what fact about our current world would freak people out if it were a newspaper headline a century ago?

Phen@lemmy.eco.br to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 182 points –

Some news that would be completely mundane today but scary or shocking in the past.

194

A convicted rapist (also charged with 91 other felonies) running for president, with as much chance as winning as the other guy.

Thanks for saying this. I bet most americans dont know that a convicted rapist was their president. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/

I'm not an expert on the nuance of the US legal system, but "convicted" probably applies to the criminal system, right? What would it be in this scenario? A confirmed rapist? Just "a rapist"?

Still, the guy raped some lady and he's actively running for president. That one would be shocking any time before the mid 2010s, honestly.

They know . A huge chunk just doesn’t care.

I have family in the US (who are not trumpets afaik) and they wouldn’t know that he actually got proven guilty for doing it. They‘d probably assume he made a deal.

Isn’t it a civil trial tho and not a criminal trial? Meaning that the bar for evidence is just “more than likely” and not “beyond a reasonable doubt” right? I mean it’s still very damning but he has not (yet) been found guilty of the crime, just liable.

There is an important distinction of being "convicted" and "proven guilty" though. You can get off a conviction through multiple means, one being a mistrial and so on. I think there is no two ways about this after reading:

A judge has now clarified that this is basically a legal distinction without a real-world difference. He says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood.

Was there a criminal trial, that ended in one of these other ways?

Yeah they'd be shocked that someone rich enough to run for president could be accused of rape 'why didn't he just have the girl committed to an asylum to keep her quiet?'

So in this scenario you're back in 1923?

I'm pretty sure it'd be anything including the words "World War II".

Bonus points if it also includes a date.

You might be able to streamline the process by saying "fears of World War III" and letting them fill in the gaps themselves.

I might find that reassuring in 1923, if the world makes it a full 100 years with only one global scale war. It's a great run by historic standards.

Not really. Global Scale Wars were a unique thing back then. The Great War, the war to end all wars, was thought (hoped!) to be the only one of its kind. They had a lot of conflicts between major powers, but at least for the west, 17 million deaths excluding the spanish flu epidemic was a massive outlier.

Even the Mexican Revolution, listed on Wikipedia with an upper estimate of 3.5 million, wasn't a quarter of that, and it wasn't global. The last thing in the west that came (somewhat) close was the Napoleonic Wars with an upper estimate of 7 million, a hundred years earlier. China has had several massive death counts in various wars and rebellions, but that won't have been very present to the average western civilian.

WW1 brought with it a slew of new developments in military technology and capability for destruction. For the world to have not just one, but potentially two conflicts considered at least on par with The Great War would be very concerning.

We should start talking about World War IV then

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. World War V will be fought with crossbows, World War VI will be lasers, and World War VII will be blowguns. I don't know about World Wars VIII through XI. World War XII will use the same weapons as III, but will be fought entirely within underground tunnels. World War XIV will—Hey, come back! I have a whole list!

—Albert Einstein

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. ~ Albert Einstein

Yeah, like in that Doctor Who special where they tell the WW1 soldier "Now let's get you back to your first world war" and he goes "FIRST world war?!".

Wasn't it known as the Great War until after WW2?

And yes, I am fun at parties.

I am assuming they'd put two and two together.

On account of the number 2, and how all their male relatives have been dead for less than ten years, that stuff is probably pretty top of mind.

Few people would be surprised by it happening. They hoped it wouldn't be for many decades but it was just known as the way future wars would go.

"Man fired for criticising homosexuality", or maybe "man imprisoned for refusing to hire black person".

People are thinking about technology, but in 1923 people were very familiar with breathtaking technological change. The complete reversal of some social norms, on the other hand, would be almost existentially disturbing to these dudes who believe in the great benevolent Christian empires, and in some cases thought ending slavery was a mistake.

I have to wonder what the residents of the 1920's third world would think. I'm sure there would be many interesting perspectives.

Those type of headlines upset way too many people today. It's the point of the make America great again slogan.

