The best antidote to fear of the new is looking back at fear of the old
October 29, 2017 8:36 AM Subscribe
Pessimists Archive is an annotated podcast examining historical examples of technophobia, alarmism, protectionism, and puritanism. For example: the Walkman, recorded music, horseless carriages, umbrellas, bicycles, and chess.
Yeah, in all rationality, horseless carriages *are* fucking scary - they kill people, destroy our planet, and have made the design of our cities and our lives a lot worse.
posted by splitpeasoup at 9:19 AM on October 29, 2017 [20 favorites]
posted by splitpeasoup at 9:19 AM on October 29, 2017 [20 favorites]
What if he's right and indeed every generation is worse than the one before it, and every bit of new technology makes us less happy and screws up our lives?
I badly broke my femur in high school in the 80s, an injury that was probably fatal 50 years or more earlier. Modern xray and surgery techniques meant I went on to live a normal life.
You say tomato....
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 9:26 AM on October 29, 2017 [6 favorites]
I badly broke my femur in high school in the 80s, an injury that was probably fatal 50 years or more earlier. Modern xray and surgery techniques meant I went on to live a normal life.
You say tomato....
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 9:26 AM on October 29, 2017 [6 favorites]
Socrates said “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” What if he's right and indeed every generation is worse than the one before it
Firstly, I'm not sure Socrates did say this. I'm not aware of a Classical, or even reputable modern, source that actually makes such an attribution. But perhaps more importantly, Socrates lived in a slave holding society that denied basic civil rights to women. Why should we think that people have got worse since that shitshow? And anyway, given that Plato claims that Socrates said it is impossible to learn anything from written sources, and that writing is dangerous because it makes people intellectually lazy, I tend towards the view that, when it comes to evaluating societal progress, they are 'both'* full of shit.
*scare quotes to reflect the fact that Plato used Socrates, like a wrinkly old glove puppet, to argue whatever point Plato felt like arguing.
posted by howfar at 9:49 AM on October 29, 2017 [12 favorites]
Firstly, I'm not sure Socrates did say this. I'm not aware of a Classical, or even reputable modern, source that actually makes such an attribution. But perhaps more importantly, Socrates lived in a slave holding society that denied basic civil rights to women. Why should we think that people have got worse since that shitshow? And anyway, given that Plato claims that Socrates said it is impossible to learn anything from written sources, and that writing is dangerous because it makes people intellectually lazy, I tend towards the view that, when it comes to evaluating societal progress, they are 'both'* full of shit.
*scare quotes to reflect the fact that Plato used Socrates, like a wrinkly old glove puppet, to argue whatever point Plato felt like arguing.
posted by howfar at 9:49 AM on October 29, 2017 [12 favorites]
Yeah, in all rationality, horseless carriages *are* fucking scary - they kill people, destroy our planet, and have made the design of our cities and our lives a lot worse.
If you think the horseless carriage is scary, you should have seen them when they still had horses.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:56 AM on October 29, 2017 [6 favorites]
If you think the horseless carriage is scary, you should have seen them when they still had horses.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:56 AM on October 29, 2017 [6 favorites]
You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.
to be fair, this precisely describes my relationship with my smartphone
(less snarky: in the context of the whole of the phaedrus, i don't think plato-via-socrates is necessarily arguing that writing is 'dangerous' so much as... problematic.)
posted by halation at 10:13 AM on October 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
to be fair, this precisely describes my relationship with my smartphone
(less snarky: in the context of the whole of the phaedrus, i don't think plato-via-socrates is necessarily arguing that writing is 'dangerous' so much as... problematic.)
posted by halation at 10:13 AM on October 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
Yeah, in all rationality, horseless carriages *are* fucking scary - they kill people, destroy our planet, and have made the design of our cities and our lives a lot worse.
