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Time Traveler from 1965

I

ideologyhunter

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What would a person from 1965 say about life in 2015? I turned 11 in '65 and remember it as the year when the Mod 60's got rolling. But imagine a person (for some reason I picture this traveler as a middle class American teenager) who got to time travel and spend a week in our present world and then report back to the 1965 world. What would '65 Teen find most remarkable? I'll state the obvious:
1) The President is a NEGRO!!
2) No one says Negro anymore.
 
gmbteach said:
7) There are no flying cars.
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Yeah. Where the fuck is my flying car that I was promised in 1965?


9) Everyone has a personal computer belying the claim of the head of IBM that there would never be a demand for more than a few computers used by government and large companies.

10) People line up to pay over $2 for a ten cent cup of coffee.
 
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But..but..but....we were told in school that mechanization and computerization would set us free, doing the work of production and menial tasks so that we have the leisure to pursue our own interests, spend time with family and friends, hobbies, pastimes....WTF happened to the dream?
 
The internet would have to be the biggest thing. Even a person from the early 90s would be amazed at how pervasive its become never mind someone from the 60's.
 
Wives working. It takes two people working full time to achieve the relative standard of living one person could in th '60s.
 
(11) Gas is up from 31¢ a gallon to $3 a gallon

(12) In some car models, they started installing the battery behind the bumper where it is most difficult to access.

(13) You can buy water.

(15) You don't even have to leave your home to go grocery shopping.
 
thebeave said:
Tap water has become so toxic that people have to buy bottled water!!
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Actually that one is that people have been so convinced that tap water is bad that they pay more for bottled water (much of which is bottled from city tap water) than they pay for milk or gasoline.
 
1. We won the cold war!
2. There's still a cold war.
3. They claim they can fit an entire computer in a book!
4. Hollywood discovered a portal to alternate dimensions where they can film amazing stuff!
5. They've lost all sense of proper old fashioned morality!
6. They think smoking isn't cool, hah!
7. What the fuck is this paleo-diet crap?
 
The way people treat each other has changed. A lot. I doubt that they would understand the controversy about child sex abuse. Or that it is no longer standard practice to use corporal punishment on children like in schools. Or the concept of rape in marriage. Or that it is a lot easier to get a divorce.
 
We have completely bureaucratised the world but do not recognise it because we think bureaucracy means government. We have accepted terrifying levels of violence but do not recognise it. We have accepted the privatisation of most things, including law and government. And have not gone back to the moon because of the utopia of rules.

Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And just how much are our lives being ruined by all this nonstop documentation?

To answer these questions, anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice. Is the inane, annoying paperwork we confront every day really a cipher for state violence? And is the capitalist promise of salvation-through-technology just a tool for the powerful to exert more control?
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http://www.mhpbooks.com/books/the-utopia-of-rules/
 
If we're talking a '65 teenager, i don't think he's going to be that interested in marital rape or world bureaucracy.

And as with flying cars, i don't think smaller computers are going to amaze him that much. All the science fiction he's seen promises all sorts of technological advances. It's going to be all shiny and interesting and fun, but pretty much along the lines of what he expected.

He is, however, going to blush himself to death if someone shows him an episode of Game of Thrones.... Especially if people of both genders are in the room during the screening.
 
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