I don't think you realize how far tech has advanced in 100 years. Commercial flights didn't really exist in their current form of scheduled flights between airports. Computers didn't exist beyond mechanical ones that aren't really comparable. Electricity was only in half of households in 1925. Telephone lines were only local and required manual switching by operators.

Breathtaking technology in the 1920s has nothing on what we can do today.

I mean yeah but the point is that technological advancement was still a common occurance. Like, yeah a sensationalized article about self driving cars would blow some minds but to most i think it wouldn't really make any bigger waves then basic cars already were at the time. How can they be blown away by the concept of self driving when the vehicle itself is so new and interesting you know? AI is so abstract that even today most people don't understand it, 100 years ago it'd just be "another new thing" just like it is today.. We are actually less accustomed to ground shaking new inventions so I'd argue that 100 years ago a lot of our modern tech would be less exciting given the regularity in which things were changing then.

Social upheaval however is ALWAYS a huge deal, especially for the time. Bear in mind that Progressivism is a fairly new ideology in the States. For literally hundreds of years social change came at a snails pace and took serious, concerted effort. Nowadays we are on average much more open to change and accepting of diversity in all it's forms, but there's a reason everyone remembers the name Martin Luther King Jr., versus.... Ruth Bader Ginsburg I guess?

"XXI-century people carry in their pockets a machine that lets then see what's happenning on the other side of the planet as it happens, check the biggest encyclopedia there is without having the go to a library, talk live to people anywhere in the World and which can calculate the most complex mathematical problems in a fraction of a second".

It's not technological change that would be unimaginable but rather what ended up being done with it as, at least judging by SciFi films over the years, people tend to look at what they have and more or less lineraly project forward.

I mean, look what what Metropolis expected the future would be or even the 1970s film and TV-series idea of the kind of materials, design and human machine interfaces the future would have (it's kinda funny to look at the CRT-display-based "future" tech of 70s TV series).

Mind you, socially mankind doesn't seem to have evolved much in these 100 years, but in terms of Tech and the possibilities openned by it, it has.

It's a pattern that emerges over and over again. Technology is reasonably easy to predict (we're still using 1920s physics after all) but the way people will react to and interact with technology is completely impossible to see coming. Like, our guesses are about as good as random chance; that's why nobody saw PCs and smartphones coming and then turned around and poured a lot of money into 3D TVs and wearables.

I don't think it would be impossible to model somehow, but I've yet to see any convincing work in that direction.

It's an interesting one, the Tom Swift series from around 1910 has him in rocket ships using wireless photo telephones, electric rifles, and all sorts of sci-fi before world war one - it doesn't have many female characters, certainly no gay characters.

There is a suffragette character arguing for the right to vote in the 1910 novel, a right women wouldn't gain for another ten years in the USA - so a hundred years ago they were in an era where the start of social change is beginning but to what extent people would expect that to continue is hard to say.

Metropolis is an interesting example too because they did have more advanced AI than we currently have - the maschinenmench Maria; an often submissive, vulnerable, emotional, manipulative, motherly and generally very stereotypically (for the time) feminine character.

I think people in the 1920s expected in the next century technology to advance a hundred miles and social issues to change maybe an inch. I can think of sci-fi from that era with black characters but none with an expectation of civil rights for those black characters.

Yeah, but electrification, cars, antibiotics, many forms of sanitation, many forms of canning, radio, telephones of any kind, several forms of weapon and powered aircraft in general were new within living memory in the 20s. "It gets (much) better and more accessible" wouldn't have surprised anyone. If we were going back 200 years you might have a point, and definitely would at 300.

Actually, they didn't understand how radio crystals (which are very rudimentary semiconductor diodes) worked at the time, but pretty much every other principle of physics used in modern technology was understood at that point. They just needed to finish quantum mechanics, and then figure out a few steps of application.

That Germany is Europes biggest economy. 100 years ago Europe was fresh out of WW1 and Germany was bankrupted as punishment.

100 years ago today, a loaf of bread cost one billion Deutsche Marks.

