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A prediction from 1966 (55 years ago) on how domestic life would be in the early 21st century. Walter Cronkite shows us. The technological marvels of computers, microwave ovens (?) giant-screen televisions, more than the five choices in broadcast television of the time, and communications devices are wonderful. They have been achieved and often surpassed.
My comment as I put it in YouTube:
If people had known about the nightmare of housing of 2021 which is essentially a bad version of housing patterns from the 1950's they would have shrieked in horror! And paying 70% of one's income for rent of a dreary apartment in an inhuman city? Yikes! Landlords are kings in America, and our economic elites are about as rapacious, inhumane, and exploitative as feudal lords.
The gadgets for cooking, entertainment, communication, and data processing are even more wonderful for miniaturization. (And, yes, we would need those in the urban nightmares so expensive because they are where the economic action is in 2021. The economy concentrates in a few coastal cities and a few that have a little glamour for the time (Atlanta? Dallas? Austin? Denver?) and college towns. But other than that much of urban America is an urban wreck. Housing might be cheap in a place like (well, name just about any dying city in Ohio, Michigan, or Pennsylvania) -- just try finding work in such places.
Imagine a world in which people are deeply in hock to see people like them much as a pusher sees an addict. That is America circa 2021.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
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(01-26-2021, 02:43 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: A prediction from 1966 (55 years ago) on how domestic life would be in the early 21st century. Walter Cronkite shows us. The technological marvels of computers, microwave ovens (?) giant-screen televisions, more than the five choices in broadcast television of the time, and communications devices are wonderful. They have been achieved and often surpassed.
My comment as I put it in YouTube:
If people had known about the nightmare of housing of 2021 which is essentially a bad version of housing patterns from the 1950's they would have shrieked in horror! And paying 70% of one's income for rent of a dreary apartment in an inhuman city? Yikes! Landlords are kings in America, and our economic elites are about as rapacious, inhumane, and exploitative as feudal lords.
The gadgets for cooking, entertainment, communication, and data processing are even more wonderful for miniaturization. (And, yes, we would need those in the urban nightmares so expensive because they are where the economic action is in 2021. The economy concentrates in a few coastal cities and a few that have a little glamour for the time (Atlanta? Dallas? Austin? Denver?) and college towns. But other than that much of urban America is an urban wreck. Housing might be cheap in a place like (well, name just about any dying city in Ohio, Michigan, or Pennsylvania) -- just try finding work in such places.
Imagine a world in which people are deeply in hock to see people like them much as a pusher sees an addict. That is America circa 2021.
And yet another prediction from the same time frame proved to be horribly wrong. That was where we were told that the advanced technology most of us now kneel at the feet of would give us reduced workweeks and ever increasing amounts of leisure time. We were beginning to head slowly in that direction until the middle of the 1980s when the PTB became hell bent on making an abrupt change and reversing directions all of a sudden. The society went from being overly hedonistic to overly workaholic almost overnight. Plus, super ego was involved, and the desire to express oneself by flaunting money became paramount. There were stories written about how so many who were formerly obsessed with getting laid became super obsessed with making money. At the same time dating services, once considered to be the last resort for losers, suddenly not only gained respectability as time pressed singles shunned things like cruising in bars, but most also became ridiculously expensive as the world upscale found its place within the lexicon where it still resides today. Many people lost friends in this process. Would be curious to know if anyone in this forum thinks we’ll ever see that world of increased leisure we were once all but promised.
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The creators of this rosy view of the world saw economic progress as a given and that it would surely make possible a better world for most people. This technology would fit people of greater formal education well (but if the teletype machine and other print-out devices would be the norm, then that would mandate literacy at a rather high level -- not bare literacy but also the ability to read between the lines, and interact appropriately. The technology was wonderful, but it could not conceal the vileness of the neoliberal politics that would slip in under Reagan, when real wages started to fall while the profit margins widened... and management, much of it trained in MBA schools, adopted command-and-control systems. Reduced pay and harsher management were not consequences of new policies to create more prosperity, although they succeeded at that. Real wages fell by design.
