number 9… number 9… number 9…
Back to rooting around abandoned train yards and dumpsters for porn… oh, the indignity.
After completing over a dozen (and taking in many of the film adaptations) the following occurred to me: Not one of these acclaimed futuristic stories—at least none of the many I was exposed to—took place in a world with any version of the Internet. All instances of published media, daily communication, romance—all offline.
I submit The Machine Stops, a scathing indictment of modern life, from one hundred and seven years ago.
…Come to think of it, Mr. Forster didn’t quite catch on to the pervasiveness of driving trollies – not unlike how all those who forecast the rise of the horseless carriage did not anticipate traffic jams.
Far more fun and interesting to imagine would be the sudden arrival of the internet.
Imagine all today’s corporate networks, home computers, OS’s, network-connected devices and whatnot - having NOT learned from the last 25 years of internet hacking and viruses and security and privacy issues.
And then the world discovers the usefulness of the internet and everyone connects.
As someone who does online sales I can attest to how impatient people have become since the internet era took off. It used to be “please wait 6 to 8 weeks for delivery” now people are ordering things in the middle of the night on a weekend, then asking 10 hours later “why doesn’t the tracking number work? I think it’s lost in the mail!” (when the package hasn’t even been picked up by the postman yet.)
I ordered a new (radio) scanner on the afternoon of December 23rd, from another province. I figured I’d be lucky if it appeared before New Years.
It was on my desk when I got to work on the 24th.
I actually find this rather disturbing.
Wow. Talk about first world problems.
There’s no need to imagine a world without Internet. The vast majority of humanity lives in a world without Internet. Without electricity too, by the way. And water that is safe for drinking.
How much of a privileged asshole you must be to get all wishy-washy about something like that? C’mon…
Even dumber, a large portion of the first world grew up without the internet, and a decent portion of people in our own backyard still don’t have it.
Also, the large segment of the population whose life doesn’t revolve around the internet.
why not “remembers” ? This isn’t speculative fiction here, this is historical…if 25 years ago can be called “historical”
A world without Shingy.
IKR? Maybe dude is super young, sure I could just find out immediately, but…meh, I’ll take a page from my younger self and decide I don’t need to know enough to find it out.
All the “wouldn’t” etc are “didn’t” etc, and read that way it loses all it’s sensationalism for anyone. I wasn’t consistently online until 97? and didn’t count myself as “on” the internet until my first hi-speed connection, a dsl line in 2000. But my 25+ years without connectivity beyond telephones self would probably appreciate the advancements without reserve yet remain fundamentally the same. We did see some aspects coming after all. I know my reaction to some of the best video games I play in this century is “Finally, they’ve gotten to what I imagined it should be as a boy”.
And the anticipation of waiting for things is reduced, but the anticipation of waiting for events largely remains. The events of our lives hugely outweigh the impact of the things, which are largely supplemental to experience and not the experience.
There are many who may not realize this, like the classic 14 yr old who complains dramatically about getting the wrong device as a gift, but I think most people either are not like that or grow out of that. Most people still mark the passage of time by milestones that are not dependent on Amazon in any way.
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