And by billion they meant twelve zeroes.

How pervasive surveillance and tracking of people (and their data) is in todays society. We've become accustomed to it but I'd bet people a century ago would be shocked at the idea of stuff like regular people being filmed from multiple angles when just going to the shops, having a device in their pocket constantly recording their location, receiving targeted advertising based on what information they've looked at previously, etc.

It wasn't really that strange, people got tailed all the time during the nuclear weapons program and after, to make sure that they weren't gay. Shit was wild in the early 50s. A senator committed suicide because his son was outed as gay, getting dirt on people was hardcore. People got fired on the flimsiest of claims.

Physical surveillance was pretty bad, even then. Digital surveillance has gotten worse today, but it's much more fragmented and not so...eerily similar to the CCP. Also, fuck McCarthy. The book on this timeframe is a wild read, highly recommend it as it explains the postwar era and cold War paranoia.

https://www.amazon.com/Lavender-Scare-Persecution-Lesbians-Government/dp/0226401901

At risk of being a broken record, a reminder that OG fascism was cool and on the rise at that point. The surprise would be that you can opt out of all that stuff, people will just think you're weird.

Most international experts consider the outbreak of a third world war unlikely in spite of global surges of violence

Not mundane, but the implications would be horrifying to 1923 society still recovering from "The Great War".

And funny enough, still misleading about how soon the next one is. Nukes really changed the game (for better or worse) and they don't have them yet.

Quite a few people would be probably surprised that colonial empires are no more

as for headlines: British PM Rishi Sunak negotiates Scottish independence with First Minister of Scotland Humza Yousaf

The only known sentence that is fatal to white british men circa 1900.

Neocolonialism is alive and well though. Today we have more slaves making more products, than ever before !

Climate change, same sex marriage (though, perhaps not as shocking as some might expect, ditto anything trans related), potential mars colonization, coming off the heels of the Spanish flu, COVID news would probably freak em out. Ooh, the USSR being gone, and China being a world super power. The USSR would have been new to them, and it collapsing less than a century later would probably feel quite odd, especially if you could make them understand just how incredibly advanced the USSR got in such a short amount of time. Tons of stuff.

In the 1920s a state fresh off a recent regime change disappearing would have been extremely par for the course. You telling that to someone from the 1960s would probably have more of an effect.

I mean, if you showed them a map it'd look nothing like their current political divide. I'm not sure they'd be more shocked by the state of what then was Soviet Russia than by Czechoslovakia being broken up or the other half a dozen changes in Europe alone.

I’m Czech, and exactly 105 years ago (October 30, 1918) the approximately dozen nationally aware Slovaks met in an inn and wrote a letter to Prague that they agree to be part of Czechoslovakia as the “Czechoslovak nation” because they knew they couldn't form a state on their own, and split off the hated Hungary. The 4 people who signed our “Declaration of Independence” 2 days prior needed someone to represent Slovakia so they went in the streets searching for a Slovak. Vavro Šrobár, a nationally Slovak lawyer who incidentally just arrived to Prague, came forth and signes the document, and became Minister of Slovakia a few weeks later.

The Republic helped Slovakia reach its industrial potential and gave its people democratic values (except for WWII, we don't talk about Slovakia in WWII). Eventually, Slovak politicians wanted power so they broke off after true democracy was restored in 1989. The Velvet Divorce was so uneventful compared to the end of Communism that people did not really care at all.

So I agree that to informed people in 1923, Slovakia being separate a century later would be no surprise. However, the formation of USSR (which I know much less about) was pretty controversial and involved a civil war so they might be actually be surprised it did last 80 years.

On the other hand, the other changes you glossed over are quite significant, especially with Germany and Poland.

Yeah, that's a fair point, they may be more surprised that either example lasted that long.

And yeah, like I said above, the entire concept of World War II would blow their minds, let alone the redrawing of maps worldwide afterwards.

