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These 19th Century Postcards Predicted Our Future
kkleiner writes "Starting in 1899, a commercial artist named Jean-Marc Côté and other artists were hired to create a series of picture cards to depict how life in France would look in a century's time. Sadly, they were never actually distributed. However, the only known set of cards to exist was discovered by Isaac Asimov, who wrote a book in 1986 called 'Futuredays' in which he presented the illustrations with commentary. What's amazing about this collection is how close their predictions were in a lot of cases, and how others are close at hand."
hopefully there will at least be some snide references to 'french postcards'
-I'm just sayin'
The problem with predictions is that if you make enough of them, whether vague or detailed, you'll find some of them came true. That is not surprising in and of itself, but some people take this as proof of something. But it's not proof, because they aren't looking at all the predictions that didn't come true, or weren't close. It's all about coincidence and the laws of probability -- things that are highly improbable by themselves can become highly probable with repetition or over time. So even if one of the greatest minds of the time predicted all these things for the future that came true, we cannot consider them in isolation -- we also have to consider all the things predicted that didn't come true.
Mr. Newton would have understood that as a scientist, and if he could be conjured up from the dead to utter a few words on this, he'd likely agree.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I have been trying to get my local postal carrier to deliver my mail to my balcony via Ultra Light, but she keeps pointing out that that would expensive, dangerous and I only live on the 2nd floor. Some people just can't see the future.
Linux O Muerte!
I don't know why accelerating maturity in some animals would be considered a "bad idea" or using radium to warm a house if foolproof containment unit could be devised..
Why you could even call it a "nuclear power plant" or something..
Not accurate.
They missed the 3 inventions that have done the most to promote health and prolong human life expectancy: toilets, refrigerators, and water treatment plants.
Same old lame story... People a long time ago predicted that people in the future would get what they want with technology. Fast forward to today, and people have amazingly gotten what they want via technology! All be it, in entirely different ways than predicted, but lets not let that stop a journalist with a deadline from filing a cookie cutter article!
And today Google is celebrating Winsor McCay. I know when I was young that I looked at these old drawings to envision the future. Tall buildings and lots of Zeppelins. Technology does have a way of defining how things look. Good printing technology 100 years ago did have a specific style.
the way chickens and turkeys are raised today?
What do you suppose the artist who drew this card had on his mind. Oh maybe he thought for just a moment about air travel, but plainly his mind wandered.
Many of the things we know today, and even take for granted, would be seen as pure magic to a person from the 19th century.
Take for instance something we are all on (precariously) friendly terms with, like the integrated circuit.
The finer points of how an IC work (such as the quantum nature of the bandgap, especially at nanoscopic scales) would be nearly incomprehensible to such a person.
Fiberoptic communication, with such strange things as helical polarization would bake their noodles, not to mention such curious things as the GPS network. (Einstein didn't come along until much later. GPS wouldn't work without SR, due to earth's frame dragging.)
Or even just the workings inside a cellphone, or just a microwave oven.
They might have been able to imagin the basic concept of the device, (eg, "portable wireless telephone"), but the signal encoding stratagems used to get the most from limited commodities of wireless band? In an age without computers, the math involved would be frightening! Something like 4096bit RSA ecryption would induce nightmares. (Just the mere notion that somebody might be willing to *try* factoring a number like that would cause dumbstruck expressions of incredulity. Let alone people routinely attempting to attack the problem from a myriad of different theoretical angles, and the impetus to do so.)
Others that would floor people from the 19th century, would be ENGINEERING microbes. They often felt that complete eradication of germs was desirable. (Just read the last part of "the time machine") As such, the very idea of creating new ones would be cognitatively jarring. Using engineered viruses for gene therapy and the like would seem backward and regressive to their views.
Wells' time traveler would be astounded, and confounded simultaneously by our modern world.
Here's a clever thought experiment for you: imagine H.G. Wells dropping in for a sunset view from his time machine at a nude beach, asking politely for a newspaper and being laughed at, going to a delapidated paper book library, and told by a 10 year old that he could have all the books in the entire world litterally in the palm of his hand. Expose him to the radical idea of the internet, then expose him to 4chan (or worse, a site dedicated to 'rule 34'), and reveal the shocking truth that most people use the internet for pornographic entertainment instead of personal improvement. (Remember, 19th century sexual repressedness)
My money would be on the time traveler being convinced we are all incurably insane, rushing back to his time machine, and wondering how it all went so terribly wrong.
