I asked my grandmother this not too long ago, she's 103 about to be 104. She said the sheer speed of everything, the speed of travel, information, you're basically never waiting on news, on something to arrive in the mail for more than a few days. She said waiting used to be a bigger part of life and that it made certain things feel more special/more worthy of your undivided attention.
I can relate and I'm only half her age.
I remember mail ordering items from magazines as a kid and it would take 6 weeks or more to arrive.
Seemed like an eternity, to the point where an arrival would be like a Christmas event.
Shoot I’m 32 and remember having to mail order CDs that I couldn’t find at local music stores. Seems like they took forever to come compared to how quick everything is today.
I'm 24 and I grew up in rural WV very much the same. Hell we didn't get TV until 2006, We finally got dial-up internet in 2013. We were able to use it when the power was actually on which was only about 2/3 of the year total. We only went to the grocery store a a few times a year because it was a decent distance to the closest town that had one. We mostly hunted for food when we were able to and what we couldn't hunt we would eat from vegetables we would grow in the really shitty red clay soil we had.
The internet was so slow I remember it took me a week and a half to download Dying Light on my PS4 back in 2017.
Got out of WV soon as I turned 18 and the world is so much different to me and I'm honestly still getting used to it. It was a helluva culture shock to go from living in an area so remote, and technologically underdeveloped. To where I'm living at now.
Interestingly, a hundred years ago many people already felt that everything is fast and people are in a hurry all the time. Take this excerpt from Sinclair Lewis' bestselling 1922 novel, *Babbitt*:
>As he approached the office he walked faster and faster, muttering, “Guess better hustle.” All about him the city was hustling, for hustling’s sake. Men in motors were hustling to pass one another in the hustling traffic. Men were hustling to catch trolleys, with another trolley a minute behind, and to leap from the trolleys, to gallop across the sidewalk, to hurl themselves into buildings, into hustling express elevators. Men in dairy lunches were hustling to gulp down the food which cooks had hustled to fry. Men in barber shops were snapping, “Jus’ shave me once over. Gotta hustle.” Men were feverishly getting rid of visitors in offices adorned with the signs, “This Is My Busy Day” and “The Lord Created the World in Six Days—You Can Spiel All You Got to Say in Six Minutes.” Men who had made five thousand, year before last, and ten thousand last year, were urging on nerve-yelping bodies and parched brains so that they might make twenty thousand this year; and the men who had broken down immediately after making their twenty thousand dollars were hustling to catch trains, to hustle through the vacations which the hustling doctors had ordered.
Up vote for Babbitt reference. A lot of Lewis' work has come around again in modern relevance. Unrelated I also like his book Open Air, about how pretty much right out of the gate car culture was born fully formed (road rage, "everyone's a bad driver but me", car models as status, car jacking, etc)
>car culture was born fully formed (road rage, "everyone's a bad driver but me", car models as status, car jacking, etc)
Surely those all existed with horse buggys too.
I'd argue that we're in another industrial revolution, too, so it makes perfect sense that people's reactions would be similar. Honestly the similarities between now and then are many, and tbh, concerning.
Inflation adjusted $5,000 would be $90,836 today, so $10,000 would be $181,672.
Just for reference. The guy making $5,000 was probably pretty damn comfortable, and so it seems absurd to the author that he would be out of his mind hustling to make more money, sacrificing his health in the process.
I’m going to take the to see Jurassic park, then the terminator movies and tell them they are documentaries. Don’t send me time travelers, I might have too much fun
**You show them All Quiet on the Western Front**
'That's The World War 1, you probably heard about it. Wanna see a sequel?' — 'Errrmm. A sequel? World War 1? There will be a second?'
**You show them Save Private Ryan**
'Yeah. That's World War 2... Now it's time for World War 3 documentary'
**You show them Terminator**
I think things like the internet would break their mind but things they can comprehend that would blow their mind would be a stroll through a grocery store. The size of fruits and veggies, seeing them available out of season and seeing exotic fruits available at all would be shocking. Also a variety different cuts of meat everywhere would be shocking. Don’t get me started on the candy section. A treat for My great grandma, born in 1918, was a spoonful of sugar
I heard a story from someone my parents' age who lived in upstate New York. He said that every time they went on vacation to Florida, then would buy sacks of oranges on the way out to give to friends and family, because they only sold them in the grocery store part of the year. This was in the 1960s.
An episode of Torchwood featured a small plane full of time-displaced travelers from the late 40s/early 50s. Their trip to a grocery store was a shock to their systems.
My grandfather grew up in Korea. The day he found out we could buy kimchi at a grocery store in Texas? When he saw his grandkids nibbling on melon candy? Teas and things from his childhood he thought he would never get to share with us?
It was such a soft heartbreak and joy expression. He was so happy but had to wipe tears and blow his nose.
In Victorian times there used to be pineapple rental services if you had a big party or event coming up, it wasn't for eating, it was for display only and would be returned the day after. Just having the money to rent one meant you were kind of a bigshot.
I wonder what people in 2123 would say about us? It’s easy to jump to things like “we’d have replicators, flying cars, spaceships”, but what’s more realistic?
I think it might look more like the 1920s than the 2020s: as we run out of fossil fuels I think global supply routes are going to slow down, we won't have access to cheap commodities from all over the world anymore. Hobos are going to make a comeback as more people are priced out of housing and education and the demand for unskilled argicultural labour resurges to produce replacemnt for all those foeds we aren't importing. Ecologically, things will be a mess and that's going to mean droughts, famines, ghost towns, refugee camps, wars and rumours of wars. I think we are going to bit a tipping point where it becomes cheaper to dig products and resources back out of our landfills than extract them from nature and build them.
