Enthusiasm for new technologies goes up and down with the frequency and drama of women’s hemlines. (That’s a metaphor first popularized in the 1920s, a decade I’m going to write about below. It’s foreshadowing, not sexism.)
We’re very much in a down phase now. Instagram hurting teenagers. Facebook hurting nations. Artificial Intelligence threatening humanity, or so we are warned. It feels like ages since some Silicon Valley billionaire in jeans and a t-shirt got us excited about cool new things that will totally change the world.
And yet it was less than five years ago that Mark Zuckerberg went on his “listening tour” of America. Remember that? Ostensibly, it was a chance for Data to interface with humans in their natural habitat, but everyone was sure it was actually a prelude to greater ambitions. “Zuckerberg hires top Clinton pollster amid rumors of presidential run,” reported The Hill. “Zuck/Sandberg 2020” didn’t sound insane then. It’s hard to believe it was only five years ago. Reading stories from that distant era is like coming across one of those “more doctors smoke Camels!” ads in an old magazine.
Here’s something that may feel even a little stranger than that, a cartoon published in March, 1925:
The version of the cartoon I’ve reproduced here comes from volume one of Our Times, a wonderful six-volume series of books written by journalist Mark Sullivan and published between 1926 and 1936. In Our Times, Sullivan did something which was rare in that era — he took the perspective of the ordinary person and asked how life had changed over the quarter-century from 1900 to 1925. And that brought him to technology. Because, as keenly concerned as people in the 1920s were with hemlines, their real passion was technology. And for very good reason.
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