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To whence shall we roll back the clock?
We joke about the glory years, the years when Things Were Better, which just so happen to coincide with people's younger years. You get me to say what years I would like to roll back the clock to and live, I would probably say somewhere around the 90s-late 00s. I am an outlier, as far as I know. Virtually no one I know would like to roll back the clock to spitting distance from two thousand and fucking-eight.
Back when the most lefty thing on the internet was a girl telling people that she didn't appreciate being propositioned for sex on an elevator. Pre-tiktok, the era of old forums. The iphone still a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye. The era when Google and Microsoft weren't the undisputed emperors of your lives.
Actually, forget that. We all know there's nowhere to roll back to, we can only roll forward, embracing the aesthetics of what we imagined the past to be. I, for one, am glad that I am not eternally inundated with "WOW DAE PARENTS ARE BOOORIIINNG????" ads. You can pull my 70-lb tub of legos accumulated over more than twenty years out of my cold, dead hands, NSA. And it's probably true that in the next 30-40 years that democracy and republicanism-as-we-know it will no longer exist.
No seriously, whence come the true techno-king? Who are the contenders for the first immortal god-king of humanity. I joke in the phrasing, but it is not exactly an incorrect joke now, is it? It is very probable that we will have the first actual trillionaire human in the next thirty years. The first effectively-emperors of mankind.
The only reason companies don't do governance of humans is that they're shit at it, actually, and Democracy is surprisingly efficient over long timescales. But assume for the sake of thought experiment, that the singularity happens, and we have our first crowned god-emperor of humanity thanks to the creation of AGI. Who are our contenders?
Personally, I should expect them to:
As such, pick your top 5 most likely individuals to become humanity's first true techno-kings, and why. Do you have any you think are sleepers?
I'll hold back my top-fivers for a couple days or so.
So, I'll dodge the techno-king question and express amazement at people saying "Forward!" or that they wouldn't roll things back.
I thought it was a foregone conclusion that the early 00s were a superior time to be alive. Freezing technology at that instant would have been perfectly fine. About the only thing that's made my life demonstrably better since then is Google Maps. Let me count the ways:
... I came of age before the time period you're discussing, and ended up a bi furry in a state that had a (admittedly rarely-enforced at the time) ban on sodomy. The sexuality-related tech of the time isn't the only or top-five biggest issues of that time, but there's a sizable portion of the populace for whom it didn't work out well for.
While I'm not happy about the extent traditional retail has gone tango uniform in the last two decades, it's also a place where advances are vast. Comparing DigiKey today to the DigiKey of 2004 is a tremendous change, and the Radio Shack of 1998-2004 was nowhere near able to contain a lot of the space it missed.
I was imagining a freeze on tech as opposed to culture. Things would have continued to evolve in a broadly similar direction, I believe, albeit at a slower pace. I suspect that furry sex wouldn't be in too different of a place today.
It does seem as though the state of the art for sex toys did get quite a bit better. I've never been a big toy guy, but I respect that a lot of the materials on the ones I do have just weren't available way back when. Not to mention vastly superior battery life and power.
That's fair.
I think there's been a bigger impact than might seem at first glance even removing the places where 'tech' and 'culture' feed each other. You mention sex toys, and everything from batteries to silicone mixes to improved 3d modeling software to better vacuum pumps have helped them, but there are similar changes in digital inking and scanner technology, fursuit build and comfort stuff, and 'normie' sex stuff like condoms.
I've got complicated feelings about Discord (or even less-culturally-awkward tech like Murmur/etc) and VRChat, but as much as online dating has fucked over the straight dating world, they've done a lot of good things for the gay ones, and that's even recognizing the nuclear wasteland that is grindr-likes.
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All good points. But the earlier decades had their charms too (at least for me, as a white American male).
The 40s allowed every healthy young person to sign up and be "a hero" in the greatest war the world has ever known, which for Americans mostly meant hanging around in England or the South Pacific islands, dating the local women. Then you have lifelong bragging rights as "the greatest generation."
The 50s: ridiculously strong economy. Just walk into your local factory, shake the boss's hand, and you've got a job that lets you buy a house and support a family. "Support a family" meant being head of the household, where the wife is fully devoted to taking care of you and the kids. Or go into the cities, rent an apartment ridiculously cheaply, and live as a beatnik, making a name for yourself in all the new forms of music. Or tour the world, which was all destroyed from WW2, so your American middle-class salary made you relatively rich. Buy yourself a new car every year, because each new model year is better than the one before and you can afford it. Or become a professor, since all the universities were hiring like mad.
The 60s: Much the same, but with better music and movies. You can also move out to California and be hippy, living in a commune for practically nothing or going surfing all day. If you were organized enough to buy a house there back then, it's probably worth millions now. Or get a regular office job, wear a suit and tie, have a secretary, and be on the golf course by 4 every day. Enjoy listening to the local news tell of amazing technological progress like "man lands on the moon" while your wife cooks you dinner and your 4 children play outside. Or if you're more adventurous, go to Vietnam, experience what it's like to kill a man, then go work off the stress by banging a dozen hookers (no worries about condoms or aids).
The 70s: Even better music and movies. Any guy with a guitar can instantly become a "rock star," possibly getting rich, but at least having a good time playing local shows. Or hang out in disco clubs, dancing with the beautiful women who flocked there. Take one of them with you to the drive-in theater, in the back of your massive Cadillac. Complain about the middle east and gas prices, but ultimately it's not your problem. Cities, beaches, and international travel are still very affordable. Host a party and impress everyone with your stereo, record collection, and maybe some blow.