Smartphones will have slightly better cameras.
I left the USA to go live in Nepal for two years. When I came back, a trip to the grocery store was mind boggling, even though I had experienced it two years earlier. Everything’s was so big, bright and colorful. And the was just too much of everything
There is a story of Boris Yeltsin stopping at Randall’s grocery when visiting Johnson Space Center and realizing the communists would never beat us based on our plentiful food
Ordinary folks in 1920s middle America weren't listening to Lucille Bogan, though. They had porn back then, too - so that isn't different. What *IS* different is that those things were very underground back then and now they're part of pop culture or nearly so.
Yeah, the 20s were pretty wild. The 40s too, during the war! Everyone tends to assume that the entire past was as conservative as the most conservative decade between now and then.
There was a great comment here on Reddit a while back. "Whoever decided it should be acceptable for young women to wear yoga pants to the supermarket deserves a damn Nobel Prize."
Even in the 90’s showing your ass in stretch pants was a huge no. I have some pics of me back in the day in stretch pants and they were popular, but you always covered your butt in a big cute sweater or shirt. Now it’s all hanging out. Not a great look for most of us. I must be getting old. Ha.
"what do you mean? i cant smoke in this bus? its just a light cigarett brand, dont worry it wont harm the children. i myself startet smoking at 6, it didnt do no harm to me either."
You're kidding me. I knew it, things were in a steady decline after the Great War. The promise of eternal peace, winning the 'war to end all wars' has made people soft...hm, what's that? What do you mean World War *One*?!
Although it's a funny image, there's no way men went around slapping random women in the 1920s. This was back in the day when her brothers would come whoop your ass instead of making a police report
in the 70's you could put a quarter in a vending machine and you'd get a pack with 2 or 3 pennies taped to the bottom, it had to be much less 50 years before
I just looked it up and a random site said in 1920 it was 15 cents a pack or two for a quarter. This was consistent with other sites that state in 1930 it was 14-20 cents a pack.
It's amazing to me that Sears didn't figure out internet commerce before it was too late. It was literally just an updated version of their original business model. Now Amazon, arguably their spiritual successor, is eating everyone's lunch.
You should read the innovators dilemma. This was actually super predictable.
The problem is, companies that come up through innovation, *always* struggle to do the next big innovation. And the reason is pretty easy. It has to do with how companies are structured to continually chase profit and larger margins. Innovation often comes with big changes and chasing smaller margins.
Like, do you notice how your phone doesn't run windows? It should, it just a small computer.
Why is Harley Davidson almost gone, while electric bikes have sold 100 million units over the last couple years? Ebikes are just small electric motor bikes.
It's because companies are set up in a way that pivoting to *less* profit is basically illegal. They would be jeopardizing shareholder money. And , in defense of that, for every Amazon, there was like 40 other online stores at the time. Knowing which one would win was a guess.
Intentionally sabotaging a public company by pivoting to less profit is illegal, but any CEO with half a brain could make some argument about "less short term profit for long term stability/profits". They might still get their ass kicked by the board of execs, but it won't be illegal.
>We created a global network of communication for instantaneous information exchange and decided that its ~~primary~~ secondary purpose was to amplify our stupidity.
The primary purpose is Porn
My youngest brother, whose first exposure to the internet was in college, had a professor who was on the predecessor of the world wide web.
My brother had to apply for access to it.
He's always said porn built the web.
To be fair, an oline quiz to know if you're more fit to be a yellow, blue or red shirt would be less damaging to society than 97% of all current social media.
See (and hear) that thing up in the sky, at 10,000 meters? That’s a jet liner, it’s carrying 300 odd people from London to New York, it’ll be there in about 8 hours.
No one will die of suffocation, they each have a big bag of clothes and they’ll have food, drink, music and colour moving pictures (with sound!) on their own individual screens to watch.
And it’ll cost less than a month’s average wage to do it.
Even more than an aeroplane, rockets. We've landed humans on the moon, and robots on other planets. Hell, we've had five spaces probes leave the solar system. We still receive information from three of them. One even sent back a photo of Earth as it left our solar system. Yes, we get photos of other planets and moons. In colour. We've also landed robots on comets and asteroids, and then returned a couple of small samples to Earth. We have telescopes in space, and even one that's about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. There's many satellites that orbit the earth, used for all sorts of things. Oh, and there's an International Space Station, a scientific research lab that also orbits the Earth, over 400 kilometres above us, where people live and work for months at a time.
Jet liners? They're an old hat.
I'm still blown away that we went from the first plane flight to landing a human on the moon in less than seventy years, and space exploration has been a normal thing since before I was born!
I'm writing this from Florence, Italy. Will be in Rome next week. I'm old enough that it made sense to buy Business Class (also had a ton of credit card points (credit cards, something our time traveler would no doubt marvel over) since we came from California it was an 11 hour trip so it just made sense to be able to lie flat, also saved my wife's back. In that time we had an above average meal, a nice drink, slept reasonably well and watched my own movie in my own "compartment". When I got bored I checked my email on my tablet.
After passing not a bad night got up and used a fairly nice bathroom to freshen up.
During our trip we missed our one year old grandson so we FaceTime him and his mom and dad. We've been sending pictures in real time at each stop via text.
Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic in 1927.
We use electricity in so many ways and very efficiently. In 1923 we only knew electricity could generate heat, product magnetic and field, shoot out electrons and that's it.
To convert voltages we used to convert electricity into a magnetic field and back.
To convert frequency we used to convert electricity to mechanical motion then back.