Really, our world more strongly resembles the various "decadent decline" models of the fiction of their time, where people are depicted as being unacceptably vulgar, evil, and jaded. (Take for instance, the descriptions of the decadent residents of k'n-yan, from lovecraft's novels) A short, 10 minute exposure to witnessing an online FPS shooter, with 8 year olds "teabagging" people, with the conception that "this routinely happens" would surely sinch it.
Our world would traumatize people from the 19th century.
What's wrong with a Radium Fireplace? Keeps the place nice and warm.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Interesting and informative. Science Fiction at it's best, combines what can be known about what people want to do or to have done, with current knowledge of fields where boundaries are exploding, to guess ways of using advances in such fields to achieve such goals. The result illuminates how it might feel to do all that, and sometimes the guess on HOW isn't that far off at all...
The WHOLE POINT of science fiction is to get us to think about how decisions in the past and we make TODAY affect the future.
How about for an example? A TV-top camera watching for who watches what adverts being used to detect atheists who 'ignore' religious blatterings? (I hope) this is SF but either it is bound to be abused occasionally or massively. "The next educational program on Afgan [UAE, Dubai,...] TV is not for women."
I think our predictions of the future (regarding the singularity, robots, biogenetics, wealth, energy, and space exploration) will be as off based as these were.
This is interesting in its own right as it shows just how myopic these visions were.
I always laugh when I see our future depicted in movies and TV shows. Looking at Star Trek, we see how much the architecture is so 1960's. The knobs and lights look right out of 1967. Even something like the CRT-TVs in UFO and Space 1999 are dated.
I probably should mod your great post up, but I'll post instead.
This reminds me more of the Douglas Adams Hitchhikers series science fiction, where Authur Dent gets stuck in an alien spaceship and alien people and it's all just weird and incomprehensible to him. That's what 100 years in the future would be to us without understanding the inbetween 99 years. Alien.
They're far too whimsical to be predictions of OUR present. They're best suited as material for a steampunk movie or anime, what people thought was possible using souped-up versions of the technology of the day. I doubt whether it's possible to predict what the future will look, although it should be possible to describe vaguely what type of technologies people will use. For example, it should be possible to describe a tablet computer in terms that a 19th century geek would understand, a portable magic lantern that can also serve as a camera, telephone, phonograph, etc. In a non-dystopian future, we're sure to have micro-versions of today's supercomputers, but whether it'll look like a smart phone, AR glasses, or something implanted inside our skulls is something for the next Steve Jobs to market to the gadget sheep of the future.
What I always find interesting about visions of the future is the way in which people's present day taints the image. For example, I think there are some old science fiction stories about space travel where the people on the voyage use wood or oil for heat. Or, as with these postcard pictures, the idea of blimps carrying boatloads of people instead of jet liners. Looking at the original Star Trek series I find it interesting that they've got faster than light travel and transporters, but most of their computers don't have screens and they still use physical toggle switches for controls and some episodes show them printing off results on paper.
It's very hard to accurately predict the future because our visions are constantly tainted by what we already have. I think a lot of these postcards did a pretty good job, considering what the artists would have known at the time. The farming equipment and two-way visual phone calls are especially impressive. Sure, some didn't turn out, but I don't think that reduces the impressive show of imagination on display.
So basically you're saying that our time would be Futurama to his 1880's mind?
But what's interesting, too, are the many things people from the 19th century could and did imagine, and thought relatively simple, which still elude us today.
Take dictation devices, for example. It's an incredible challenge for us to do a good enough job with speech recognition to use them for actually transcribing documents. Google Now and Siri are jokes by comparison with what many futurists in the 19th century thought wouldn't be that hard: how many of them would be able to fathom, being told about something like the Internet, that courts still have to use court reporters, and the majority of the magical systems of the future use substantially similar keyboards to what they were using then?
Or take robotics and automation: again, look at the predictions from these postcards, or from anything between 1880 and 1970 or so. How would your time traveller comprehend that we can engineer viruses and nanometer-scale computing devices, but can't build a reasonable device to cut someone's hair or do someone's makeup? In fact, we tend to be impressed by things like robot arms barely managing to flip a pancake, or humanoid robots slowly climbing stairs. For that matter, we're just now starting to manage automated cars, something that is everywhere in science fiction over the last century.
What tends to be impressive about these sorts of predictions is that there are so many things we take for granted that people from past eras couldn't begin to imagine, and so many things they could easily imagine that are nowhere near being possible.
Worse.