To be sure, American attitudes toward work changed. Talented people took the advice of guidance counselors and did anything other than factory work. Figure that someone with a BA degrees who got work on an assembly line was likely to go back for some further education related to industrial productivity such as engineering or certain phases of accountancy or would be the ideal shop stewards in union shops.
The sorts of jobs that burgeoned in the early 1980's, largely work in fast-food places and in shopping malls, were not the sorts that allowed an adult living; neither did they teach any skills other than how to bow and scrape before superiors (basically everyone).I had such a job and I actually got a pay raise because the minimum wage took a slight uptick, and I would have remained below the minimum wage had I not gotten such a raise.
No technology can compensate for human degradation.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
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That's a great video to watch, it was made the year I was born. It has that High Era spirit of belief in progress, and an assumption that there would always be institutional support to make it possible for the architects of modernity to realize their Big Visions. I loved the commentator insisting that the cost of utilities would force the vast majority of the population into urban hives. Instead, we've spread out. Everyone has their own vision. No one wants to live in house full of plastic furniture. But some of the tech they predict did indeed come to pass, some more advanced (computers, telecommunications) than they imagined, and others less so (robots, 3d printing).
Steve Barrera
[A]lthough one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation. - Hagakure
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(01-27-2021, 02:30 PM)sbarrera Wrote: That's a great video to watch, it was made the year I was born. It has that High Era spirit of belief in progress, and an assumption that there would always be institutional support to make it possible for the architects of modernity to realize their Big Visions. I loved the commentator insisting that the cost of utilities would force the vast majority of the population into urban hives. Instead, we've spread out. Everyone has their own vision. No one wants to live in house full of plastic furniture. But some of the tech they predict did indeed come to pass, some more advanced (computers, telecommunications) than they imagined, and others less so (robots, 3d printing).
So what went wrong? Except that we don't quite have the robots or the in-house food factory we have most of this technology -- or better. 3D printing is closer than you think, and I can see how it will be used. If we like how a cell phone works but get tired of the outward appearance we can replace the outer cover. Instead of the teletype we have more versatile printers.
Economic inequality has intensified, and that has slowed much of the technological paradise that this video suggests. Deeply in hock to landlords and to creditors, many people are working thirty-hour-a-week jobs... but two of them -- for bare survival. Such was a political decision to solve inflation by ensuring that people are obliged to participate in the production and servicing of what the economy needs, but to pay them so little that they cannot participate fully in the consumer economy. Such is exploitation in the form of neoliberalism, and it has colored the lives of a huge chunk of the American workforce. The elite dream of a workforce managed brutally and compelled to live on the brink of starvation is all too common in history.
Obviously, housing is inadequate, and those "ticky-tacky" houses from the 1960's are being cut up into apartments that will become slums in their own right if they are not such yet. But remember that the elites are having McMansions built on quarter-acre lots. and you can imagine what the cost is for servicing them with roads and utilities. Such crowds out the possibility of affordable housing. If anything the tract house can be replaced with a prefabricated unit (I have heard of people making houses out of shipping containers. Work must be done to make them livable, but if one is handy one might get something comfortable).
Something the size of the tract houses of the 1960's (they are adequate for all but large families or those addicted to conspicuous consumption) can be fully or partially manufactured. Electrical wiring can be built in along with access points for data and other signals. A broadcast antenna and a satellite receiver might be built in. Toilets and water supplies will be built on standardized foundations (although the toilets and sinks might be installed soon after the building is put in place.
A bland outer surface is perfect for painting whatever mural one wants. People will likely be under pressure to plant trees or gardens -- hey, I'm looking at the conformist 2030's, and certain forms of aesthetic austerity will not be acceptable.
Plastic furniture? I doubt it. Wood is still quite durable. So is leather, and if a giant turtle can live for over 100 years without a change of leather (I have felt the skin of a snapping turtle, and it feels just like leather -- the shell feels like wood), so can leather.
Technology fits human nature and the political milieu or it will either never establish itself or it will die.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
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