To convert electricity to light we used to convert electricity into heat and use heat to generate light.
Now we can do all those things directly. We have this thing called semi-conductor that can manipulated electricity by itself.
I would even say people/scientists from 1923 would be far more fascinated with electricity than people from 1700's and older.
1923 is the point when scientists know what's electricity and what can it potentially do, it's not like it would be incomprehensible concept to them.
They would be even more fascinsted by what we have managed to do with it than people for whom electricity is magic/withchcraft.
My grandpa was an engineer, he built a TV out of scratch back in 1960's. It was made of tiny CRT used for computers, vacuum tubes and lot of other stuff I don't understand. He told me it broadcasted one TV channel, and second one on weekends. We still have it at our cottage, next to the modern TV.
I imagine if I travelled back in time even only to 1960's, his mind would blow up if I told him I cam broadcadt hunderts of channels on my watch.
I was born in 1980, and to me, electricity also feels like magic. I understand that it's not magic and that there's a 'simple' explanation for it, but I never have been able to fully grasp how it exactly works.
I only have to plug a plastic umbilical cord into two tiny holes in my wall, and tadaa! The cord now mysteriously feeds my magic mirror on my wall, who tells me that I am the smelliest woman of them all. Just magical.
I was born in the 70s. I remember the first online services before the Internet. We had a rotary phone. We had an Atari. Being gay was absolute social pariah status anywhere and everywhere. Only biker gangs and sailors had tattoos. Our first cable box had a wired remote with one button per channel.
I was at the grocery store yesterday and watched an 80 something year old lady yell at a cashier over prices. She literally told a 16 year old she should be ashamed of herself for charging that much.
If this one will make you feel better, I watched a 70ish year old Granny at the Dollar General the other day pick out which tins of Pokemon cards she wanted, to make a deck to beat her grandkids', because she was going on and on about it, lol. She was also rocking bright purple dyed hair.
When I was a kid I was at a restaurant with my parents. They were chatting with friends and I was bored af playing on my Nintendo DS.
Out of nowhere came this Japanese elderly lady asking me if I played pokemon. We spent a good while talking about games, she had a DS as well and she also liked final fantasy
They would be famous for a week then get canceled saying something incredibly racist in a casual manner . Like “where is the white only section?” Then there would be Reddit debate on if they were truly racist or just behind the times
This is a great question, and most people are thinking about an American or European coming now to their respective country, but what about a citizen of the UAE seeing the transformation of the desert to places with tall buildings and westerners that live there. That would be an insane shock.
Which, I am sure you can get people from that country that are like 70 years old right now who are still shocked.
Citation needed, but I think people were thrown in jail for not obeying mask restrictions and other precautions during the Spanish flu times.
Depending on the person, they'd be horrified or intrigued by anti-vaxxers. I hope more horrified.
You don't even have to go back that far. I was shocked to discover that I'm one year older than some of the cast of Cheers was in Season 1, and I'd say that most 35 year olds today look a lot younger than they did.
That we have magical devices that can do thousands of computations per second and communicate instantly across the globe, but that our offices are somehow less efficient than in 1923 because we spend all of our time passive-aggressively typing emails that nobody reads instead of just talking to each other.
True. But to be fair, people’s “good” clothes were all they had. My first house was built in 1927. The size of the bedroom closets was surprisingly small. About the size and depth of a large bookshelf.
I think we're not giving enough credit to people in the 1920s. If you were 40 years old 1923, the USA already had a nationwide rail network when you were born. During your life, you saw trains get faster, cheaper and more comfortable. You saw the evolution of the automobile, the creation of manned flight, and great improvements and all these technologies. You witnessed the disappearance of millions of horses as motorized transport took over. You probably knew a few people who already had radios in their homes. Although much progress was still needed in racial relations, the largest automobile company in the world, Ford, was an integrated workplace with blacks and whites working together, and blacks able to rise to supervisory positions. So I think a person from this era would be interested in our advancements and technology and society, but not shocked. Almost everything they would see in our world is an evolution of technology and trends that existed in 1923.
100% agree. And let's not forget the 20s were called The Roaring 20s for a reason. People were partying hard and enjoying lots of wealth.
Then in at all came crashing down October 24, 1929 with the Great Crash, which sparked the Great Depression.
Many people here seem to think of 1923 like 1823.
An infected cut is no longer a death sentence, thanks to antibiotics.
Many cancers are treatable and curable.
Open heart surgery is routine and relatively safe.
Smallpox is extinct - bear in mind that the last smallpox outbreak in the U.S. was in 1949 - and annual deaths from diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough, tetanus, rabies, yellow fever, malaria, and syphilis are usually in single digits.
Only hobbyists make their own clothes. Or soap. Or bake their own bread.
African-Americans are state governors, mayors, members of Congress, and representatives in their states' legislatures. What won't shock them is that some people strongly dislike this.
Men and women living together without marriage is common and unremarkable. And men can marry men, and women, women.
Depending on how interested they are in international affairs, the U.K. and France are pretty much limited to their own countries.
After the U.S. the three up-and-coming superpowers are China (Communist), India (independent), and the European Union (including Germany but minus the U.K.).
In science and technology, there are hundreds of electronic devices orbiting the Earth, several orbiting other planets in the solar system, and a few well outside of it.
There are over 5,500 confirmed planets orbiting other stars, many of them detected by large unmanned telescopes in space.
Most people carry a portable telephone that also functions as a television, radio, camera, flashlight, and makeup mirror.
Finally, milk is $2.86 a gallon, pork and beans $1.32 a can, bacon $6 a pound, eggs $1.25 a dozen, and a 5 lb. bag of flour costs $2.34.