The 1880s were still deely gripped by puritanism, social stratification as being a good thing, institutionalized racism, and a very narrow and rigid view of what was considered "acceptable", and "proper".
We aren't talking a comical spin on modern problems with aliens and silly technologies.
Think about what *we* consider unspeakable. THAT, times 9000.
I doubt that a 19th century time traveler would have a sufficiently powerful adjective to describe what he would see, and how he would percieve it.
I agree. Explaining the extreme difficulty involved with machines even approaching that level of autonomous function would be hard to do indeed.
Even today, few people realize how excrutiatingly difficult AI really is. Something as intelligent as a mouse would be a radical accomplishment. (And we routinely make science fiction where AIs with superhuman intellect are commonplace...)
Like everything, the devil's in the details. Sadly, this is something that routinely goes unnoticed or unappreciated, even today, where the reality stares us brazenly in the face and mocks us openly. (How many times have you had to deal with the starry-eyed executive, who has "a great idea"?)
Many of the things we have today came from trying to solve the frustratingly difficult, but seemingly simple things people have imagined for ages. Like going to the moon. I would be hard pressed to make an all-inclusive list of things around me at this very moment that exist exclusively because we dared to tackle that seemingly simple problem, [which it turns out wasn't so simple.]
I just think it prudent for people daydreaming about the future to rationalize that the future world where your romantic idea becomes real, is one that you simply cannot understand, because of all the knowledge and social changes it brought in the intervening time.
When I think about a future with strong ai in it, I imagine a future where goatse-esque things are commonplace, and even appearing on things like gameshows. Essentially phillip k dick on an ecstacy and crack smoothie. (With barbituates and chocolate chips blended in.)
I think you're way off the mark! I remember reading St Augustine's "City of God Against The Pagans" written in the early 400s. I was struck that my thought processes as a computer scientist were much closer to him than to my peers. He had the pedantic logical mind of a computer scientist. My favorite example is his version of the Cogito - "I know I exist. The skeptics say I am mistaken in this, but by the same token they say I am".
I think people from older eras were every bit as mentally adept and flexible as we are now, and more than we generally credit.
Let's look through your list...
The finer points of how an IC work (such as the quantum nature of the bandgap, especially at nanoscopic scales) would be nearly incomprehensible to such a person.
Incomprehensible to someone today also. I tried explaining N and P gaps to my wife without any success.
"Fiberoptic communication, with such strange things as helical polarization would bake their noodles, not to mention such curious things as the GPS network. (Einstein didn't come along until much later. GPS wouldn't work without SR, due to earth's frame dragging.)"
It wouldn't work without SR, true, but sextants and celestial navigation have been around for thousands of years, and by the 19th century they had damned fine instruments to measure celestial bodies including the moon. The idea of basing it off other more nearby celestial bodies would be easily understood. As for calculating exact position due to the differences in signals -- well, not much different from interferometry and "Newton's Fringes" (named after Newton of course).
"In an age without computers, the math involved would be frightening! Something like 4096bit RSA ecryption would induce nightmares."
They had many computers for celestial-navigation tables in the 18th century. Computer at this stage meant "person who performs computation", and they'd have entire halls full of them. And they had computers for artillery tables going back to the middle ages, where it was the bright mathematician hired by the local nobleman. The idea of upping the scale was already widespread. Charles Babbage (died 1871) was far more ambitious about what could be computed. He wouldn't have been frightened, not one bit. Say what you will about the 18th century, but they weren't unambitious about what they could achieve (at least not in the British Empire).
imagine H.G. Wells dropping in for a sunset view from his time machine at a nude beach, asking politely for a newspaper and being laughed at, going to a delapidated paper book library, and told by a 10 year old that he could have all the books in the entire world litterally in the palm of his hand. Expose him to the radical idea of the internet, then expose him to 4chan (or worse, a site dedicated to 'rule 34'), and reveal the shocking truth that most people use the internet for pornographic entertainment instead of personal improvement. (Remember, 19th century sexual repressedness)"
Whatever reason do you have to think that? Nothing of H.G.Well's writing suggests he'd be shocked. I reckon from his book "A Modern Utopia" that he's far more progressive than our own society today.
The Victorians were actually quite fond of pornography. So I don't think Mr. Wells would be shocked to learn that we are, too.
In other respects, though, I think your post is dead on.
Looking at a lot of predictions of 'the future', a lot of them were right on, and a lot of them were "WTF".
