As an aside, I wonder what the history books will say about our time in 100 years or so. It's interesting to think that we are all a part, no matter how large or small, of history in the making. For better or worse.
I'm gambling on "The Oil Age". Political strife will be placed in the context of petroleum geopolitics, energy sectors, climate change, and what will be dubbed "The first migration" (if ocean levels rise as some predict, there will be a second migration for 10% of global population [1])
You can wrap, among other things, the 70's OPEC wars, 79 Iranian revolution, 9/11 and the rise of Trump in a nice tiny bow and create a coarsely accurate depiction of history over those 45 years. You can even have a little side story about things like the 1985 "We Are the World" charity song without missing a beat.
In the long run, things like Facebook and Snapchat will probably be as relevant and well-known as say, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. Never heard of it? It's a charter member of the Dow Jones Transportation Average (the predecessor to the DJIA) and an important company from the 1800s ...
When I was in combat training (U.S., mid 2000s), a corporal who was teaching a munitions class one day started pointing to things and listing off random objects. Clothes, chairs, computer, projector, weapon lubricant, etc. He asked what all of these had in common. The answer was that they all contain petroleum derivatives. And that's why we go, he said. The 18-year-old idiot me didn't understand, so that night I went into my Green Monster (didn't have internet) and started reading about recent U.S. military involvement. It culminated in a rather dramatic mental image of Iraqi forces retreating through Kuwait and burning hundreds and hundreds of oil wells as they went. I was still very confused, but I was overcome with a sharp feeling that I was a pawn in a game being played by gods I couldn't see or hear or meet or understand, a game that had been going on since before I was born. I became depressed and cursed my father for not teaching me anything at all useful about the world.
I don't know why I wrote all of that. Maybe just to say that I'm sorry for my part in all of this bullshit.
> what the history books will say about our time in 100 years or so
The history books will be written by the victors. What the history says will depend hugely on whether we have free informational continuity between now and then or a massive legal/totalitarian/military/nuclear/catastrophic "wipe" destroying that.
(Less dramatically, this is obviously the era when intelligence agencies are fighting and the internet is their battleground. ""Cyberwarfare"" is not about turning off power stations, it's about destroying your opponent's ability to do normal open democratic politics. There's even tension between US domestic security services - the FBI director Comey is clearly pro-Trump while the CIA are not, and Trump has gutted the US State Department which has traditionally been the department for interfering with other countries.)
History is written within the perspective of the writers and benign things constantly drive revisionism. It's often to support a mythical narrative and provide some kind of cohesive abstract framework to justify policy positions and a depiction of an austere past.
For instance, free speech, as we know it, really came around WW1-era and was due to people like Learned Hand convincing Oliver Wendell Holmes. But since then, history has been seemingly rewritten to make it look like it was part of the revolutionary war.
There's plenty of other things ... non-citizens could vote up to 1926. The "American Dream" was coined in 1931 and was essentially backdated to colonial times, etc.
Accurate realities will bunch the pants of essentially everyone regardless of politics. One could argue being openly gay, for instance, in the 1800s was not seen as insufferable. James Buchanan, the 15th president, lived with a man and was referred to by terms that were contemporary to homosexual. I've done fairly extensive private research and can't find it being a controversial thing during his campaign, even though this was a well known fact (I've meant to do some more microfish reading at the library about it). See, there I go messing up the narrative of progressivism and civil rights. Sorry.
The guy after him, Lincoln, was seen so unfavorably at the time that he won the popular vote in 1864 by only 10% - this was after everyone who disliked him had ostensibly already left. You think he'd be a landslide in the remaining states.
There's a narrative of a cordial press during FDR being too polite to take photographs of the man in a wheelchair. Nope, the secret service would confiscate your camera, possibly strip you of press privileges and destroy your film. Kinda like a repressive state.
This isn't the tropish "victors write the history" - this is a more nuanced instance of people framing benign things to support a narrative arc and defend a lensing through the politics of storytelling. The deviations, far-reaching connections, and omissions, can often reveal preferences on what the underlying culture of the author would prefer them to see and can be as revealing as the text itself.
> messing up the narrative of progressivism and civil rights
Is it? There's a whole subfield of queer history devoted to getting an accurate record of this kind of thing. Arguing that it's always been present in society but treated very differently by different societies.
It does mess up the Whig view of progressiveness being on a ratchet.
Many of these things I go to university libraries to research. I'm actually walking through downtown LA to get the results of prop 14 in 1952 right now from LA public. That was to repeal article 19 of the California Constitution which excluded and put severe restrictions on Chinese people.
I'm curious if there was an against campaign for its repeal. Most of the online archives I could find referred to it as antiquated and unenforced but I would like to know what the results were and if there's any op eds leading up to it.
Edit: nope, there was an 1880 case that nullified the article. This was a mere formality. There was very little mention of it beyond that. Passed with 78%
I think in a 100 years there won't be many history books being written. Think of what climate change is gong to do in just the next 30 years, and then be honest with yourself about the next 100. Look at what a small amount of migration has done to global politics, and imagine a couple of billion on the move.
Look at nationalism and populism on the rise. We've passed the point of no-return I think... that will be the lesson for any surviving future historians.
I think you underestimate the adaptative capacities of human society. If global warming doesn't exterminate all human life it'll take about one generation for people to get used to it. On the scale of human history a single generation really isn't much.
2016 was the first year I've lived through where I thought to myself "This is a year people will list in the history books." In the same way people know dates like 1929 or 1848; I don't necessarily think things will turn out that consequential in the long run, but I can envision children asking me "So what was it like to live through that?"
To paraphrase in a marxist kind of way, I am pretty sure the delta between "to everybody according to their need, from everyone according to their ability" has never been greater. This may be kind of off topic, but while SV likes to talk about being a meritocracy, and corporate earnings and productivity for each engineer working here are staggering, the reality is that the tools SV is creating are not helping things enough. While FB and Google and Uber might be solving some interesting problems, I would tend to say that there are a lot of very talented people here whose talents could be better spent. While engineering is great, what about running for public office? It is clear those roles are not attracting the kind of people we actually want in them.
I see that as a symptom of how futile most public office has become. Maybe term-limits would help, maybe other things would. If we want to fix the problem though, I think the answer starts with the candidates, not just trying to re-engineer a system to persist in spite of all apparent efforts to subvert it. I guess we can all watch, though.
//kind of off topic, but I felt like this was the place to say it.
Quite so; the 'Great Game' of empires is most definitely back on. My take on this is that Putin is rather masterfully playing the Dutch Nativists and the Turkish autocrats against the social-liberal middle. Having the Turkish President denouncing the Dutch and Germans as nazis while also feeding the nationalist fantasies of Wilders and the various proto-fascist parties around Europe must be pretty entertaining for him; I bet he laughs himself to sleep every night.
This will be known as the social media era of politics. For good (greater engagement, faster news dissemination) and for bad (staggering polarisation, fake news).
I think this will persist for quite some time e.g decades until the next era arrives which will see more earth-friendly, people-centric, less capitalist views come to the fore e.g base income, renewable at all costs etc as automation and climate change reek havoc.
You can wrap, among other things, the 70's OPEC wars, 79 Iranian revolution, 9/11 and the rise of Trump in a nice tiny bow and create a coarsely accurate depiction of history over those 45 years. You can even have a little side story about things like the 1985 "We Are the World" charity song without missing a beat.
In the long run, things like Facebook and Snapchat will probably be as relevant and well-known as say, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. Never heard of it? It's a charter member of the Dow Jones Transportation Average (the predecessor to the DJIA) and an important company from the 1800s ...
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elliott-negin/think-todays-ref...