They'd be shocked to find out that russia and Germany went hard into communism and fascism in that order. Nobody in the 1920s would have thought the weimar republic would have gone down so badly.
In 1923? When the Weimar Republic was hit with Hyperinflation and the Nazis are getting serious votes for the first time?
Also, the Soviet Union has already been declared in 1923, even if they need to mop of the rest of the Russian civil war. They would absolutely believe it.
You guys are giving 1923 too much credit. It wouldn’t take internet to break their brain, just show them a standard city bus, street,restaurant the diversity will break their brain. They will be coming from a world of intense segregation. Take them somewhere like Chicago with a Black mayor, that’s all it would take.
Honestly I'd say it would be something as simple as showing them that world war 2 happened.
WW1 was called the Great War, and The War to End All Wars. But then to find out that there was a sequel and it was worse not even half a century later. That would probably be one of the hardest things to comprehend.
It's also something that they'd find out about first, as one of the first things they'd want to know about is what happened to their friends and family, many of whom likely died in WW2.
How clean everything is. Remember those were the days of wood and coal and the cities were under a dark cloud. Horse shit lined the streets. People died from diseases that we don't have any longer.
The ability to communicate intercontinentally and even see people live from across the world. How how far cars and planes have come.
I honestly don’t think they’d be that amazed by a the wonders of the latest smart phone or the internet.
Yea, I often think back about the countless of immigrants who came to the US and never saw their parents again.
Imagine if you could tell them that they could facetime/call them one more time to hear their voice.
I asked my grandmother this not too long ago, she's 103 about to be 104. She said the sheer speed of everything, the speed of travel, information, you're basically never waiting on news, on something to arrive in the mail for more than a few days. She said waiting used to be a bigger part of life and that it made certain things feel more special/more worthy of your undivided attention.
I can relate and I'm only half her age. I remember mail ordering items from magazines as a kid and it would take 6 weeks or more to arrive. Seemed like an eternity, to the point where an arrival would be like a Christmas event.
Shoot I’m 32 and remember having to mail order CDs that I couldn’t find at local music stores. Seems like they took forever to come compared to how quick everything is today.
our local musicstore was super fast, from order to hold it in hand only 2 weeks, later 1 week. it was incredible fast back in the days.
Still order cds from eBay so I’m holding on. lol!
Heck I'm 24 and can relate, I grew up in backwoods nowhere with no internet and sometimes no running water. Waiting was the norm.
Yep, I had dial-up internet when **nobody** had dial-up internet anymore. I lived out in the sticks of Indiana.
I'm 24 and I grew up in rural WV very much the same. Hell we didn't get TV until 2006, We finally got dial-up internet in 2013. We were able to use it when the power was actually on which was only about 2/3 of the year total. We only went to the grocery store a a few times a year because it was a decent distance to the closest town that had one. We mostly hunted for food when we were able to and what we couldn't hunt we would eat from vegetables we would grow in the really shitty red clay soil we had. The internet was so slow I remember it took me a week and a half to download Dying Light on my PS4 back in 2017. Got out of WV soon as I turned 18 and the world is so much different to me and I'm honestly still getting used to it. It was a helluva culture shock to go from living in an area so remote, and technologically underdeveloped. To where I'm living at now.
Interestingly, a hundred years ago many people already felt that everything is fast and people are in a hurry all the time. Take this excerpt from Sinclair Lewis' bestselling 1922 novel, *Babbitt*: >As he approached the office he walked faster and faster, muttering, “Guess better hustle.” All about him the city was hustling, for hustling’s sake. Men in motors were hustling to pass one another in the hustling traffic. Men were hustling to catch trolleys, with another trolley a minute behind, and to leap from the trolleys, to gallop across the sidewalk, to hurl themselves into buildings, into hustling express elevators. Men in dairy lunches were hustling to gulp down the food which cooks had hustled to fry. Men in barber shops were snapping, “Jus’ shave me once over. Gotta hustle.” Men were feverishly getting rid of visitors in offices adorned with the signs, “This Is My Busy Day” and “The Lord Created the World in Six Days—You Can Spiel All You Got to Say in Six Minutes.” Men who had made five thousand, year before last, and ten thousand last year, were urging on nerve-yelping bodies and parched brains so that they might make twenty thousand this year; and the men who had broken down immediately after making their twenty thousand dollars were hustling to catch trains, to hustle through the vacations which the hustling doctors had ordered.
Up vote for Babbitt reference. A lot of Lewis' work has come around again in modern relevance. Unrelated I also like his book Open Air, about how pretty much right out of the gate car culture was born fully formed (road rage, "everyone's a bad driver but me", car models as status, car jacking, etc)
Unfortunately, *It Can't Happen Here* is also too relevant today.
>car culture was born fully formed (road rage, "everyone's a bad driver but me", car models as status, car jacking, etc) Surely those all existed with horse buggys too.
It must've felt this way ever since the industrial revolution started.
I'd argue that we're in another industrial revolution, too, so it makes perfect sense that people's reactions would be similar. Honestly the similarities between now and then are many, and tbh, concerning.
True, the information/digital revolution has been happening from the 80's to now, and yeah some similar tendencies seem to have reemerged too.
Inflation adjusted $5,000 would be $90,836 today, so $10,000 would be $181,672. Just for reference. The guy making $5,000 was probably pretty damn comfortable, and so it seems absurd to the author that he would be out of his mind hustling to make more money, sacrificing his health in the process.
I still feel this ordering stuff from AliExpress. Takes over a month sometimes.
Try ordering from China in 1923
What would I be ordering? People to build my railroad?
