#I remember getting the little booklet celebrating 70 years since ww2
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What Will the 2020s Be Like?
DEC 13 2019
I focus a lot in this blog on technology, because it’s something I understand, and also because it does very much transform society and civilization. The cotton gin made slavery sustainable, and the Civil War, therefore, inevitable.
Tech made WW1 the deadliest war ever, and many believe that the advances of tech in the 1920s (radio, telephone, automobiles, etc) was so disruptive, it made the Great Depression inevitable.
WW2 wasn’t so much brought on by advances in technology, but more than any other event before it (or arguably since) it catapulted technology forward. From the first rockets and computers, to the first atomic bombs.
I grew up in the 1970s, which was the peak of the analog world... the world of newspapers, and three-network broadcast TV. There was an antenna on every roof... a pay phone and a mail box on every street corner. Cameras used film, recorders used tape, and electric typewriters had ribbons.
Your watch and your clock were analog, as was your record player. Your electric guitar had pick ups that fed an analog signal to an amplifier with a tube inside it. And your car... well all the gauges on your dashboard had needles. Any feedback systems it had, such as the automatic transmission, power steering, or the carburetor, relied on fluid dynamics or vacuum pressure.
Tech-wise, the 1970s wasn’t much different from the 1960s or the 1950s, other than doing all these things more cleverly... as one would expect after several decades of honing techniques.
Politically, however, the 1970s was a lot different from the 1950s, because of all the upheaval and transformation that happened through the 1960s. Civil rights were finally being taken seriously. The Draft had disappeared in favor of an all volunteer military. Social conformity was out the window forever. Secularism was on the rise, abortion was legal, and divorce was becoming more common and more acceptable.
Conservatives have never gotten over these political changes, which is why they have, in every succeeding decade, fought dirtier and more desperately to regain control of society... still dreaming to this day of overturning Roe V Wade, for example, but also longing to bring back racism, the subjugation of women, the persecution of gays, and state sanctioned Christianity to the exclusion of all other religions... and of science.
Not that I want this entry to be a screed about conservatism... so let’s just acknowledge that they’ve always been out there, through the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and teens... struggling like hell to claw us all back to the 1950s any way they can... and move on...
Having grown up in the 1970s, I became of teenager of the 1980s. So I can recall clearly that what made the 1980s different from the previous three decades was the advent of, “electronics.”
I put that word, “electronics,” in quotes to emphasize that this was still a world that did not have computers as we know them now, and nobody thought of their electronic devices as being, “digital”.
Yes, home computers existed in the 1980s... for hobbyists. I even had a very crude home computer, the Timex/Sinclair 2000 in the early 80s, but there wasn’t much you could do with it, and after it flopped, all support for it vanished.
This was the story for a lot of home computers in the 1980s. If they were useful for anything, it was teaching you how to program in BASIC, and learn the fundamentals about how these analytical engines worked, but many people saw them as kind of a fad.
Only super hardcore computer geeks really stuck with them through the 1980s. The rest of us just kind of lived our lives, knowing they were out there, but not really thinking they would ever matter much.
Electronics, on the other hand, was seen as a different kind of tech that really did revolutionize our everyday lives in this decade before the World Wide Web came into its own.
The term, “electronic,” was for any device from the analog days, that now had a circuit board inside it... with transistors on it... maybe a chip? People didn’t talk a lot about chips in the 80s, even if they did exist inside our devices.
A Telephone, for example, was an analog thing in the house, with big curly cords. In the early 70s, they still all had analog dials on them. By the late 70s, they all had all become, “touch tone,” with a keypad that sounded, “electronic,” tones to do the “dialing.” But the first truly electronic phones, were the magical cordless phones... with the stubby antenna on the handset that you could amazingly take all the way out to the front stoop!
This same kind of transformation happened to everything... from digital clocks, to electronic tape decks, cameras, speedometers, and even typewriters with little LCD screens on them, that could save what you were writing to little discs... which they called, “word processors.” :O
There were a million hand held devices... I remember owning an electronic dictionary and thesaurus, about the size of a small tablet today, and twice as thick, with a tiny LCD screen. It allowed you to play a few shitty word based games like hangman. It seemed like a modern marvel.