Show them a time lapse animation of the countries borders as they changed in real time such that a second equals one month. Two minutes of "what the fuck just happened‽‽"

potential mars colonization

Yeah because we're real close to doing that in 2023

Yeah because we're real close to doing that in 2023

my-hero has been hyping Martian adventures only 20 years from now for... over 20 years now.

I don't think Mars colonies would surprise them. If anything they'd expect us to have family resorts or Jupiter

1923, virtually every capitalist country in the world had just invaded the USSR 5 years ago, Japan only pulled out in 1922.

The USSR being gone only becomes shocking post WWII when they went from an agrarian nation wracked by civil war and famine, with zero tractor factories to sending 100,000 tanks into Germany 20 years later to putting a man in space 20 years after that.

ditto anything trans related

In fact, German medical science was on the forefront of chemical and surgical gender therapies, riiight up until Hitler. Quite a lot of seminal research was burned by the doctors responsible - to protect the identities of anyone involved.

Probably all the climate change shit

Also if you told a guy from 1923 that the world's most industrialized nation was China they'd probably accuse you of lying

And even nowadays they'd be right to do so...

Least ignorant liberal

What does it say on all your consumer goods again? cap-think

Taiwan, Germany, Canada, EU...

I take quality over slave labor and shit falling apart after a year...

I'm sure you don't own anything made in China then. Canada, famous producer of consumer goods farquaad-point

Whatever little is actually made in Western countries anymore is shit quality designed to fall apart to make more profit just like everything else.

winnie pooh is pleased with your doing

Nothing never happened day:

soypoint-1 WINNIE THE POOH TAIANAMMENNMEN 1989 CHINESE CAN ONLY DO BOOTLEGSsoypoint-2 (totes not racist to show an Asian man with yellow skin btw)

Can you do soypoint-1 SOCIAL CREDIT soypoint-2 so we can do all the greatest hits?

China is such an excellent test for how gullible someone is. So many people will believe any bad thing they read on the internet about it, no matter how absurd, and no matter how easy it is to disprove.

https://www.shanghaidisneyresort.com/en/entertainment/theme-park/characters-meet-pooh/

So there's a whole fucking Hundred Acre Wood exhibit, Pooh and all, but I guess if you text someone about it Xi appears from under your bed and black bags you? xibe-check

Are you really trying to deny reality here? I understand you hate China and am even willing to belive it's ideological and not entirely racist but pretending they're not a global manufacturing powerhouse is next level nuts.

You can buy groceries from a mechanical grocer, but it’ll accuse you of shoplifting like three times while checking you out.

while checking you out

I'm sick of those suggestive robotic winks, and the vulgar gestures every time I scan a banana

I had one scream loud AF at me because I didn't move my item to the bay in the microsecond it allowed.

Just an advertisement with a smiling black guy would do.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cream_of_Wheat#/media/File%3ACream_of_Wheat_Breakfast_Bell_1918_advertisement.jpg ?

feels a bit like cheating given that the man in the picture is clearly being presented as a server, not a consumer

Fair. I didn't understand what OP was getting at, so I took them literally. It seemed strange to ignore that white people in the early 20th loved depictions of smiling black people in servant roles.

As for ads targeted at black consumers... now I'm curious. I know there were newspapers targeted at black readers. I wonder if they had ads.

Yeah I think a better answer would've been "an ad with a black man smiling at his white wife"

For bonus points, make it clear in the ad that the man is a house husband and the wife is a working professional lol

Give them a gay son marrying his partner, really blow some heads.

Many countries all around the world possess weapons that could obliterate an entire other country, or their own country if detonated by mistake, and possibly destroy the whole planet.

Well, I don't think any of the nuclear countries are small enough to be obliterated by an accidental detonation. It would just but a nice hole in Nebraska or Omsk or whatever.

South Africa being the most progressive country in the world, in that regard, may be a bit shocking a well

That I have a device that fits in my pocket and can connect to almost anyone else on the face of the planet, as well as tell me any fact I'd like to hear, or any story I'd like to experience. And it does all this about as fast as my thumbs can type out the request.