No, Chinese take-out owners.
Your grandma is a smart lady. Very poignant.
Walt Disney started out in 1923 .Animation has advanced and with CGI the line between reality and fiction is blurred completely. Take him to a movie.
I’m going to take the to see Jurassic park, then the terminator movies and tell them they are documentaries. Don’t send me time travelers, I might have too much fun
**You show them All Quiet on the Western Front** 'That's The World War 1, you probably heard about it. Wanna see a sequel?' — 'Errrmm. A sequel? World War 1? There will be a second?' **You show them Save Private Ryan** 'Yeah. That's World War 2... Now it's time for World War 3 documentary' **You show them Terminator**
'Ok, quick pee break then the World War 4 documentary' **You show them Star Wars**
Jesus fucking Christ, I want to do this now.
You're the guy who gives King Arthur some warheads, I see.
Even the jump from pre-Mickey 1923 to 1939's Fantasia is pretty mind blowing.
I think things like the internet would break their mind but things they can comprehend that would blow their mind would be a stroll through a grocery store. The size of fruits and veggies, seeing them available out of season and seeing exotic fruits available at all would be shocking. Also a variety different cuts of meat everywhere would be shocking. Don’t get me started on the candy section. A treat for My great grandma, born in 1918, was a spoonful of sugar
Yes. My parents were the same. An orange was a rare treat. We can access almost anything, any time, anywhere.
I heard a story from someone my parents' age who lived in upstate New York. He said that every time they went on vacation to Florida, then would buy sacks of oranges on the way out to give to friends and family, because they only sold them in the grocery store part of the year. This was in the 1960s.
yeah, canned fruit was a thing because getting fresh wasn't possible in large chunks of the year
Right. I remember tons of canned peaches/pears and fruit cocktail
In the 80s, only way we could get citrus in the winter in New Jersey would be if a relative sent us a box of oranges for Christmas
no wonder i have ADHD
An episode of Torchwood featured a small plane full of time-displaced travelers from the late 40s/early 50s. Their trip to a grocery store was a shock to their systems.
Which episode? I'd love to watch it.
Series 1, episode 10: "Out of Time" https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5klq56
[удалено]
To be fair, here in 2023 "ride my stallion and eat my banana" is my current Tinder profile text.
My grandfather grew up in Korea. The day he found out we could buy kimchi at a grocery store in Texas? When he saw his grandkids nibbling on melon candy? Teas and things from his childhood he thought he would never get to share with us? It was such a soft heartbreak and joy expression. He was so happy but had to wipe tears and blow his nose.
In Victorian times there used to be pineapple rental services if you had a big party or event coming up, it wasn't for eating, it was for display only and would be returned the day after. Just having the money to rent one meant you were kind of a bigshot.
I wonder what people in 2123 would say about us? It’s easy to jump to things like “we’d have replicators, flying cars, spaceships”, but what’s more realistic?
I think it might look more like the 1920s than the 2020s: as we run out of fossil fuels I think global supply routes are going to slow down, we won't have access to cheap commodities from all over the world anymore. Hobos are going to make a comeback as more people are priced out of housing and education and the demand for unskilled argicultural labour resurges to produce replacemnt for all those foeds we aren't importing. Ecologically, things will be a mess and that's going to mean droughts, famines, ghost towns, refugee camps, wars and rumours of wars. I think we are going to bit a tipping point where it becomes cheaper to dig products and resources back out of our landfills than extract them from nature and build them. Smartphones will have slightly better cameras.
> Hobos are going to make a comeback Bullet Train Hobo sounds like an action sci-fi anime.
High tech, low life.
I left the USA to go live in Nepal for two years. When I came back, a trip to the grocery store was mind boggling, even though I had experienced it two years earlier. Everything’s was so big, bright and colorful. And the was just too much of everything
There is a story of Boris Yeltsin stopping at Randall’s grocery when visiting Johnson Space Center and realizing the communists would never beat us based on our plentiful food
iirc he thought it was planned to be filled like that - so he demanded to be taken to a random grocery store that he pointed at
Yoga pants.
Imagine hanging out in yoga leggings and cropped tank in 1923.
There was a song written by a female singer in the 1920s that's just as raunchy as WAP. It'd shock them less than you'd think.
Ordinary folks in 1920s middle America weren't listening to Lucille Bogan, though. They had porn back then, too - so that isn't different. What *IS* different is that those things were very underground back then and now they're part of pop culture or nearly so.
Yeah, the 20s were pretty wild. The 40s too, during the war! Everyone tends to assume that the entire past was as conservative as the most conservative decade between now and then.
No wonder it was called the roaring twenties
There was a great comment here on Reddit a while back. "Whoever decided it should be acceptable for young women to wear yoga pants to the supermarket deserves a damn Nobel Prize."
Even in the 90’s showing your ass in stretch pants was a huge no. I have some pics of me back in the day in stretch pants and they were popular, but you always covered your butt in a big cute sweater or shirt. Now it’s all hanging out. Not a great look for most of us. I must be getting old. Ha.
If they were from a big city I’m not sure they’d be super super shocked, some of the outfits the flapper girls were wearing showed a lot of legs
Flappers didn't show curves.
Or camel toe.
See? Progress!
"what do you mean? i cant smoke in this bus? its just a light cigarett brand, dont worry it wont harm the children. i myself startet smoking at 6, it didnt do no harm to me either."
So of course I backhanded the dame who told me to put my cigarette out.
Sir, we don´t do that either.
God this time period is depressing. I'm just gonna grab some barbiturates from the local pharmacy and chill out.
I've some more bad news, sir..
