Some news that would be completely mundane today but scary or shocking in the past.
A convicted rapist (also charged with 91 other felonies) running for president, with as much chance as winning as the other guy.
Thanks for saying this. I bet most americans dont know that a convicted rapist was their president. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/
I’m not an expert on the nuance of the US legal system, but “convicted” probably applies to the criminal system, right? What would it be in this scenario? A confirmed rapist? Just “a rapist”?
Still, the guy raped some lady and he’s actively running for president. That one would be shocking any time before the mid 2010s, honestly.
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Yeah, “civilly liable rapist” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it
Civil was the case that they gave me
What’s my motha-fuckin name? “Civil Suit Loserrrrr”
Well, that’s not so bad then… /s
Yeah they’d be shocked that someone rich enough to run for president could be accused of rape ‘why didn’t he just have the girl committed to an asylum to keep her quiet?’
Anything price related. Imagine telling anyone from 1920s that you paid 50 dollars for a piece of clothing.
I paid 3.20 for a small loaf of bread. Fight me.
You can buy groceries from a mechanical grocer, but it’ll accuse you of shoplifting like three times while checking you out.
while checking you out
I’m sick of those suggestive robotic winks, and the vulgar gestures every time I scan a banana
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What game is that?
Atomic Heart
I had one scream loud AF at me because I didn’t move my item to the bay in the microsecond it allowed.
So in this scenario you’re back in 1923?
I’m pretty sure it’d be anything including the words “World War II”.
Bonus points if it also includes a date.
You might be able to streamline the process by saying “fears of World War III” and letting them fill in the gaps themselves.
I might find that reassuring in 1923, if the world makes it a full 100 years with only one global scale war. It’s a great run by historic standards.
Not really. Global Scale Wars were a unique thing back then. The Great War, the war to end all wars, was thought (hoped!) to be the only one of its kind. They had a lot of conflicts between major powers, but at least for the west, 17 million deaths excluding the spanish flu epidemic was a massive outlier.
Even the Mexican Revolution, listed on Wikipedia with an upper estimate of 3.5 million, wasn’t a quarter of that, and it wasn’t global. The last thing in the west that came (somewhat) close was the Napoleonic Wars with an upper estimate of 7 million, a hundred years earlier. China has had several massive death counts in various wars and rebellions, but that won’t have been very present to the average western civilian.
WW1 brought with it a slew of new developments in military technology and capability for destruction. For the world to have not just one, but potentially two conflicts considered at least on par with The Great War would be very concerning.
We should start talking about World War IV then
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. World War V will be fought with crossbows, World War VI will be lasers, and World War VII will be blowguns. I don’t know about World Wars VIII through XI. World War XII will use the same weapons as III, but will be fought entirely within underground tunnels. World War XIV will—Hey, come back! I have a whole list!
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. ~ Albert Einstein
future telling is kind of a lame answer
Few people would be surprised by it happening. They hoped it wouldn’t be for many decades but it was just known as the way future wars would go.
Quite a few people would be probably surprised that colonial empires are no more
as for headlines: British PM Rishi Sunak negotiates Scottish independence with First Minister of Scotland Humza Yousaf
Neocolonialism is alive and well though. Today we have more slaves making more products, than ever before !
also anything involving european union
in 1923 that idea was not really that shocking and already talked about.
“Man fired for criticising homosexuality”, or maybe “man imprisoned for refusing to hire black person”.
People are thinking about technology, but in 1923 people were very familiar with breathtaking technological change. The complete reversal of some social norms, on the other hand, would be almost existentially disturbing to these dudes who believe in the great benevolent Christian empires, and in some cases thought ending slavery was a mistake.
I have to wonder what the residents of the 1920’s third world would think. I’m sure there would be many interesting perspectives.
Those type of headlines upset way too many people today. It’s the point of the make America great again slogan.
I don’t think you realize how far tech has advanced in 100 years. Commercial flights didn’t really exist in their current form of scheduled flights between airports. Computers didn’t exist beyond mechanical ones that aren’t really comparable. Electricity was only in half of households in 1925. Telephone lines were only local and required manual switching by operators.
Breathtaking technology in the 1920s has nothing on what we can do today.
I mean yeah but the point is that technological advancement was still a common occurance. Like, yeah a sensationalized article about self driving cars would blow some minds but to most i think it wouldn’t really make any bigger waves then basic cars already were at the time. How can they be blown away by the concept of self driving when the vehicle itself is so new and interesting you know? AI is so abstract that even today most people don’t understand it, 100 years ago it’d just be “another new thing” just like it is today… We are actually less accustomed to ground shaking new inventions so I’d argue that 100 years ago a lot of our modern tech would be less exciting given the regularity in which things were changing then.
Social upheaval however is ALWAYS a huge deal, especially for the time. Bear in mind that Progressivism is a fairly new ideology in the States. For literally hundreds of years social change came at a snails pace and took serious, concerted effort. Nowadays we are on average much more open to change and accepting of diversity in all it’s forms, but there’s a reason everyone remembers the name Martin Luther King Jr., versus… Ruth Bader Ginsburg I guess?