And yet 99,9% of the time you just use it to get into arguments with people you don't even know.

The rest of it being ads, I assume

What do you think they'd also do with it? They were already getting in arguments over mail with people they would never see nor hear.

It's also a universal translator, the device they thought would facilitate diplomacy and peaceful communication.

Paraphrasing Douglas Adams: "If you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. By effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, this has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

Tears of the feeble, hands of the slaves
Skin of the mothers, mouths of the babes
Building a Tower, belongs to the sky
When the whole thing comes crashing down
Down ask me why...

And the government uses it to spy on you. Businesses use it to spy on you and gather basically all of your personal data. Privacy has been dead for a number of years now. A hundred years ago people would have rioted.

Anything price related. Imagine telling anyone from 1920s that you paid 50 dollars for a piece of clothing.

I paid 3.20 for a small loaf of bread. Fight me.

Most people spend more than three hours a day staring at a small mirror in their pocket that makes colorful dancing lights.

I, and the vast majority of the world, wander around with instant access to the sum total of human knowledge, as well as the ability to instantly talk with anyone else in the world that we know. Face to face in many cases these days. These devices also allow many of us to remember that *we have a universal translator in our pockets, so language isn't even much of a barrier to communication and understanding each other.The vast majority of us use these wonderous devices to get into arguments with people we are extremely unlikely to ever meet in person.

The vast majority of us use these wonderous devices to get into arguments with people we are extremely unlikely to ever meet in person

And also about things that we generally either don't really care much about, or can't actually do anything about lol

I can't believe you would say that. I am offended.

That nearly everyone is carrying a tracking device with them, designed to disguise itself as a convenient entertainment device.

Given this is the era of rising totalitarianism, maybe the surprise would be that there's no legal penalty for not carrying it; people just choose to to the point life will be difficult if you buck the trend.

And yet you still can't ask the device to locate someone.

How would that even register with people from 1923? What is a .... "tracking device"? Or an "entertainment device"?

Its 1923 and the phonograph has been around for 45 years, and local radio has been around for 3 in some areas, so I think they would know what an entertainment device is. A tracking device, like a radio that tells people where you are without your input. These idea would not go over the heads of any citygoer, though you would struggle with any back country folks.

I agree I should have phrased that better. Something like a "secret agent following you wherever you go" maybe?

Maybe a communication device? That's how it started at least.

1 more...
1 more...

There are still no flying cars.

Helicopters exist, and there are some octocopter drones that can lift a person. We also got a working jetpack recently, and we've had water-jetpacks for ages.

And a billionaire inadvertently continues to do everything in his power to show why they would be a bad idea.

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"A N***** WANTS TO BE PRESIDENT. AMERICA HAS LOST ITS WAYS TO INSANITY"

"F*****S PARADE AROUND THE CITY AND THEY WERENT SHOT AT FIRST SIGHT"

"PATRIOT ARRESTED FOR BURNING CROSSES"

"PEOPLE CLAIMING STATE AND CHURCH SHOULD BE SEPARATED ARE NOT FIT FOR OFFICE, THEY ARE COMMUNIST TRAITORS"

"PEOPLE CLAIMING STATE AND CHURCH SHOULD BE SEPARATED ARE NOT FIT FOR OFFICE, THEY ARE COMMUNIST TRAITORS"

That's more of a 50-70s thing. In the 1920s communism wasn't a big idea in the US and God wasn't in the pledge nor part of our national motto.

The first Red Scare was in 1919 and communism was a big enough idea in the US that the government was putting communists in prison

I don't know how many headlines would be talking about Communist traitors in 1923.

I'd imagine it's the things that still kinda make it as headlines today, but don't get much coverage anymore because everyone is used to it by now.

"By the way, this weekend's mass shootings led to 10 deaths and 29 injuries total, a little more than last week. Parents, remember to bundle up your kids this fall semester with the latest BulletBlocker Youth Jacket, 10% off if you order today! Now back to the news you actually wanted to hear about: the former U.S. President allegedly commits even more crimes..."

