today, not sure about the bicycles of then.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Writeresearch/comments/hmy0h4/what_...
That's basically a full out sprint for a relatively fast horse. Most can't sustain that for long and definitely not with a lot of load. Steam, gas, and diesel engines were and are capable of sustaining that for long durations with greater load, hence why it seems so jarring. Especially for large loads, even the earliest trucks were probably moving must faster than draft horses.
More to the point (horses obviously can't do that for very long), trains were doing ~130km/h by the middle of the 19th century.
No one said it was a rational objection.
Thankfully nothing horrible happened in the next 10 years or so
Yeah.
Anyone with even a vague awareness of history is aware of the historical parallels.
Let's hope saner heads will prevail in these times of rapid change.
Can be break the systems that keep leading us to the next such war. For example the lack of true representation for the people. The seige of governments by the rich and "elite". Stupid decisions made by people who kill their kids for a buck (referencing climate change). Dismantling of international conventions that were the result of people from a harder time saying "hold on... this is too fucked".
Trend for leaders took different turn than 'saner heads'.
No doubt exacerbated by, and in turn promoting, neuroasthenia