“XXI-century people carry in their pockets a machine that lets then see what’s happenning on the other side of the planet as it happens, check the biggest encyclopedia there is without having the go to a library, talk live to people anywhere in the World and which can calculate the most complex mathematical problems in a fraction of a second”.
It’s not technological change that would be unimaginable but rather what ended up being done with it as, at least judging by SciFi films over the years, people tend to look at what they have and more or less lineraly project forward.
I mean, look what what Metropolis expected the future would be or even the 1970s film and TV-series idea of the kind of materials, design and human machine interfaces the future would have (it’s kinda funny to look at the CRT-display-based “future” tech of 70s TV series).
Mind you, socially mankind doesn’t seem to have evolved much in these 100 years, but in terms of Tech and the possibilities openned by it, it has.
It’s a pattern that emerges over and over again. Technology is reasonably easy to predict (we’re still using 1920s physics after all) but the way people will react to and interact with technology is completely impossible to see coming. Like, our guesses are about as good as random chance; that’s why nobody saw PCs and smartphones coming and then turned around and poured a lot of money into 3D TVs and wearables.
I don’t think it would be impossible to model somehow, but I’ve yet to see any convincing work in that direction.
It’s an interesting one, the Tom Swift series from around 1910 has him in rocket ships using wireless photo telephones, electric rifles, and all sorts of sci-fi before world war one - it doesn’t have many female characters, certainly no gay characters.
There is a suffragette character arguing for the right to vote in the 1910 novel, a right women wouldn’t gain for another ten years in the USA - so a hundred years ago they were in an era where the start of social change is beginning but to what extent people would expect that to continue is hard to say.
Metropolis is an interesting example too because they did have more advanced AI than we currently have - the maschinenmench Maria; an often submissive, vulnerable, emotional, manipulative, motherly and generally very stereotypically (for the time) feminine character.
I think people in the 1920s expected in the next century technology to advance a hundred miles and social issues to change maybe an inch. I can think of sci-fi from that era with black characters but none with an expectation of civil rights for those black characters.
Yeah, but electrification, cars, antibiotics, many forms of sanitation, many forms of canning, radio, telephones of any kind, several forms of weapon and powered aircraft in general were new within living memory in the 20s. “It gets (much) better and more accessible” wouldn’t have surprised anyone. If we were going back 200 years you might have a point, and definitely would at 300.
Actually, they didn’t understand how radio crystals (which are very rudimentary semiconductor diodes) worked at the time, but pretty much every other principle of physics used in modern technology was understood at that point. They just needed to finish quantum mechanics, and then figure out a few steps of application.
“A N***** WANTS TO BE PRESIDENT. AMERICA HAS LOST ITS WAYS TO INSANITY”
“F*****S PARADE AROUND THE CITY AND THEY WERENT SHOT AT FIRST SIGHT”
“PATRIOT ARRESTED FOR BURNING CROSSES”
“PEOPLE CLAIMING STATE AND CHURCH SHOULD BE SEPARATED ARE NOT FIT FOR OFFICE, THEY ARE COMMUNIST TRAITORS”
“PEOPLE CLAIMING STATE AND CHURCH SHOULD BE SEPARATED ARE NOT FIT FOR OFFICE, THEY ARE COMMUNIST TRAITORS”
That’s more of a 50-70s thing. In the 1920s communism wasn’t a big idea in the US and God wasn’t in the pledge nor part of our national motto.
The first Red Scare was in 1919 and communism was a big enough idea in the US that the government was putting communists in prison
I don’t know how many headlines would be talking about Communist traitors in 1923.
That people from my country actually had the gall to behave like our country belonged to us and not white people.
Bolivia?
India, it’s not even been 80 years since we became independent
Imagine telling your countrymen that Rishi Sunak was Prime minister of the UK and Humza Yousaf was First minister of Scotland. 🙂
The Titanic sinking kills five more
Lol, brilliant answer. I never would have thought of that.
Oh, snap!
The storm of the U. S. Capitol would be the most shocking one, probably, as nobody dared to do that.
Also, 9/11 events, nuclear/thermonuclear bombs, nuclear power plant disasters, many things.
Technologically, the fact that an everyday laptop can deliver tens of billions of arithmetic instructions per second is still mind-boggling to me.
That Germany is Europes biggest economy. 100 years ago Europe was fresh out of WW1 and Germany was bankrupted as punishment.
100 years ago today, a loaf of bread cost one billion Deutsche Marks.
And by billion they meant twelve zeroes.
Most international experts consider the outbreak of a third world war unlikely in spite of global surges of violence
Not mundane, but the implications would be horrifying to 1923 society still recovering from “The Great War”.
And funny enough, still misleading about how soon the next one is. Nukes really changed the game (for better or worse) and they don’t have them yet.
Only the richest people have horses. Most just use cars.
“Russian control of Crimea contested”
“Egyptian controlled Suez blocked”
“France controls British power infrastructure”
Brexit would have confused a lot of people.