I wonder what a prediction today, of 200 years in the future, would be. Life in 2212. We've been tainted by Star Trek, etc All that stuff should be possible, NOW! But what will it really be like?
My predictions:
1. We will have landed men on the Moon again.
2. We will have landed men on Mars (why? I don't know...)
3. There will have been another nuclear weapon used in anger (this leads to a major restructuring of global politics)
4. We still won't have anything like a warp drive
5. We will have actually come up with a better power source. Cold fusion or similar.
6. There will still be religious nutcases (See #3)
The issue is not the lack of logic, or having weaker minds. (The exact counter argument could be made, in fact. The greeks had an entire profession built around training people to remember huge volumes of information, for instance.)
The issue is the distance on cultural norms, and radical changes that disruptive technologies produce. (Compare the culture of the 80s, with that of 2012. What changed? What stayed the same? Why?)
As for the 1880s mathematitian being daunted by factoring a 4096 bit integer, on paper... approach this rationally.
A 4096 bit integer has more possible factors in an exhaustive search than there were human beings on the planet at the time. Assuming 100% utilization of 100% of the world population, factoring a single crypto block would take more time than the human race had previously existed up until that point. Even with technological devices of the time, running at a few hundred operations per second (per babbage), the absurdity of doing this so uncle sam wouldn't spy on your private correspondence would be dumbfounding.
(People used cryptograms back then, sure. But nothing approaching the "overkill" of modern cryptography. When we measure "time to factor complete space" in terms of "time before universe dies of heat death", using modern, multi-gigahertz machines with billions of FLOPS each, *and* ubiquity of such horsepower, doing it on PAPER would be laughable, and a good mathematician would point out how impractical that is. Its like inventing superliminal processing, only to get porno from the future.)
As for victorian era porno.. with exception to houses of ill repute, and dog and pony shows, the "pornography" of the era is easily trumped with a victoria's secret catalog. Goatse, tubgirl, and "2 girls, one cup" and their ilk would send victorians rushing for the door. Remember, "dog and pony" were the "extreme" of that era. The shit on the internet, both real and fake alike-- puts even the raciest stuff from that era to shame in terms of being scandalous.
While wells might be willing to have an open mind about the future, I think he would draw the line at child porn snuff films, and people using the greatest accomplishment since the library of alexandria to wipe their asses with. (Intellectually speaking.)
We still don't have flying cars. It's clear that massive numbers of flying cars wouldn't work out well. But nobody has produced even a prototype of a useful thrust-type VTOL big enough to carry humans. One would have expected a military version by now. The stability and control problem is solved; little quadrotors under computer control are now incredibly maneuverable in tight spaces. Jet engines have enough power. The F-35 VTOL variant, like the Harrier, works, but the price tag is insane.
The problem is probably related to jet engine cost. Jet engines good enough for manned aircraft don't get significantly cheaper below 6-passenger bizjet size. That's why general aviation is still using pistons.
(Moller is part of the problem, not part of the solution.)
It's really amazing, that postcards from 1899, already described in details in a book from the last millennium, that I read as a kid, is presented as news for nerds.
I wonder what that same HG Wells would have thought of looking at a farmer driving his air conditioned enclosed cab tractor plowing his field while talking on a cell phone negotiating a future contract with a trader in Chicago for the crop he is harvesting at the moment. Or for that matter looking at a bunch of airmen conducting sorties over Afghanistan while relaxing in a Las Vegas suburb.
Perhaps more astounding would be to tell this time traveler that people went to the Moon, sampled a bunch of rocks, and then never bothered going back for another 50 years while letting the spaceships that could have (or even should have) been used rot away from rust and are eaten out by mice.
Yeah, it is a weird world we live in, which would certainly would confound and even confuse somebody from even the 19th Century. What was interesting though is that people at the end of the 19th Century knew that the world was going to change in some profound ways, and that the old ways of doing things was on its way out. The fruits of the industrial revolution were finally being noticed and it was transforming the lives of very ordinary people in profound ways.
Most of these are nonsensical and none really show what people keep saying they do.
flying machines were already being developed (just needed fine tuning), gliders were woking, balloons were flying, the telephone was in use, electricity was lighting and heating homes, and the 'robots' were talked about as part of industrial fantasy. As nice as these are, and I'd like a set too, they represent many of the common thoughts of the future.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
We've seen these quaint 'predictions of the future' pictures for quite some time.
Fiberoptic communication, with such strange things as helical polarization would bake their noodles, not to mention such curious things as the GPS network. (Einstein didn't come along until much later. GPS wouldn't work without SR, due to earth's frame dragging.)
