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
They know . A huge chunk just doesn’t care.
I have family in the US (who are not trumpets afaik) and they wouldn’t know that he actually got proven guilty for doing it. They‘d probably assume he made a deal.
Isn’t it a civil trial tho and not a criminal trial? Meaning that the bar for evidence is just “more than likely” and not “beyond a reasonable doubt” right? I mean it’s still very damning but he has not (yet) been found guilty of the crime, just liable.
There is an important distinction of being “convicted” and “proven guilty” though. You can get off a conviction through multiple means, one being a mistrial and so on. I think there is no two ways about this after reading:
A judge has now clarified that this is basically a legal distinction without a real-world difference. He says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood.
Was there a criminal trial, that ended in one of these other ways?
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?’
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
Yeah, like in that Doctor Who special where they tell the WW1 soldier “Now let’s get you back to your first world war” and he goes “FIRST world war?!”.
Wasn’t it known as the Great War until after WW2?
And yes, I am fun at parties.
I am assuming they’d put two and two together.
On account of the number 2, and how all their male relatives have been dead for less than ten years, that stuff is probably pretty top of mind.
Especially if they have boys aged below 10 in the family
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.
future telling is kind of a lame answer
“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.
Only the richest people have horses. Most just use cars.
That Germany is Europes biggest economy. 100 years ago Europe was fresh out of WW1 and Germany was bankrupted as punishment.
Mid 1930s that headline would also be quite disturbing
Mid 1940s it would’ve been a great laugh.
How pervasive surveillance and tracking of people (and their data) is in todays society. We’ve become accustomed to it but I’d bet people a century ago would be shocked at the idea of stuff like regular people being filmed from multiple angles when just going to the shops, having a device in their pocket constantly recording their location, receiving targeted advertising based on what information they’ve looked at previously, etc.
It wasn’t really that strange, people got tailed all the time during the nuclear weapons program and after, to make sure that they weren’t gay. Shit was wild in the early 50s. A senator committed suicide because his son was outed as gay, getting dirt on people was hardcore. People got fired on the flimsiest of claims.
Physical surveillance was pretty bad, even then. Digital surveillance has gotten worse today, but it’s much more fragmented and not so…eerily similar to the CCP. Also, fuck McCarthy. The book on this timeframe is a wild read, highly recommend it as it explains the postwar era and cold War paranoia.
https://www.amazon.com/Lavender-Scare-Persecution-Lesbians-Government/dp/0226401901
At risk of being a broken record, a reminder that OG fascism was cool and on the rise at that point. The surprise would be that you can opt out of all that stuff, people will just think you’re weird.
People were shocked about stuff like that in the eighties!
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.
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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
also anything involving european union
in 1923 that idea was not really that shocking and already talked about.
The only known sentence that is fatal to white british men circa 1900.
Neocolonialism is alive and well though. Today we have more slaves making more products, than ever before !
– “You can freely marry a Black person in most of the civilized world.”
– “Why would you?”
Most?
Climate change, same sex marriage (though, perhaps not as shocking as some might expect, ditto anything trans related), potential mars colonization, coming off the heels of the Spanish flu, COVID news would probably freak em out. Ooh, the USSR being gone, and China being a world super power. The USSR would have been new to them, and it collapsing less than a century later would probably feel quite odd, especially if you could make them understand just how incredibly advanced the USSR got in such a short amount of time. Tons of stuff.
In the 1920s a state fresh off a recent regime change disappearing would have been extremely par for the course. You telling that to someone from the 1960s would probably have more of an effect.
I mean, if you showed them a map it’d look nothing like their current political divide. I’m not sure they’d be more shocked by the state of what then was Soviet Russia than by Czechoslovakia being broken up or the other half a dozen changes in Europe alone.
I’m Czech, and exactly 105 years ago (October 30, 1918) the approximately dozen nationally aware Slovaks met in an inn and wrote a letter to Prague that they agree to be part of Czechoslovakia as the “Czechoslovak nation” because they knew they couldn’t form a state on their own, and split off the hated Hungary. The 4 people who signed our “Declaration of Independence” 2 days prior needed someone to represent Slovakia so they went in the streets searching for a Slovak. Vavro Šrobár, a nationally Slovak lawyer who incidentally just arrived to Prague, came forth and signes the document, and became Minister of Slovakia a few weeks later.
The Republic helped Slovakia reach its industrial potential and gave its people democratic values (except for WWII, we don’t talk about Slovakia in WWII). Eventually, Slovak politicians wanted power so they broke off after true democracy was restored in 1989. The Velvet Divorce was so uneventful compared to the end of Communism that people did not really care at all.
So I agree that to informed people in 1923, Slovakia being separate a century later would be no surprise. However, the formation of USSR (which I know much less about) was pretty controversial and involved a civil war so they might be actually be surprised it did last 80 years.
On the other hand, the other changes you glossed over are quite significant, especially with Germany and Poland.
Yeah, that’s a fair point, they may be more surprised that either example lasted that long.
And yeah, like I said above, the entire concept of World War II would blow their minds, let alone the redrawing of maps worldwide afterwards.
Show them a time lapse animation of the countries borders as they changed in real time such that a second equals one month. Two minutes of “what the fuck just happened‽‽”
I don’t think Mars colonies would surprise them. If anything they’d expect us to have family resorts or Jupiter
Many countries all around the world possess weapons that could obliterate an entire other country, or their own country if detonated by mistake, and possibly destroy the whole planet.
Well, I don’t think any of the nuclear countries are small enough to be obliterated by an accidental detonation. It would just but a nice hole in Nebraska or Omsk or whatever.
Perhaps Israel?
Israel wasn’t a country back then so it’s additional surprise
Yeah, that’s true actually. Assuming they have nukes like everyone thinks.
South Africa being the most progressive country in the world, in that regard, may be a bit shocking a well
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.
You can have a heart transplant.
1923 people expected mechanical heart transplants to be available today
Just an advertisement with a smiling black guy would do.
feels a bit like cheating given that the man in the picture is clearly being presented as a server, not a consumer
Fair. I didn’t understand what OP was getting at, so I took them literally. It seemed strange to ignore that white people in the early 20th loved depictions of smiling black people in servant roles.
As for ads targeted at black consumers… now I’m curious. I know there were newspapers targeted at black readers. I wonder if they had ads.
Yeah I think a better answer would’ve been “an ad with a black man smiling at his white wife”
For bonus points, make it clear in the ad that the man is a house husband and the wife is a working professional lol
Give them a gay son marrying his partner, really blow some heads.
A photo of Obama in the oval office
Most tram networks and passenger trains have been abolished. Yeah, and you can’t walk on the street anymore.
In the USA