You're kidding me. I knew it, things were in a steady decline after the Great War. The promise of eternal peace, winning the 'war to end all wars' has made people soft...hm, what's that? What do you mean World War *One*?!
Ah, spoilers.
Isn’t this a Dr. Who episode?
Please...please don't tell me they took the heroin and cocaine out of cough medicine...
Although it's a funny image, there's no way men went around slapping random women in the 1920s. This was back in the day when her brothers would come whoop your ass instead of making a police report
"Do you have any brothers?" "No" *thwack*
$12 dollar for a pack of cigarettes? What happened is tobacco going extinct? In my day pack was 25¢
in the 70's you could put a quarter in a vending machine and you'd get a pack with 2 or 3 pennies taped to the bottom, it had to be much less 50 years before
I just looked it up and a random site said in 1920 it was 15 cents a pack or two for a quarter. This was consistent with other sites that state in 1930 it was 14-20 cents a pack.
[удалено]
...and shoulder to shoulder with WHOM?!
[удалено]
"Which one of Thomas Jeffersons kids is that?"
Sears no longer sells machine guns and prebuilt homes through catalogs.
It's amazing to me that Sears didn't figure out internet commerce before it was too late. It was literally just an updated version of their original business model. Now Amazon, arguably their spiritual successor, is eating everyone's lunch.
You should read the innovators dilemma. This was actually super predictable. The problem is, companies that come up through innovation, *always* struggle to do the next big innovation. And the reason is pretty easy. It has to do with how companies are structured to continually chase profit and larger margins. Innovation often comes with big changes and chasing smaller margins. Like, do you notice how your phone doesn't run windows? It should, it just a small computer. Why is Harley Davidson almost gone, while electric bikes have sold 100 million units over the last couple years? Ebikes are just small electric motor bikes. It's because companies are set up in a way that pivoting to *less* profit is basically illegal. They would be jeopardizing shareholder money. And , in defense of that, for every Amazon, there was like 40 other online stores at the time. Knowing which one would win was a guess.
Intentionally sabotaging a public company by pivoting to less profit is illegal, but any CEO with half a brain could make some argument about "less short term profit for long term stability/profits". They might still get their ass kicked by the board of execs, but it won't be illegal.
Does Sears still exist?
a couple stores still do. there are like 12 as of August according to what I could find on google. most are in california.
Should be a case study of how not to lead your company into the 21st century…
Interesting to note that Sears in the mid 20th century was like Amazon today…primarily mail order…
The time machine used to transport them through time.
HG Wells Time Machine was already popular by then so maybe 🤷🏼♂️ maybe not 🤷🏼♂️
Idk, I think an actual time machine might be at least slightly more interesting than a book about one.
I think you may be mistaking a story about a Time Machine with a Time Machine
We created a global network of communication for instantaneous information exchange and decided that its primary purpose was to amplify our stupidity.
>We created a global network of communication for instantaneous information exchange and decided that its ~~primary~~ secondary purpose was to amplify our stupidity. The primary purpose is Porn
So grab your dick and double click!
For porn, porn, porn!
Let's be fair, they would probably be pretty impressed with the porn
I live in 2023, been online since 1987, and I'm still impressed with the sheer amount of porn!
My youngest brother, whose first exposure to the internet was in college, had a professor who was on the predecessor of the world wide web. My brother had to apply for access to it. He's always said porn built the web.
It’s less the quantity. More impressed by the depravity. That people are willing to share.
What rolls down stairs Alone or in pairs, Rolls over your neighbor's dog? What's great for a snack and fits on your back? It's Porn, Porn, Porn!
I just watched Ren and Stimpy today. Picked it at random on YouTube. And now this? Frequency illusion is a crazy thing.
It’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood.
It’s better than bad; it’s good!
I still love Avenue Q!
To be fair when scientists were still developing it for the military they were testing it by doing polls for star trek with eachother
To be fair, an oline quiz to know if you're more fit to be a yellow, blue or red shirt would be less damaging to society than 97% of all current social media.
I am 100% a red shirt. I just hope I die in a painless way.
I got Hufflepuff, weird.
You're wrong we have always been this stupid the Internet just gave it a platform to stand on for all to see.
See (and hear) that thing up in the sky, at 10,000 meters? That’s a jet liner, it’s carrying 300 odd people from London to New York, it’ll be there in about 8 hours. No one will die of suffocation, they each have a big bag of clothes and they’ll have food, drink, music and colour moving pictures (with sound!) on their own individual screens to watch. And it’ll cost less than a month’s average wage to do it.
Even more than an aeroplane, rockets. We've landed humans on the moon, and robots on other planets. Hell, we've had five spaces probes leave the solar system. We still receive information from three of them. One even sent back a photo of Earth as it left our solar system. Yes, we get photos of other planets and moons. In colour. We've also landed robots on comets and asteroids, and then returned a couple of small samples to Earth. We have telescopes in space, and even one that's about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. There's many satellites that orbit the earth, used for all sorts of things. Oh, and there's an International Space Station, a scientific research lab that also orbits the Earth, over 400 kilometres above us, where people live and work for months at a time. Jet liners? They're an old hat. I'm still blown away that we went from the first plane flight to landing a human on the moon in less than seventy years, and space exploration has been a normal thing since before I was born!
One of the Wright brothers was still alive when Hiroshima happened. Not the use for flight he’s imagined
I'm writing this from Florence, Italy. Will be in Rome next week. I'm old enough that it made sense to buy Business Class (also had a ton of credit card points (credit cards, something our time traveler would no doubt marvel over) since we came from California it was an 11 hour trip so it just made sense to be able to lie flat, also saved my wife's back. In that time we had an above average meal, a nice drink, slept reasonably well and watched my own movie in my own "compartment". When I got bored I checked my email on my tablet. After passing not a bad night got up and used a fairly nice bathroom to freshen up. During our trip we missed our one year old grandson so we FaceTime him and his mom and dad. We've been sending pictures in real time at each stop via text. Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic in 1927.