I wouldn't count on that. SR was pretty much in place from a mathematical point of view with Hendrik Antoon Lorentz' Ether Theory of 1892, building on a framework by Hermann Minkowski and finetuned by Henri Poincaré. Until today we learn the Lorentz transformations in SR - and they predate the SR by 13 years. The only thing H.A.Lorentz didn't get right was the Ether. He still believed he needed a medium for lightwaves to propagate. But for calculations, Ether Theory and SR are equivalent, Albert Einstein's theory is just much more elegant.
The 1880s were still deely gripped by puritanism, social stratification as being a good thing, institutionalized racism, and a very narrow and rigid view of what was considered "acceptable", and "proper".
Sounds just like the USA circa 2012!
All the characters wear typical clothes of the era and the gizmos are wired up like an early Marconi wireless transmitter, not an amazing leap into the future at all. They were probablu unpublished because even the cheap postcard publishers could see that they were crap.
And the killer is that Microsoft used the "future schoolroom" illustration to plug their "Microsoft University" initiative some time in the mid-80s. I remember the advert in Byte from back then....
While wells might be willing to have an open mind about the future, I think he would draw the line at child porn snuff films, and people using the greatest accomplishment since the library of alexandria to wipe their asses with. (Intellectually speaking.)
Maybe you should read de Sade sometime. The days of Sodom contain stuff that would make even internet hardened people sick. We aren't talking about Goatse or 1cup anymore with this fellow, we are talking about stuff even hardcore bondage and fetish sites would not dare to show for real.
"Our world would traumatize people from the 19th century." Victorians were not as universally repressed as popular belief would suggest. In public, there was higher standard of "official" morality, perhaps. But HG Wells had a quite colourful love life.
> Many of the things we know today, and even take for granted, would be seen as pure magic to a person from the 19th century.
And to people today.
> The finer points of how an IC work (such as the quantum nature of the bandgap, especially at nanoscopic scales) would be nearly incomprehensible to such a person.
Yes, most people today have no idea about such things.
> Fiberoptic communication, with such strange things as helical polarization would bake their noodles, not to mention such curious things as the GPS network.
People might understand GPS (I do), but I'venever heard of baking noodles in relation to fiberoptic communication.
> Or even just the workings inside a cellphone, or just a microwave oven.
I've only got the faintest idea of how a cell phone works (it's a computer with a radio?), and most people wouldn't understand how a microwave worked. Though they may understand if you explained it.
> Something like 4096bit RSA ecryption would induce nightmares.
Bullshit.
> Others that would floor people from the 19th century, would be ENGINEERING microbes. They often felt that complete eradication of germs was desirable. (Just read the last part of "the time machine") As such, the very idea of creating new ones would be cognitatively jarring. Using engineered viruses for gene therapy and the like would seem backward and regressive to their views.
But an educated person from that time could have it explained, and understand why it was a good thing. Even if at first 'glance' it sounds like a bad thing.
You give too much credit to people today, and not enough to people from the past. An educated intelligent person from either era could understand most of what you mentioned with some basic explanations. Yes, some of it would be incomprehensible to the 19th C person, but some of it is incomprehensible to people today. (Why are 'civilised' countries still fighting wars of aggression, the leaders still lying and manipulating people, etc.? Why is sex still a taboo subject, and violence considered normal?)
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
Worse.
The 1880s were still deely gripped by puritanism, social stratification as being a good thing, institutionalized racism, and a very narrow and rigid view of what was considered "acceptable", and "proper".
you need to talk to your grand parents and great grand parents they were far more pornographic than you give them credit for
please note they have modern distractions like TV (the greatest contraceptive ever invented according to my grandmother) and came up with their own "Entertainment"
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
The finer points of how an IC work (such as the quantum nature of the bandgap, especially at nanoscopic scales) would be nearly incomprehensible to such a person.
Are you telling me the average Apple user comprehends how an IC works, but it would be a problem for a person from 100 years ago?
Or even just the workings inside a cellphone, or just a microwave oven.
Yes, the average user of a cellphone knows how ICs work and the average user of microwave oven knows the physics behind it. I get it.
They might have been able to imagin the basic concept of the device, (eg, "portable wireless telephone")
Yes, while the average contemporary user grasps way more than that... I said I get it, not that I agree with it...