It's a global problem, and it's also a great way to control the movement of people and democracy. Can't afford a car? No public transportation? TFB. Stay in your poor neighborhood and suffer.
posted by Beholder at 10:48 AM on October 29, 2017 [2 favorites]
It's a global problem, and it's also a great way to control the movement of people and democracy. Can't afford a car? No public transportation? TFB. Stay in your poor neighborhood and suffer.
posted by Beholder at 10:48 AM on October 29, 2017 [2 favorites]
They should do thalidomide or asbestos next. Maybe the Juicero, Microsoft BOB, lead paint, Google Glass or psychic hotlines.
posted by ernielundquist at 10:57 AM on October 29, 2017 [5 favorites]
posted by ernielundquist at 10:57 AM on October 29, 2017 [5 favorites]
Kudos to a podcast about the Walkman wherein they always used the correct, irregular plural instead of the incorrect "s" form (which I used to hear often and even saw on signs, in the audio section - a term as repugnant to me as orientate). Anyway, the show's really about wearing headphones in public, which was first surfacing a decade earlier - I knew guys who'd install ¼" headphone jacks in their dash for maximum stereophonic enjoyment during long drives, wearing their over-the-ear Koss headphones but that could get you in trouble with The Man 'cause it was a ticketable offense, even then, and rightly so. Usually when they say "wearing a Walkman" the thing that's being worn is a pair of the new, lightweight ⅛" jack on-ear headphones, which usually came with a Walkman. These earphones have their own issue of sound leakage. You could listen to your transistor radio through its little mono ear-bud headphone even in the 1960s, but stereo earbuds didn't become common until the iPod.
Great show, BTW.
posted by Rash at 11:23 AM on October 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
Great show, BTW.
posted by Rash at 11:23 AM on October 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
No use being a pessimist; it won’t work anyway.
posted by chavenet at 11:39 AM on October 29, 2017 [6 favorites]
posted by chavenet at 11:39 AM on October 29, 2017 [6 favorites]
I'm amazed at the prescience of some of the early criticisms of cars, even if this show tries to make them seem laughable by reading them in funny accents. Ilya Ehrenburg's concern with how people were already calling car crashes "accidents" in the 1920s and steadily becoming indifferent to the regularity with which people were killed by them really strikes me.
posted by a certain Sysoi Pafnut'evich at 1:07 PM on October 29, 2017 [9 favorites]
posted by a certain Sysoi Pafnut'evich at 1:07 PM on October 29, 2017 [9 favorites]
They should do thalidomide or asbestos next. Maybe the Juicero, Microsoft BOB, lead paint, Google Glass or psychic hotlines.
Zeppelins, Prohibition, flying cars, DDT, CueCat, Fascism, Ferdinand de Lesseps’ Panama Canal, and the Designated Hitter Rule.
...and obviously Favorites.
posted by leotrotsky at 2:13 PM on October 29, 2017 [3 favorites]
Zeppelins, Prohibition, flying cars, DDT, CueCat, Fascism, Ferdinand de Lesseps’ Panama Canal, and the Designated Hitter Rule.
...and obviously Favorites.
posted by leotrotsky at 2:13 PM on October 29, 2017 [3 favorites]
There's a kernel of a good idea in this, but the framing makes it annoyingly bad for me. The whole "Progress: You're for it or against it!" premise, the goofy cartoon voices he's using to mock people he disagrees with, while he reads other contemporaneous quotes straight. It's just silly.
It could be an interesting topic without the smug, poorly supported conclusion.
Zeppelins, Prohibition, flying cars, DDT, CueCat, Fascism, Ferdinand de Lesseps’ Panama Canal, and the Designated Hitter Rule.
Oh, you're just being a crank now. Maybe an icepick lobotomy would cure your hysteria.
PS I have a CueCat and I didn't tear the sticker with the shrinkwrap license, so I can legally do whatever I want with it. Any day now, I'll figure out what that is.
posted by ernielundquist at 2:48 PM on October 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
It could be an interesting topic without the smug, poorly supported conclusion.
Zeppelins, Prohibition, flying cars, DDT, CueCat, Fascism, Ferdinand de Lesseps’ Panama Canal, and the Designated Hitter Rule.
Oh, you're just being a crank now. Maybe an icepick lobotomy would cure your hysteria.
PS I have a CueCat and I didn't tear the sticker with the shrinkwrap license, so I can legally do whatever I want with it. Any day now, I'll figure out what that is.
posted by ernielundquist at 2:48 PM on October 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
Yeah, in all rationality, horseless carriages *are* fucking scary - they kill people, destroy our planet, and have made the design of our cities and our lives a lot worse.