Video arcade games, of course, had a massive impact on our lives in the 1980s, as well as the first home game consoles, for those who could afford them... usually the upper middle class families that also could afford cable TV.
And after video games, the other huge tech that really transformed our lives was the video recorder. Again, you had to have some money to own one back then, but those giant, klunky camcorders of the day were a massive improvement over the old Super8 film cameras that only recorded video, with no sound.
With a camcorder, you not only could capture both video and sound, but on magnetic tape, rather than film... which meant you could watch it immediately. No need to have it developed... or rent a projector!
I could go on, but the point here is that the 1980s was a time when the analog world of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, was being magically transformed by electronics, and we really felt like electronics were going to allow us to do anything... and yet nobody imagined home computers, networked together, would be a part of that.
The original Ghost Busters movie from 1984 is a wonderful example of this, because it’s set in the real world... which is beset by the supernatural problem of ghosts, spirits, vengeful gods that range from nuisances, to existential threats, but heretofore have never been tangible, touchable, or provable.
But three, clever, modern men of the 1980s have developed an arsenal of electronic devices to deal with these ghosts. They can detect and analyze them, track them, attack them, trap them, and hold them in a containment grid... all with state of the art transistorized tech.
The movie really captured the feeling of the times, like no other... that we can use electronics, here on Earth (rather than in a galaxy far far away) to deal with problems in our everyday lives (rather than hacking into NORAD to teach an AI that nuclear war is pointless) and be heroes in our home town.
Young people did take that message to heart, embracing electronics to do what young people like to do... create stuff. In 21st century parlance we would say they were creating, “content,” but at the time, the big problem was in publishing said content.
Garage bands recorded songs and albums. Others recorded videos, both long, short, and very short form videos. People wrote poems and prose on their word processors... started, “zines,” which were published using photocopiers, in stapled booklets.
All this stuff we attempted to shop to big publishers, who’s gate keepers ignored it, so we tried to sell zines, and indie tapes in local record stores, or showcase local videos at get-togethers in coffee houses. We developed an, “underground,” of indie music, video, writing, comics, etc... which relied on a network of high school and college students disseminating copies of content from hand to hand, throughout the country, and across the pond.
Most of the greatest musicians and other artists of the 1980s... the ones who did get signed to indie studios to produce more professional material... were never acknowledged by the mainstream media... which by the 80s was under the control of 30-something baby-boomers whose only agenda was to celebrate their own youth, and crank out cheep garbage pop for commercial consumption.
So, when the 1990s arrived, and the World Wide Web came into being, with cheep, but reliable home computers that had dial up modems to get anybody with a paycheck online... that underground movement from the 80s took it over immediately.
Most of us had at least some prior experience with BASIC, as mentioned above, and knew the fundamentals about computing... even if we hadn’t used that knowledge much for several years.
Now, those skills were suddenly relevant, and most of us were still young enough (in our twenties now, rather than our teens) to take on the learning curves necessary to do everything from code HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, but learn how to work on and upgrade our machines, how to master operating systems and all the big applications... the word and graphics processors, the animation tools, the video tools, the audio tools... how to get freeware... how to make freeware... you name it.
The teens of the 1980s, including those hard core computer hobbyists mentioned above, who helped build the primordial backbone that would become the WWW a decade later, built the internet. We pioneered it, formatted it’s culture... of memes, piracy, boundless creativity, and the free sharing of ideas and technology.
And we did it all in the late 1990s and early 2000s before the mainstream media had any real clue that this silly internet thing could be come kind of a threat to their carefully curated analog kingdom.
Flaming and trolling were things back then... conspiracy theories, fake news, and disinformation were problems back then... but they were manageable. Nothing like what they are now, at the end of the twenty-teens.
The problem there, is that in the twenty-teens, the old conservative farts finally left the safe confines of AOL and began to slowly populate places like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter... as did all the AM radio shock jocks they listened to.