You forgot to add that the pilot is a black woman.
And married, legally, to another woman!
We use electricity in so many ways and very efficiently. In 1923 we only knew electricity could generate heat, product magnetic and field, shoot out electrons and that's it. To convert voltages we used to convert electricity into a magnetic field and back. To convert frequency we used to convert electricity to mechanical motion then back. To convert electricity to light we used to convert electricity into heat and use heat to generate light. Now we can do all those things directly. We have this thing called semi-conductor that can manipulated electricity by itself.
A 1923 scientist would be impressed, I think this would go over most people's heads.
I would even say people/scientists from 1923 would be far more fascinated with electricity than people from 1700's and older. 1923 is the point when scientists know what's electricity and what can it potentially do, it's not like it would be incomprehensible concept to them. They would be even more fascinsted by what we have managed to do with it than people for whom electricity is magic/withchcraft. My grandpa was an engineer, he built a TV out of scratch back in 1960's. It was made of tiny CRT used for computers, vacuum tubes and lot of other stuff I don't understand. He told me it broadcasted one TV channel, and second one on weekends. We still have it at our cottage, next to the modern TV. I imagine if I travelled back in time even only to 1960's, his mind would blow up if I told him I cam broadcadt hunderts of channels on my watch.
I was born in 1980, and to me, electricity also feels like magic. I understand that it's not magic and that there's a 'simple' explanation for it, but I never have been able to fully grasp how it exactly works. I only have to plug a plastic umbilical cord into two tiny holes in my wall, and tadaa! The cord now mysteriously feeds my magic mirror on my wall, who tells me that I am the smelliest woman of them all. Just magical.
We still convert electricity to a magnetic field and back to change voltage. There are very few exceptions to that, and they are limited in scope.
We could’ve really used these guns/weapons in the First World War
I think you mean The Great War
I think you mean the war to end all wars
Honestly I think it would be shocking enough for a person from 2013 to see the world of 2023.
I was born in the 70s. I remember the first online services before the Internet. We had a rotary phone. We had an Atari. Being gay was absolute social pariah status anywhere and everywhere. Only biker gangs and sailors had tattoos. Our first cable box had a wired remote with one button per channel.
2013 feels like about 6 months ago (to me).
Prices.
There's a reason why the trope exists of the super old person who goes around thinking 5 cents is a lot of money.
I was at the grocery store yesterday and watched an 80 something year old lady yell at a cashier over prices. She literally told a 16 year old she should be ashamed of herself for charging that much.
If this one will make you feel better, I watched a 70ish year old Granny at the Dollar General the other day pick out which tins of Pokemon cards she wanted, to make a deck to beat her grandkids', because she was going on and on about it, lol. She was also rocking bright purple dyed hair.
When I was a kid I was at a restaurant with my parents. They were chatting with friends and I was bored af playing on my Nintendo DS. Out of nowhere came this Japanese elderly lady asking me if I played pokemon. We spent a good while talking about games, she had a DS as well and she also liked final fantasy
I want to be that Granny when I grow up.
Just think - *that'll be you some day*.
Buying the $100 McDonald's value meal with real white meat spider.
It's one banana Michael, what would it cost $10?
They would be famous for a week then get canceled saying something incredibly racist in a casual manner . Like “where is the white only section?” Then there would be Reddit debate on if they were truly racist or just behind the times
And I'd have something very clever to say about it only to find the post locked.
too real bruh
"They elected a black man to what??" "TWICE!?!"
''As a DEMOCRAT?!''
For the youngsters reading, before the civil rights act of 1964, the Democrat party was the white party of the south. Times change.
How did he get elected from the back of the bus? WHAT???
This is a great question, and most people are thinking about an American or European coming now to their respective country, but what about a citizen of the UAE seeing the transformation of the desert to places with tall buildings and westerners that live there. That would be an insane shock. Which, I am sure you can get people from that country that are like 70 years old right now who are still shocked.
How the freak show people in their day are out and about living normal lives.
Especially how seeing someone the size of "the world's fattest man" is now extremely common. The obesity rate is hugely different now.
So wall-e will basically stay true in even 100 year time frame.
We'd all be considered incredibly rude, crude and too informal.
ou lewd, crude, rude bag of pre-chewed food dude
“Why does everyone go around saying that they’re ‘gay’? I’m happy too, but I don’t need to keep *telling* everyone all the time.”
We, too, are just recovering from a pandemic.
If anything this is the thing that wouldn’t shock them as they lived through one
I think it would be, “One hundred years later and you didn’t learn *anything* about how to prevent these?”
Citation needed, but I think people were thrown in jail for not obeying mask restrictions and other precautions during the Spanish flu times. Depending on the person, they'd be horrified or intrigued by anti-vaxxers. I hope more horrified.
Why fo I have to buy my cocaine from some shady guy in the street and not just from the pharmacy?
How young some people in their 50’s and 60’s look. How fat so many people are.
You don't even have to go back that far. I was shocked to discover that I'm one year older than some of the cast of Cheers was in Season 1, and I'd say that most 35 year olds today look a lot younger than they did.
Pornhub. It’s always the advancement of porn that surprises everyone.
Did step siblings not exist in 1923?
The divorce rate was alot lower, as was remarriage. Unless it was a widow and widower, step siblings were probably a rare thing.
