The Conquest of Ubiquity (1928)

mtyka.github.io

52 points·gruseom··5 comments

This was almost scary to read. There is such a stark contrast between what I would call naïve (not necessarily bad) science fiction, focusing on the particulars of a technology, or setting contemporary stories in scifi settings, and this little piece, explaining not Spotify, but the implications of Spotify, to the audience of 1928.

This and “the machine stops” are among the most incredible things I have ever read, and I wonder what other gems might be written today about a future we should see but we don’t because we are so caught up in our pasts.

> This was almost scary to read.

I second that. He even predicts touch interfaces and modern-day connected and environment-aware smart devices.

> Days can be gloomy; there are men and women who are very much alone, and many whom age or infirmity confines to their own company with which they are only too familiar. These men and women, reduced to boredom and gloom, can now fill their sad and useless hours with beauty or passion.

I wonder if he imagined that the very same technology he predicted would comfort us in our loneliness would also come to contribute to our increased alienation from one another.

I dont think that the alienation is actually true. What's different is that society has become more meta, people don't depend that much on their local social environment anymore, but they're still embedded in some kind of community. If you don't get sucked into some racist shithole then it's very likely that there's even more diversity than in your local community.

Focused primarily on broadcast music, this is a brilliant insight into a commodification-of-craft introduced by technology that mirrors what did indeed occur, and that the writer had imagined could be transformative in a dialectical materialist sense.

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