I challenge you to find anything that wouldn’t be explainable to someone of average intelligence even 50 years ago. I think the point is that you would have to explain it for it to make sense.
I can watch porn on my fridge.
Google translated text, English to Finnish with 1-2 corrections needed per page. I tried it then. I fixed every sentence. It had most of the vocabulary, more than half. But not the grammar and syntax.
Didn’t play Pickleball today. Not feeling well. Want to stay near a bathroom.
Anyway…
One of our house keepers (twice a month, it’s a life saver) is from Ukraine, She’s mostly deaf, but knows ‘Hello, goodbye’. That’s about if.
She, I, and my wife have translators on our phones. Speech to text or translate it to speech.
I doubt that was available 20 years ago. Maybe… but this is a really good free system.
We are happy to help her out. I can’t imagine what she is going through. She still has family in Ukraine.
Most of the world’s communications is owned by an amateur mixed martial artist who dropped out of college to make a website about stalking hot girls.
NASA is pretty much dead, but PayPal is taking humanity to Mars soon.
There’s only one or two newspapers left. CNN is only for old people. Most people get their news from the PayPal guy or comedians and podcasters.
The dominant ideology in the US is fascism and the government has been mostly purged of anyone who believes in democracy.
Billionaires are commonplace now, but a bag of chips costs twice as much for half the product. Houses too.
You can’t get an abortion anymore but you can violently storm the congress and be fine.
Much of the American entertainment industry is owned by the Chinese, with the Saudis picking up the leftovers.
More than half the world stopped using computers in favor of telephones.
The SDMB is still around.
There was a tv series, 2013 - ‘Sleepy Hollow’ - Ichabod Crane pulld into the 21st century. I thought it was impressive when confronted with modern life and things, he just sort of rolled with it. He was an intelligent man. (Me, I would have been standing in the middle of the street, aghast at the horseless carriages all around me.)
This blows me away. My wife also browses on her phone. She has a nice 17" laptop, a nice tablet that she asked me for (and has yet to use), but mostly uses her phone. 
I only browse on my phone when I’m away from my desktop computer. I prefer a 43" screen thank you very much.
I think 20 years ago predictions about politics and the state of democracy getting bad would make sense. The one I think would be hard to swallow 20 years ago is, “Democrats and moderate Republicans will look back with nostalgia on Bush’s time in office.”
Much of the technology and Internet related ones are only going to be surprising to people who weren’t paying attention to those things 20 years ago. The roots of the modern era were firmly planted back then.
To me, the most surprising thing tech related would have been the general rightward and fascist swing that big tech has taken. Back then I’d have easily believed libertarian, but lining up behind an incompetent autocrat?
Reagan let in talk radio as “news,” Rush Limbaugh and pals.
“I need to do a firmware update on my litterbox.”
The words make perfect sense, you can even understand what is happening. Just not why.
Almost any technology is “explainable” at some level, especially if you only go back 50 years where electronics was already broadly familiar. The more interesting question is to ask a person 50 years ago to explain a sentence like “I didn’t have any money so I paid for my groceries with my phone”. In 1976 that would likely be interpreted as “I unplugged one of my nice extension telephones and took it to the supermarket and traded it to the cashier in exchange for food”! How about that – we’re back to a barter economy again! 
This is very recent. Certainly 20 years ago Big Tech would have been considered purely as businesses, and possibly very promising ones to invest in. The idea of Big Tech (or at least certain elements of it) as strongly politically aligned is not only recent, but attributable to the unique nature of the present administration.
It’s not just big tech. Journalism and a lot of corporations too. They see fascism as just one more thing to pay off. Nothing for them to worry about.
I remember complaints from 20 years ago that big tech was not political enough. The claim was they were being out legislated by older companies that were experienced with lobbying and playing the DC games.
My surprise at them getting political would be where they ended up landing, not that they eventually did it. Of course if you told me that PayPal would be an incubator for evil billionaires I’d probably would not have been too surprised.
“On the advice of ChatGPT, Susie Q, who recently came out as fluid, quit their work-from-home job to be a travel influencer on TikTok. They are going nomad and will pick up gig work if they run short of funds. They will accept payment in crypto.”
If you said that to someone 20 years ago, I think they would have questions. 
I suspect that the biggest things since 2006 would be centered around smartphones and how they’ve changed our lives.
Outside of that, I think today’s increased shift away from in-store purchasing to online ordering and delivery would sound outlandish to 2006-me, even if Amazon Prime was almost a year old by then..
Yea, that’ll do it!
COVID changed a lot. Pick up your groceriers in the parking lot, or have them delivered to you.
When taking care of my elderly mother, that helped a lot.
This would have made sense. I had a Pocket PC in 2005 that was remarkably capable of doing most of what I use a smartphone now, including watching (with some hacking) videos including feature-length films. It was clunky and low res (compared to today), but I was doing it. I remember saying “If I could just make phone calls with this thing it would be perfect”.
I forgot my phone so I paid for my groceries with my watch.
One in real life: A few weeks ago I drove to work, while at work did a few errands and it wasn’t until I got home that I realized I didn’t have my car key with me all day, but since my phone is always on me and my car will start based on that, I never even noticed.