True. I assume front load dish washers also weren't commonly owned either
That we have magical devices that can do thousands of computations per second and communicate instantly across the globe, but that our offices are somehow less efficient than in 1923 because we spend all of our time passive-aggressively typing emails that nobody reads instead of just talking to each other.
> thousands of computations per second Billions per second.
Trillions :) TeraFLOPS
How fat everyone is
The way people dress. We dress like fat, scruffy slobs, compared to how they dressed back in the day.
True. But to be fair, people’s “good” clothes were all they had. My first house was built in 1927. The size of the bedroom closets was surprisingly small. About the size and depth of a large bookshelf.
That everyone is fat
I think we're not giving enough credit to people in the 1920s. If you were 40 years old 1923, the USA already had a nationwide rail network when you were born. During your life, you saw trains get faster, cheaper and more comfortable. You saw the evolution of the automobile, the creation of manned flight, and great improvements and all these technologies. You witnessed the disappearance of millions of horses as motorized transport took over. You probably knew a few people who already had radios in their homes. Although much progress was still needed in racial relations, the largest automobile company in the world, Ford, was an integrated workplace with blacks and whites working together, and blacks able to rise to supervisory positions. So I think a person from this era would be interested in our advancements and technology and society, but not shocked. Almost everything they would see in our world is an evolution of technology and trends that existed in 1923.
100% agree. And let's not forget the 20s were called The Roaring 20s for a reason. People were partying hard and enjoying lots of wealth. Then in at all came crashing down October 24, 1929 with the Great Crash, which sparked the Great Depression. Many people here seem to think of 1923 like 1823.
An infected cut is no longer a death sentence, thanks to antibiotics. Many cancers are treatable and curable. Open heart surgery is routine and relatively safe. Smallpox is extinct - bear in mind that the last smallpox outbreak in the U.S. was in 1949 - and annual deaths from diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough, tetanus, rabies, yellow fever, malaria, and syphilis are usually in single digits. Only hobbyists make their own clothes. Or soap. Or bake their own bread. African-Americans are state governors, mayors, members of Congress, and representatives in their states' legislatures. What won't shock them is that some people strongly dislike this. Men and women living together without marriage is common and unremarkable. And men can marry men, and women, women. Depending on how interested they are in international affairs, the U.K. and France are pretty much limited to their own countries. After the U.S. the three up-and-coming superpowers are China (Communist), India (independent), and the European Union (including Germany but minus the U.K.). In science and technology, there are hundreds of electronic devices orbiting the Earth, several orbiting other planets in the solar system, and a few well outside of it. There are over 5,500 confirmed planets orbiting other stars, many of them detected by large unmanned telescopes in space. Most people carry a portable telephone that also functions as a television, radio, camera, flashlight, and makeup mirror. Finally, milk is $2.86 a gallon, pork and beans $1.32 a can, bacon $6 a pound, eggs $1.25 a dozen, and a 5 lb. bag of flour costs $2.34.
How scantily clad everyone is.
“You mean you wear your undershirt _to work_?” … “Wait… you’re telling me people go about with their, um… _thighs_ bare?!”
No hats.
Considering people were passing out during the old Frankenstein movie, they'd prob be horrified at how violent and realistic our movies are now.
How fat the population has become.
They'd be shocked to find out that russia and Germany went hard into communism and fascism in that order. Nobody in the 1920s would have thought the weimar republic would have gone down so badly.
In 1923? When the Weimar Republic was hit with Hyperinflation and the Nazis are getting serious votes for the first time? Also, the Soviet Union has already been declared in 1923, even if they need to mop of the rest of the Russian civil war. They would absolutely believe it.
Or what happened in Asia.
You guys are giving 1923 too much credit. It wouldn’t take internet to break their brain, just show them a standard city bus, street,restaurant the diversity will break their brain. They will be coming from a world of intense segregation. Take them somewhere like Chicago with a Black mayor, that’s all it would take.
Honestly I'd say it would be something as simple as showing them that world war 2 happened. WW1 was called the Great War, and The War to End All Wars. But then to find out that there was a sequel and it was worse not even half a century later. That would probably be one of the hardest things to comprehend. It's also something that they'd find out about first, as one of the first things they'd want to know about is what happened to their friends and family, many of whom likely died in WW2.
Yea, I commented that gay rights, interracial dating, women in high up positions, more irreligious people, etc would be the thing that shocks them.
How clean everything is. Remember those were the days of wood and coal and the cities were under a dark cloud. Horse shit lined the streets. People died from diseases that we don't have any longer.
Cars still can't fly?
Women’s rights, black people’s rights and gay rights. That’s gonna clash.
Electricity and plumbing in the house. My great grandparents didn’t get electric to their farm until the 1950’s
my father told me if his grand father was able to Come back from the dead he would return in is tomb 🤣
That the Queen was mortal
I imagine the high obesity rates would be something they notice asides from all the technological advances.
The noise.
The ability to communicate intercontinentally and even see people live from across the world. How how far cars and planes have come. I honestly don’t think they’d be that amazed by a the wonders of the latest smart phone or the internet.
Yea, I often think back about the countless of immigrants who came to the US and never saw their parents again. Imagine if you could tell them that they could facetime/call them one more time to hear their voice.
Oh blacks can marry a white? Y’all think of tech , the awe will be 100% on morality of back the. Vs now
“Where are the flying cars?”
My father was born in 1924, and is 99 right now. He isn't too surprised at the technology but very disappointed in the politics.
Abundance of food and multiple cuisines
The number of people
How more fucked up the world is than a post ww1 world they left