They said over a plate of Guatemalan avocado toast and Colombian coffee, on a phone manufactured and built in Asia - which all appeared by magic and were in no way whatsoever transported to a flat in Downtown Manhattan by automobiles of any type or shape.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 3:03 PM on October 29, 2017 [2 favorites]
They said over a plate of Guatemalan avocado toast and Colombian coffee, on a phone manufactured and built in Asia - which all appeared by magic and were in no way whatsoever transported to a flat in Downtown Manhattan by automobiles of any type or shape.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 3:03 PM on October 29, 2017 [2 favorites]
it's true, coffee was not available in america until ford invented the model t
posted by entropicamericana at 4:45 PM on October 29, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by entropicamericana at 4:45 PM on October 29, 2017 [4 favorites]
I quite enjoy this podcast! It helps me feel a sense of perspective and connection to history. As someone who recently begun biking, I found it interesting that bicyclists have been hated for hundreds of years. And I learned about bicycle face
posted by rebent at 7:06 PM on October 29, 2017
posted by rebent at 7:06 PM on October 29, 2017
They said over a plate of Guatemalan avocado toast and Colombian coffee, on a phone manufactured and built in Asia - which all appeared by magic and were in no way whatsoever transported to a flat in Downtown Manhattan by automobiles of any type or shape.
Strip the arch sarcasm from this comment (and mop up the excess dripping on the floor) and it's basically "The way any thing is currently done is the only way it could ever be done."
Kind of a weird statement on which to hang a sense of superiority...
posted by Mike Smith at 8:57 PM on October 29, 2017 [5 favorites]
Strip the arch sarcasm from this comment (and mop up the excess dripping on the floor) and it's basically "The way any thing is currently done is the only way it could ever be done."
Kind of a weird statement on which to hang a sense of superiority...
posted by Mike Smith at 8:57 PM on October 29, 2017 [5 favorites]
>You could listen to your transistor radio through its little mono ear-bud headphone even in the 1960s, but stereo earbuds didn't become common until the iPod.
Wut? Tell that to my late 1980s knock-off tape players and 1990s discman. The Ipods earbud innovation was that they were white.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/7/1/5861062/sony-walkman-at-35
posted by bystander at 6:49 PM on October 31, 2017 [3 favorites]
Wut? Tell that to my late 1980s knock-off tape players and 1990s discman. The Ipods earbud innovation was that they were white.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/7/1/5861062/sony-walkman-at-35
posted by bystander at 6:49 PM on October 31, 2017 [3 favorites]
Yeah, I had earbuds back in high school and college, and that was .... a long time ago.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 5:24 PM on November 4, 2017
posted by [insert clever name here] at 5:24 PM on November 4, 2017
I've listened to most of them by now, and like ernielundquist says, it's entertaining but I'm occasionally put out by the attitude being slightly more dismissive than it needs to be.
Like, in the recorded music episode, he points out a lot of the resistance to it was musicians worried about how they'll make a living, and has a passing note that copyright law hadn't "caught up" yet. But what that meant was that if Sousa wrote a composition, he could collect royalties for every copy of the sheet music sold, but the disruptors of the day could record and sell a performance of that same song, and he'd get nothing. That seems like a worthwhile context.
Like, it's not like every technology has people who are unreasonably skeptical on one side and people being perfectly reasonable on the other. There's also going to be the people selling radium pills or something.
posted by RobotHero at 6:26 PM on November 9, 2017
Like, in the recorded music episode, he points out a lot of the resistance to it was musicians worried about how they'll make a living, and has a passing note that copyright law hadn't "caught up" yet. But what that meant was that if Sousa wrote a composition, he could collect royalties for every copy of the sheet music sold, but the disruptors of the day could record and sell a performance of that same song, and he'd get nothing. That seems like a worthwhile context.
Like, it's not like every technology has people who are unreasonably skeptical on one side and people being perfectly reasonable on the other. There's also going to be the people selling radium pills or something.
posted by RobotHero at 6:26 PM on November 9, 2017
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But it does seem they were right to worry about the automobile. 1.25 million deaths worldwide in the year 2010, and who can even quantify the ecological consequences.
I've often wondered if every panic over the new was well founded Socrates said “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” What if he's right and indeed every generation is worse than the one before it, and every bit of new technology makes us less happy and screws up our lives?
Happy Sunday!
posted by cccorlew at 9:08 AM on October 29, 2017 [8 favorites]