Originally published at: Kids in the 1960s predicting the 21st century is dark AF | Boing Boing
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Looking back at interviews that took place in the fifties and sixties, I find it interesting how women were conditioned to whisper, to modulate their voices to sound soft and inoffensive.
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The intercuts to the cosplayer reading…something? Are annoying af.
And why are we watching a channel with a Pepe the Frog icon? He’s got nice uploads of Jordan Peterson videos too i’m sure that’s something BoingBoing is really into.
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They needed Monty Python so bad.
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I was kind of shocked to see how dark and dystopian these British school childrens’ visions of the year 2000 were. But then, it was a time of intense Cold War tensions. As a kid growing up in that era, I frequent had nuclear annihilation dreams.
It would be interesting to know what the questions were. The kid at 1:40 seems to have been asked specifically about nuclear war. The others might have been fed similar dystopian-inducing questions as well. I remember having those same dreams in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a general sense of fatalism that it was bound to happen.
Pretty interesting in this video, for sure. I wonder how about the difference in this between British and USAn culture. Americans are generally regarded as loud by nature, though I know that conditioning happened in the US as well. I’m just curious about the age at which is happened.
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I think that boy says - “…at a funeral of a computer” rather than “through a computer” but that hardly reduces the overall dystopian vibe.
The children in that video were born approximately within a decade of the end of WWII and from their accents are from wealthy backgrounds. And they all seem traumatised.
I wonder if this is a function of their parent’s experience of the war and its aftermath.
Although Britain was on the winning side of the war, it would be more accurate to say it ‘survived’ the war rather than ‘won’ it. It was left impoverished, destroyed and about to lose its colonies and undergo unprecedented social change in the hands of a Labour government. And if that weren’t enough, there was no guaranteed peace after the war, only the likelihood of another, catastrophic nuclear war.
I used to work in London with people of that generation in the early 90s and even in their middle ages they struck me as still traumatised by the war.
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I do get the feeling that the cuts from a TEDx-presentation and the lack of context are by design, clickbait that our fearless Gareth bit on. Somewhere the source material is out there, probably with more crunchy bits.
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I would think that Pink and Tommy agree.
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How many of them grew up and voted for Brexit?
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it’s interesting how at one point in time the population boom and “computers/robots taking over everything” were some of the big worries, but it hasn’t worked out to be nearly as big of a problem as we feared. instead, we have unimagined problems like overuse of plastics and inevitable, rapid climate change.
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it is from sam hyde who is right wing incel 4chan type that had his show on adult swim canceled.
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what is with the cuts of sam hydes prank ted talk??
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I guess every generation has its own fears.
Like @garethb2 , I grew up with nuclear annihilation nightmares. They’ve become a lot less frequent since the '90s but I still have the odd one.
And although now I’m very concerned about climate change and species die-off and I don’t feel particularly hopeful about the future, I’ve never had a climate change nightmare.
For me, those worries are quaint compared to the existential terror of nuclear war.
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It’s not at all surprising that children growing up in the midst of a cold war with an ever present nuclear threat, raised by parents that survived WWII and the blitz are dark AF.
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So, to confirm my bias, the kids were probably taken from a video someone else shared, and then to throw off the copycat catching algorithms interspaced with whatever clutter the cutter had lying around on his hard drive.
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yeah, i grew up with the fear of nuclear war, too. it’s hard to describe how scary it was, but it’s an entirely different fear than the climate change one is, or, you know, the fear that your country is destined for a second civil war.
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I’ve seen a number of fifties-vintage American recordings where women speak the same way, and they use that “continental American” accent you see in the old black and white movies. It starts fading in the sixties and seventies, and by the eighties is pretty much gone.
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Vast pleasure domes used by the excelcites… mmhmm okay then.
Replaced the embed with one that doesn’t include Hyde cuts.
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