Why was the 21st century so nasty?

MadScientistMatt · May 4, 2008

We had a recent thread in the research forum where a lot of misconceptions about the Middle Ages popped up. While sanitation and hygene weren't quite like what they are now, and science wasn't as far advanced, there's a lot of claims about what life was like back then that are quite exaggerated or simply untrue.

That got me to wondering - what equally over the top beliefs might a society in the far future hold about the past hundred years? Would some people claim that it took the Apollo voyage to the moon to convince people that it wasn't really made of green cheese, for example? Or might some of the "Road Kill Cafe" jokes around nowadays mutate into a belief that restaurants sometimes really did serve putrid dead animals that had been struck by cars?

What strange and gross urban legends might the far future have about our times?

Smiling Ted · May 4, 2008

"Boring? Wasn't that the time they cracked the human genome, and boy bands roamed the earth?"
-Prof. Hubert Farnsworth, New New York, 30th Century

Ruv Draba · May 4, 2008

People in the 21st century used to race their cars to death. "Car cemeteries" were full of the wrecks of the vehicles they crashed, and people cemeteries were full of the losers.

Wealth and status depended on how fat you were. Parents would take their children to fattening restaurants just to give them a good start in life. Bloating adults would have to throw away their clothes every year.

The desire for wealth was so high that competitive children used to have gun-duels with each other in schools.

Parents were so greedy that they'd buy property and rent it to each others' children.

People believed that excessive air-conditioning could stop global warming.

Fertility was low. There used to be fertility rites called 'raves'.

(This one from a Spider Robinson book): People were so vain they'd go to salons and recline in big chairs in front of mirrors, just to admire themselves.

Advertising lights were so bright that people had to wear sunglasses.

People were so afraid of nature that they killed it all off.

Mr Flibble · May 4, 2008

Wealth and status depended on how fat you were. Parents would take their children to fattening restaurants just to give them a good start in life.

Yup

bethany · May 4, 2008

um, whoa. I was thinking this was a fascinating idea for a thread. And then it got all weird and hostile.

I love the idea of people in the future looking back and getting our culture all wrong!

maxmordon · May 4, 2008

bethany said:
um, whoa. I was thinking this was a fascinating idea for a thread. And then it got all weird and hostile.

I love the idea of people in the future looking back and getting our culture all wrong!

So sad when that happens!

Hitler wasn't bad, but misunderstood. The racism thing? that's just revisionism made by the American Empire

People used to worship a Pantheon of deities called Kellog's. Apparently they thought this brought them they daily meal

Jim Carrey was a genius satirist who used to mock the dumb habits of its time making it over-the-top

Matera the Mad · May 4, 2008

They wore plastic clothes, and had to use a chemical called "fabric softener" to make them wearable every time they wased them -- and that's the other weird thing, they used billions of gallons of drinkable water to wash their clothes, when now we have solar powered ultrasonic cleansers.

althrasher · May 4, 2008

"Women would go to insane lengths to find a mate. It was common practice for women to undergo invasive surgery just to appear more attractive.

It was also common practice for all people to regularly poke themselves in the eye with a crude sort of eye-lens, rather than the simple corrective surgery we use now."

Smiling Ted · May 4, 2008

"The Late 20th Century was riven by thousands of different religious denominations, or 'channels,' adherents of which would fight to the death, although all claimed devotion to the FarSeer, who was worshipped in each home in the form of a cube with a square glass screen."

-Aesthetics of of Religious Experience in the Plastic Age
Roland Houghmahany, PhD
Trump University Press

a_sharp · May 4, 2008

Before we returned, the alien human race actually believed we were the aliens and created the myth that our liberation of planet Earth was an invasion, fer god's sakes!

A common form of entertainment was to vegetate before a small hand-held device and delude oneself that one was having conversations with others while pressing alphabetic keys with one's thumbs. The gibberish that clogged the ancient ether became known as "twexting."

Recent archaeological evidence proves conclusively that the so-called Twin Towers of Nyck never existed, anymore than Nyck itself existed, except as fable and fantasy.

a_sharp · May 4, 2008

Global Warming was a hoax perpetrated by the Smarties until Elvis Presley rose from the dead to exhalt the Magic Kingdom, (all glory to the great prophet Disney and his first disciple, Eisner). Thus ended ages of scientific oppression, paving the way for Better Living through Animation.

sunandshadow · May 4, 2008

Back then people could get pregnant by accident - isn't that a horrifying thought?

benbradley · May 4, 2008

I do think this is an interesting idea, especially if you also look at it from the other direction (we KNOW or can at least research what people believed and expected the 21st Century to be like).

I recently heard this Fresh Air interview with R.E.M. in which one of the guys talks about back in high school or college, learning about what the 21st Century was going to be - no pollution, no energy problems, no social ills,...(no Global Cooling...) All that was supposedly inspiration for a song or two, but it gave a perspective on the present that gives one pause.

I vaguely remember this sort of thing too. I specifically recall as a child in the 1960's going through this "tour trailer" or whatever that talked about "The Future of Nuclear Energy", specifically that nuclear fusion power plants were only ten years away, would provide clean electricity without having to burn coal in power plants, and would be so cheap it wouldn't need to be metered...

benbradley · May 4, 2008

And here's another thing... imagine future net.archaeologists going through Internet backup files (Painstakingly Preserved by the folks at http://archive.org, among others) and finding all these thousands and thousands of blog entries with variations on these little quotes about times and events in the early 21st Century, "The best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy...":
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/chrisrock.asp

And throw in a few pertinent word meaning changes over the decades that might make some of these statements unintentionally hilarious or scandalous, or the meaning radically changed in some other way. As just one example of a word that changed within my lifetime, when I was a child gay meant a state of mind, not a sexual preference.