Yeah, but you have to consider that "Italian democracy overthrown by former journalist" and "bank sprayed with tommy gun" was recent news at that point. All that shit would shock people in the 60's, but in the 20's the main revelation would be the affordability of bulletproof clothing.

1923?

Lenin's body lays in the mausoleum on the Red Square for the last 99 years. Impersonators of him and Stalin walk around in their daily routine, asking money for photoes with them. In a shop not far from them, you can purchaze chinese merchandize with a soviet, russian flags, as well as with a monarchist-sympatising one, even though Romanovs are as dead as they were back then. Some items cost over a thousand of rubles, a sum that was enough to buy a factory - and that's after two recent denomonations. Pretty good that these crowds of international tourists don't count their money being there, these prices can easily drive someone insane.

See, in 1923 "the USSR fails" wouldn't surprise people, but "the USSR is a great power and also fails and also is still locally popular" would be hella disorienting.

Why do I picture confused Trotsky, going WTF in his glasses? Yes, it's going to last 70-so years in spite of your pessimism, no, you aren't a part of it and assasinated in Mexico, yes, this georgian chud is as power-hungry as he looks, no, unions won't become the waifu of proletariat, but yes, after the fall of Stalin you'd be pretty much reabilitated and some canadians would even direct a movie about rebelious youngsters named after you.

You couldn't buy a factory for rubles in 1923...

NEP was a thing though. Very limited and tightly controlled, but possible. Both NEPmen and foreign capitalists had a brief window while economy was healing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEPman

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_concessions_in_the_USSR

I don't think one could be safe throwing them around like that though. Being big probably meant you have a particular relationship with local administration who don't find you too capitalistic.

I'm at the airport, and the robot waiter is standing at the bar, staring at me in a passive / aggressive manner. Taunting me with its non delivery of my food.

Now, I'm no writer, but there's a headline in that somewhere.

That people from my country actually had the gall to behave like our country belonged to us and not white people.

The storm of the U. S. Capitol would be the most shocking one, probably, as nobody dared to do that.

Also, 9/11 events, nuclear/thermonuclear bombs, nuclear power plant disasters, many things.

Technologically, the fact that an everyday laptop can deliver tens of billions of arithmetic instructions per second is still mind-boggling to me.

Definitely the fact that we have access to technology that allows us to effectively create and spread misinformation at lightning speed, all without having to leave the comfort of our homes. Misinformation that can be seen by millions of people across the globe in a matter of moments after it is created.

I bet it’s the fact I can play through the Battle of the Somme as many times as I want, and die a hundred deaths each game, for fun

ALL KNOWLEDGE OF SOLONS LOST
Recent Poll: Zero Percent of Americans Thinking About Solons

Ligmas have increased in popularity though

In a hundred years, people will be reading this thread and asking their AI to define ligma. That AI will have been trained on all our comments

I would guess pretty much everything about our current world would freak out people from a century ago

Human Lifespan Doubled

Lol the average American lifespan in 1923 was 58 and in my county in 2022 it was 64 and dropping

"doubled"

Humans can be found outside America too.

https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

Ok? It's still not true, this is just classic ignorant neoliberal propaganda. Even your own source doesn't support this, unless you go well into the 1800s.

For Africa and Asia it did.

Again this is very simply not true. You are imagineering, not objectively looking at data. Which countries specifically do you see doubling life span? I'm not seeing it.

That's mostly due to decreased infant mortality rates, than actually extending our lifespans, so far. That looks like it may be changing rather soon.

OpenAI accepts files/documents now.

In 1923 this would be gibberish.

I miss the niche community "sentences that would have made no sense fifteen years ago."

Like "Homestuck stans dox Twitter influencer @dril."

The idea of a thinking machine/mechanical brain would be more than enough to wow them

Yes. Realistic working computers were still a fantasy. So was solid state electronics and continuing miniaturisation.

But they might feel like plausible future space magic like flying cars.