At the same time, “Big Media,” began to take the internet seriously as a threat, with YouTube and Netflix stealing so many of their captive eyeballs and earlobes, and launched a hostile takeover of the internet that continues to play out to this day... with Disney buying up every franchise and attempting to shut down Netflix, and net neutrality itself having been destroyed by the Trump administration two years ago now, allowing ISPs to partner with big media outlets and throttle competitors content, as they all attempt to stamp out independent, original content altogether.
YouTube’s on life support, for independent creators. Tumblr is a zombie husk of what it was just two years ago. Twitter is a hellscape. Facebook is for lifeless mannequins. Vine is dead. Blogger and LiveJournal are forgotten to time. MySpace, Geocities and AngelFire... all ashes now. All destroyed by blind corporate greed and the same army of bigoted killjoys we’ve been trying to beat back since the dawn of civilization.
Still, technology continues to evolve, and the internet of 2019 is not the desktop computer based internet of 1999. Twenty years later, it’s become a wireless internet that’s expanded to include very powerful handheld devices which can do everything every, “electronic,” device of the 1980s did, and much more... all in a thing that fits in your shirt pocket.
This changes the game going into the 2020s, as smart phones settle into their final form factor... and slowly begin to assume their ultimate role as the, “mission brain,” for an individual’s life.
In the 2020s, my phone will not just bluetooth to my watch, and be the thing I bank and shop with, as it is today. It will talk to my car, if I still own a car. It will talk to my house, if I own a house. It will talk to my smart glasses, overlaying my view of the world with augmented reality. It will be even talk to me... and work with me to solve any problem I might have... from finding a dog walker, to complex legal and financial issues.
From a political perspective... it will represent me in polls... the way today’s smart phone and land line phones have never done. And it will register me to vote, remind me when to do it three weeks early, and clear my schedule, and get me a ride if necessary... meaning voter turnout will be far higher than ever before among the younger demographics... from 18 to 55... or GenZ up to GenX... with aging Boomers still sitting on Facebook at their desktops, paying their bills with paper checks unable to understand why even primaries and midterms are largely decided by the time they show up in their walkers to vote straight Republican down the ticket, like what’s worked in their favor for many decades.
The bigger picture here, if you zoom back... is that, with the form factor of smart phones having been worked out in the twenty-teens, the big advances in the 2020s will be in the AI those devices have.
And that coming level of AI, will allow individuals to continuously circumvent any roadblocks the corporate and political behemoths of old try to lay down for us... from bureaucratic red tape and voter suppression, to monopolization of media and markets, to censorship and the moderation of free speech.
I know all of that sounds idyllic and Utopian... and loudly echoes the original view of what the internet was gonna do for humanity, back in the 1990s... but much of what we have today would have seemed overly-futuristic and impossible just twenty years ago.
I’m sure there will still be a dark political backdrop to deal with, as today’s upsurge of racism and fascism around the world struggles to stay relevant.
And the effects of climate change through the 2020s will be another big source of darkness and drama like we are only beginning to see at the end of the teens... which will trigger major transformations in the way we all live.
Homes will get smaller and more efficient. Car ownership will dive to new lows. Families will get smaller, and suburban sprawl will ebb backward, creating, “ghost subdivisions,” haunted by the spirits of Karen and Craig.
They will follow the trend of today’s abandoned shopping malls, which will also only get worse.
Meanwhile, weed will come to be legalized nationally... as it is already doing state by state, leading to an eventual end to the War on Drugs, and much of the gang violence related to drug trafficking... as well as an influx of tax money, even before we’ve figured out how to tax the rich at a fair rate.
The 2020s will not be without their tumult and tribulations, but I believe that on the whole, compared to the twenty-teens, they will be a lot less crazy, and a lot more hopeful.
Time traveler traffic... also... won’t be nearly as heavy.... which will ease the craziness considerably.
As for aliens?... well... Trump might just get his Space Force so... they will probably be taking the brunt of the trolling from the aliens, rather than the Air Force... for whatever that’s worth.
Time for bed.
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