Looking back on american society, we can now identify many laughable ridiculous beliefs, mores, etc. For example, in retrospect the 1950s contain such nuttiness as:
men always wearing hats, and full 3-piece suits to baseball games
duck and cover
the nuclear family (mrs cleaver tending to the kids, while vaccuming in a dress)
controversy over elvis swiveling his hips on television
smoking cigarettes after a “healthy” meal of fatty meat and buttered potatos
1960s:
allen ginsburgh and the like are threatening and controversial
opposition to being drafted and forced to serve in vietnam would tear families apart
dopey hippies thinking they can change the world, when all they really wanted to do is fuck and smoke pot
spending billions and making a big issue over the “space race”
green acres
1980s:
big hair
bigger, uglier hair
just say no
jerry falwell
mr. t
obsession with materialism
thin ties
rambo
pmrc
1990s:
too recent to contemplate, but i’m sure pants hanging below the butt, martha stewart, and lame tattooing/piercing stand a chance of eventually making the grade.
Of course, I know I’ve left a lot of revisionist lameness out, and feel free to contribute, but what of our lives today, do you think will be judged laughable and lame in the future? my dumb guesses:
the concept of intellectual property
reality tv
starbucks
taking the internet way too seriously
the 2-party system
I can imagine people in 2010 looking back and thinking, “45-gig hard drives? 256 megs of RAM?!? Giga-hertz processors?!?!? Those people were living in the stone age!!!”
I also envision people looking at games like Quake III and referring to those levels of graphics as “primitive”.
Then there’s transportation… most likely, by then, they’d have found a way to shrink fuel cells down small enough to fit into most cars, and people will look back on our 25 MPG automobiles and scoff.
If the ISS (Internationl Space Station) gets finished on time, I imagine that people will consider the concept boring, and will be expecting lunar or martian colonies to be in development (probably lunar, if we even bother with such expansion at all).
And, of course, people will look back at Pauly Shore and say, “What the hell were they thinking?!?” (Oh, wait, they already do).
Y2K disaster
Attempts to sneak Creation Science into school cirriculums
USPS wanting to tax E mail (was this an urban myth? What?)
Pat Buchannon
Republican National Convention
Democrat National Convention
The City of Miami
The Anti-Christ
Nostradamus
The latest batch of Telephone Psyhics
On line dating (Get a life!)
That’ll do it for the moment. If I think of some more, I’ll try to forget them ASAP.
Celebrating the Millenium in the wrong year.
Not Celebrating it in the right year.
56k and under modems
Independent ISP’s (unless they make a comeback)
The whole controversy over trading mp3’s
Politics (God, I hope so)
Local Politics (if I have my way)
Cheap NASA missions (you get what ya pay for)
Gas Guzzling Super Sized SUV’s (how many gallons per mile?)
Dang, I’ll add more later.
I’m pretty sure that when I’m a grandpa, my grandkids will be shocked beyond belief that I lived in a time before the internet and email, and this will be analogus (sp?) to my amazement of my grandfather’s life before cars.
mabye I’ll have to explain that books were small, portable information storage units; yeah, kinda like a palmpilot, but without the pen. . . .
The “boy bands” craze.
The Viagra and similar “all-natural remedies” spinoffs
“Whazzzzup??”
All the sick and twisted teen movies (à la American Pie)
The Tom Green Show
Saint Zero, so far I think yours is going to be the most accurate.
I am only 14, so I don’t have the experience of being in the past, but here is my main prediction:
Ever see a sewing machine/TV/refridgerator/egg-beater that’s colored either beige or guacamole? You just look at it and go “Ewww,” but “back in the day,” EVERYTHING was that color, and it was all brand-spanking-new, and if stuff was that color, you’d say “Oooh, ahhh, that must be new.”
Already, beige-colored computers are sort of the thing you look at and go “eww.” But modern computers nowadays follow a simple rule: Either it looks like some kind of weird blob thing (For example, the iMac, or most Compaqs), or they have weird angles and semicircles like some abstract sculpture. Most printers follow this rule, I also have a computer (made by IBM, FYI) that looks more like an abstract painting than a computer. Also, the colors being used nowadays are either pure black, pur white, or white with a type of light cluish cyan. I am pretty sure by the year 2010, or even 2005, we’ll look at computers/appliances with these colors and just go “Uggghhh…”
Also, music-wise, here is some of the stuff I either probably will hate, or already hate:
The pointless, mindless, endless, thorougly irritating screaming matches about which was the “correct” year to celebrate the new millenium. Just pick a day and leave everyone else the hell alone, all right?
The pointless, mindless, endless, thorougly irritating screaming matches over everything else, from “boy bands” to Survivor to Elian Gonzales to every athlete who got caught with one freakin’ ounce of ganja.
Elian Gonzales. For all of Cuba’s human-rights issues, you really think this kid is going to miss being treated like a political tennis ball 24-7?
Y2K paranoia. Now they’re saying that if all the computer experts and companies did absolutely nothing, it would have been a catastrophe. Gee, I also hear that if all the fire departments disappeared, entire cities could go up in flames!
The RIAA lawsuit. I don’t know what’s dumber, that they sued Napster, or that they thought it wouldn’t do infinitely more harm than good.
And on a more personal note (did I mention that I was an avid videogamer?), SNK no longer producing games for American systems, in effect destroying any chance of them competing in the world market. They’re going to regret this several years down the line when no one’s interested in super-technical fighting games, the Dreamcast and Playstation 2 really take off, and Capcom, Sega, and Konami are stronger than ever.