Remember, 19th century sexual repressedness
Is this serious? Do you know anything about the 19th century? What are you talking about here, 19th century Buddhist monasteries perhaps? Yes, their porn was not that prevalent but that was because the technology was poor and expensive, yet there was quite hard porn even then, even though they could just go out and buy a few prostitutes and have the real thing! Yes, it may come as a shock to you, but porn is just a replacement, the real thing is better! Now who is shocked, eh? Try telling that to an American (citizen of the only superpower) who lives in a pseudo-puritan country where if you are shy/ugly/etc and can't get any of the loose women running around, you are not allowed to pay for a professional. Hey! Now THAT would be a shock to the 19th century French!
So while I don't doubt that many 19th century people might be traumatized if transported to today, your explanation is retarded. There are a great many people that would NOT be traumatized. Thinkers and scientists would survive fine (try to convince me that Tesla, Verne, Twain etc would have a real problem) and on the other hand many contemporary people would be as traumatized if they were transported back 100 years and they lost their MTV, Nintendo, Mac etc
Why is sex still a taboo subject, and violence considered normal?)
Because sex is more pleasurable precisely because of it taboo nature. If you take away the taboo, you take a out a lot of the intensity and intimacy.
Violence, on the other hand, is more public -- in fact a lot of the time that is the point.
Worse.
The 1880s were still deely gripped by puritanism, social stratification as being a good thing, institutionalized racism, and a very narrow and rigid view of what was considered "acceptable", and "proper".
you need to talk to your grand parents and great grand parents they were far more pornographic than you give them credit for
please note they have modern distractions like TV (the greatest contraceptive ever invented according to my grandmother) and came up with their own "Entertainment"
Having sex with other real people isn't pornography.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
While wells might be willing to have an open mind about the future, I think he would draw the line at child porn snuff films, and people using the greatest accomplishment since the library of alexandria to wipe their asses with. (Intellectually speaking.)
Maybe you should read de Sade sometime. The days of Sodom contain stuff that would make even internet hardened people sick. We aren't talking about Goatse or 1cup anymore with this fellow, we are talking about stuff even hardcore bondage and fetish sites would not dare to show for real.
Yes, but I think the point is that most ten year olds don't read de Sade as casual entertainment, unlike the crap on the internet.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
...so the future can be predicted, in theory, to within an arbitrarily small epsilon neighborhood. But...there is a difference between "predicting the future" and "extrapolating the present." The latter is just one of a myriad ways of accomplishing the former. SF is replete with interesting and intriguing attempts at extrapolating and correlating social/political trends with technological trends. The key, I think, is in identifying which correlations remain stable as the axes along which we are making the extrapolations vary in time. In chaos theory, these stable correlations are called strange attractors. For example, I would offer the the correlation between energy storage density and population density as a remarkably resilient strange attractor -- the correlation remains very significant, whether you are looking at a Neolithic encampment or a modern metropolis. As energy storage density rises, so does the social/political/economic infrastructure around it. This would suggest that the flow of energy and how we manage it will be strongly correlated with the social/political/economic trends at some future point. Models that incorporate this particular correlation will thus be more likely to model actual conditions than models that do not.
I thought the point was, that all the poor time traveling great great ... grandfathers would be scared out of their wits by goatse and friends. To which I replied: "I don't think so".
People have always found pleasure in rather bizarre entertainments. The internet has changed the availability of smut, but not it's range or scope.
I was just re-reading Catch that Rabbit to my daughter. I noticed that in 'The future' they spied on the malfunctioning multibot by watching it on the 'Visiplate' a flat screen TV/monitor.
...
What's interesting is how far off the mark the predictions of electricity-based technology these cards are. Lots of mechanical levers and knobs to control things. Also, miniaturization seems to have been missed.
He doesn't know how to use the three seashells!
I was more aiming for the 'la la la, wow, this internet thing in the future is fantastic, I can get any..... omg, is that mdoing what I think he's doing!? What is wrong with these people!? "Trol-lol-lol"?'
Eg, wells sits down at the free computer kiosk at the familiar setting of the library, starts researching things to see how culture has changed, and gets sub jected to the very worst the internet has to offer. Walked in expecting enlightenment. Gets a stark lesson in the futility that is man.
Even better, reads online that 4chan is a bastion of uncensored speech. Decides to look for himself (expecting more of a french salon). Gets told "tits or GTFO", called a "newfag", etc. Quickly realizes that no speech of any real importance goes on there. Leaves disappointed after having been pelted with internet memes.
Where's the cheese-eating surrender monkey card?