Pthom · May 4, 2008

sunandshadow said:
Back then people could get pregnant by accident - isn't that a horrifying thought?

"Back then, people actually got pregnant."

"What's 'pregnant?' "

"Never mind, Alice. It's nothing you have to worry about. When you're old enough, you'll pick your offspring from the selection at the pound, same as we found you. Now eat your bleck."

Ruv Draba · May 5, 2008

The penalty for being caught robbing was to go to school with other robbers, and the penalty for murdering was to be murdered.

It was considered rude to care about your neighbour. Only indifference was considered polite.

They invented new rules for intolerance and condescension and called them 'political correctness'.

Love was thought such a catastrophe that it had the same word as for crimes and car-accidents: "involved".

Everyone raced to own more stuff, but they had to throw it away a year after they got it.

Life-mates made agreements for how their love and loyalty should end.

There was a whole profession who'd help you break agreements. Another profession would check to see if you'd kept them.

The world was getting crowded, so they tried to build a new, floating country out of old plastic bags.

It was legal to put paupers into debt.

They used to poison their faces to make them look young. They'd cut and stretch their faces like old upholstery to make them look smooth.

Having bred for greed for hundreds of years, parents got scared when their fat children started dying at fifty and tried to get the greed out of their kids' genetic makeup. Thirty years later, their greedless kids tried to ship their parents off to that big, floating bag-island with all the rest of the junk they'd been so involved with.

MadScientistMatt · May 5, 2008

One chilling thought: A lot of bad scholarship these days about the past has come from scholars who failed to recognize satire and political polemics for what they were. Imagine if the best preserved works of our time turn out to be those written by anonymous Internet forwards, followed by Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, and The Onion.

There's likely to be quite a tale about the Great Nigerian Treasure Hunt, where billions of dollars in unclaimed money, enough to have solved all of Africa's debt problems, had inexplicably been misplaced. Greedy white businessmen looted it with the help of a few highly placed widows, which was why Africa was so overrun with poverty.

mario_c · May 5, 2008

MadScientistMatt said:
One chilling thought: A lot of bad scholarship these days about the past has come from scholars who failed to recognize satire and political polemics for what they were. Imagine if the best preserved works of our time turn out to be those written by anonymous Internet forwards, followed by Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, and The Onion.

There's likely to be quite a tale about the Great Nigerian Treasure Hunt, where billions of dollars in unclaimed money, enough to have solved all of Africa's debt problems, had inexplicably been misplaced. Greedy white businessmen looted it with the help of a few highly placed widows, which was why Africa was so overrun with poverty.

That'd be funnier if people didn't believe it today.

yappo · May 7, 2008

Overpopulation was so bad society had to reinstitute means to remove surplus population. All over the world institutions openly killed off the elderly who had become a burden to society. However, in difference from more primitive times these institutions used highly sophisticated methods to provide as humanitarian an end as possible. To some degrees it even resembled medical aid, in as much as one can talk about a medical science existing at all in those days.

Zoombie · May 7, 2008

Did you know back then, people had to keep the organs they were *born* with!

slcboston · May 7, 2008

Ruv Draba said:
Love was thought such a catastrophe that it had the same word as for crimes and car-accidents: "involved".

How did I never notice that before? :Wha:

tallus83 · May 7, 2008

All of the 21st centuries' problem can be traced back to one cause: OPRAH

benbradley · May 7, 2008

Zoombie said:
Did you know back then, people had to keep the organs they were *born* with!

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZT. That was only true for the first two decades, and not even neccesarily true for all people who were BORN! If only ten percent of the nightmare stories I've heard about childbirth are true, it's no wonder women were so glad to give it up.

Where do these Urban Legends come from...

Read this writing in the old-fashioned "English" language I found on an old papyrus scroll from early in the 21st Century:

...he noted that average life expectancy increases by about 3 months every year. Kurzweil then claimed that longevity trends are accelerating so fast that the life expectancy will increase more than one year for each year that passes in about 15 years. In other words, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy could be indefinitely long. He projects that by 2030, AI will be ubiquitous, and most humans will be physically melded to information and other technologies.

As usual for predictions back then, that dude was too pessimistic, as it all happened by the year 2021.

All the history is available to anyone for free, right here at http://encyclopaedia-Eastasia.com (hmm, link doesn't work right now, but I'm sure it'll come up Any Moment Now...)

benbradley · May 7, 2008

tallus83 said:
All of the 21st centuries' problem can be traced back to one cause: OPRAH

You misspelled DRPHIL.

geardrops · May 7, 2008

I don't know how much projection we can make on the 21st century, seeing as we're now a paltry 8% into it, but a good deal can be said about the 20th.

Why was the 21st century so nasty?

Empirical Storm Trooper

Ah-HA!

They've been very bad, Mr Flibble

:)

Penúltimo

Bartender, gimme a Linux Mint

Prodigal Muser

Ah-HA!

Somebody give me an A

Somebody give me an A

Impractical Fantasy Animal

It's a doggy dog world

It's a doggy dog world

Word butcher

Empirical Storm Trooper

Your thoughts are not real...

Dragon of the Multiverse

Pasture-ized

It's a doggy dog world

It's a doggy dog world

Good thing I like my day job