The 80s: Get into finance and live like a king with some basic math. Or computer programming, or hardware electronics. Hang out at the local arcade, impressing people with your mad pac-man skills, or at home on the NES. Wear a crazy colored jacket. Watch "Cocktail" and then start a cocktail bar. Enjoy the feeling of your country's supreme military dominance and victory in the cold war. Watch all the classic sci-fi movies on first release, then over and over, and talk about them with your local crew. Rock out to the coolest hard rock shows of all time. Travel to Japan and see it at the height of its bubble, but while also being an exotic foreigner.
I think what all of these decades have in common was we were rich enough to have materialistic comforts and freedom, but still doing thingt in the real world instead of being all addicted to our screens. That, and relative status is also important for human happiness. I also like the aesthetics of pre-1940s architecture, clothes, and music, but there's probably too much poverty back then for me to enjoy.
I think for me the big issue is not having the constant worry that you have to over perform to stay in place. Up until the 1980s unless you went out of your way to screw up your life, you were generally going to live decently. Maybe not great, but decently. Parents generally didn’t have to overly worry about how good their kid was at school. He’d be fine.
To be fair I was cherry-picking some of the better lives. You could definitely screw up your life in the past by, say, working at a factory that closed down, or on a farm that was no longer profitable, or getting addicted to drugs that you didn't understand the dangers of.
It was always possible to mess up. But in the past, it was a lot harder to do so and the consequences were a lot less permanent. If you fucked up school, you aren’t doomed, you have lowered standards of living, but you could still expect a modest lifestyle where living on your own is feasible with a single job. The mythical permanent record is real, and because of credentialism it’s now not even good enough to keep your nose clean, but you need to get either blue collar job training or a college degree in the right subjects.
While modern jobs have lengthier training periods, I don’t think that failure is actually that much closer than it was- that’s just blue tribe neuroticism. If you fuck up in high school, well, transferring from community college to flyover tech is still a college degree and odds are you weren’t going to Harvard anyways. Living on your own at 70’s standards(eating at home every meal, often beanie weenies, tiny house, one car and not a nice one, no vacations except maybe camping in a state park) is still pretty in reach for most people who don’t get incarcerated or use drugs. We have social problems they didn’t, but it’s possible to bounce back from all the usual fuck ups.
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Starve to death in the Bengal famine.
Welcome to state socialism, enjoy your stay.
Post 2000s-
Whew, living in the Third World almost becomes bearable thanks to the internet.
It's easy for you Americans to forget that for most of the globe, things are the best they've ever been. Even your current struggles are a minor blip in the face of near unrelenting improvements of the things, which if they were gone, you'd miss the most.
Yeah, good thing you're not Chinese either in this scenario. Not much to look back at and feel good about, for at least a century.
https://www.statista.com/chart/4216/the-worlds-most-optimistic-countries/
It's a damn shame that no Indian warlord or petty king had 1% the sheer rizz or memorability of their Chinese counterparts.
On a more serious note, India was likely better to live in than China for at least the period stretching from the 1920s to the 70s. Certainly the average person/peasant didn't suffer nearly as much from the cupidity of their leaders. But the Chinese took the brakes off the capitalism train a decade or two before us, and that compounds, leaving aside HBD and better economic management.
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I would definitely not want to have lived in India in the past! At least, not as a regular person. Being a rich person might have been sweet, though.
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We're Americans, not Canadians. We want to know what's in it for us. If the benighted third-world masses are doing better that's great, but it doesn't offset the slightest drop in US QOL.
Speak for yourself, please.
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I think anywhere from a third to over half of your countrymen would disagree, not that I particularly care. The biggest contributions of the States to the rest of us has been through diffusion of technological innovation and global trade flourishing under Pax Americana, not from charity doled out from the kindness of your hearts.
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Yeah. And beyond that the whole “tech revolution” didn’t show up dramatically in any aggregate economic stats like GDP or productivity growth. My model for what happened is basically, we used to do a bunch of tasks using a red widget. Someone invented a blue widget that does those tasks 5% better (but they’re super annoying to use). As a society we switched en masse from red to blue widgets. The way people do their tasks is now very different and so it feels like there must have been some dramatic upgrade, but in reality:
The way gdp is calculated systemstically undercounts the gains from technology. If you sell 1 black and white tiny tv in 1960 for $2000 it adds the same to the gdp as selling 10 4k OLED tvs in 2023 for $200 each but the latter are obviously orders of magnitude more valuable. If you had a device with the capabilities of a modern smart phone in 1970 it would have been worth millions of dollars. Welfare recipients in 2023 have access to all the worlds books and movies at their fingertips. Literal kings would have killed for such a privilige. We are all rich beyond our ancestors wildest dreams and gdp reflects only a small fraction of that.
Quality increases show up by reducing the price index, making real GDP higher.
And even supposing these things are systematically missed and we are in fact much better off beyond what GDP reports, they should be apparent in measures of happiness or quality of life, and they are decidedly not.
And yet, here we are, complaining that we're still not rich enough. Decades of economic growth over the 20th century didn't make Americans happy, just greedier.
And tech is making our children much more depressed
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