Farmer born in 1842 talks about life and change (1929) [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
I converted those recordings to MP3 about 15 years ago.
It's amazing how far we've come in such a short time.
There is a project to collect old diaries https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X0hi2Q3TAK8
Perhaps they take audio too? Or perhaps there is some similar archive for non-diary recollections and things?
And perhaps you’d like to share online?
Imagine finding a diary or account of some mundane life a few hundred years ago. This stuff is important to preserve for the future.
This was out in a rural area, but still. Major highway like an American interstate.
Huge cities disappearing as remote working, automation, rising sea levels and mass migrations make most of them pointless.
Lots of civil unrest, mass migrations, new plagues and wars as the globalized economy collapses and disappointed voters choose new kinds of populism to save them.
Rich people moving to the few lucky countries that won on the global warming and now try to isolate. Everybody else fight for scraps.
Eventually population adjusts and stabilizes on much lower level and reproduction rates grow again as repopulation starts.
I have to constantly remind myself:
In chaos, all predictions are possible, solarpunk is just as likely as cyberpunk.
Everywhere you look, you see what you are looking for. If you are looking for death all you see is death, if you are looking for god, all you see is god.
Which, if you follow the projections, will include entire Europe and North America. Seriously, read the IPCC report: impact of global warming in western world will be rather superficial, if not positive. It’s not them who is most negatively affected.
So, about 1 billion people out of about 8 billion worldwide. Half of that if you were speaking of "western world" only.
Now imagine what the rest will do. And how that will impact globalized economy on which welfare of western world is built.
My, how far we've come...
There is actually a lot of land left in the world (even in the US and Canada) if you want to take on the hardships of not interacting with society. Judging by what I see say on YouTube, a lot of people want this!
Random channel, I only watched a little of it: https://www.youtube.com/user/explorealternatives (it felt like a lot of off grid living was in Canada, which is interesting given the weather)
Similar to paleo and other alternative diets as a reaction against industrial farming and food production, there's already a lot of reaction against big tech and technocracy. I think / I hope this time it won't take 50+ years to "properly react". Both industries brought us some good things but we have to be critical about what to adopt.
That's a lot of land.
I just googled and this seems like a real thing, i.e. hundreds of properties for very cheap:
https://www.landandfarm.com/search/michigan-land-between-500...
Also I had a friend who did this near the California/Nevada border. Super cheap land if you don't care about electricity and plumbing!
Michigan and California are both extremely populated states -- but MOST of them by land area is very sparsely populated.
I'm sure someone here knows more, but I think it's obvious if you just drive 30, 60, or 120 minutes outside any city in the US. There is a lot of land. All of it is probably owned, but the owners are probably not doing anything with it, and would sell it for a fair price, which is low.
Hell there is even land in San Francisco if you've ever biked between San Francisco and South San Francisco. Again, it's owned, but it's not doing very much.
Humans like to crowd together in very few places, particularly near water. Here's a more relevant picture: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/3d-mapping-the-worlds-large...
Judging by this picture, the US, Europe, and Russia are barely populated at all :)
In Australia for instance, thousands of acres of Rural land have been rezoned as "Farming", which means that you can't build a house on less than 100 acres. And of course the only ones who benefit are the corrupt real-estate developers.
The future will be miserable, unless you live in China. In China, the future will arrive as planned as China will once again become the middle kingdom and be bestowed with the mandate of heaven. In the west, the 200 years of western industrial society will be regarded as a mistake that must be payed for dearly with carbon credits.
;)
Also.
Sudden death for worn-out workers. We'll invent a rationale for that eventually. 20 years of retirement is just an unnecessary drain on the economy.
Like in Logan's Run except more plausible.
Also cellphones implanted at birth. With stress induction.
Also, radical amputation for information workers. All that extra flesh is just an unnecessary drain on the economy.
It's a interesting development and worth watching.
Or you might go the way my country did, with a 60-something retirement age and 65 (or slightly better) life expectancy.
Very few steamboats. Everyone went to New York then, if they wanted to go in the new style why, they take a steamboat. If they want to go cheap they go on one our river sloops."
One of the most incredible things to note here is that this was around the time planes were being invented, the first commercial airplane trip was just made few years earlier, and this a fairly rural interview of an elder so it's sane to think this person has never even seen an airplane.
"Now the railroad is slow. Just now, this afternoon, going right up over here, I saw I guess a dozen aeroplanes..."
https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/MVTN/id/5313/r... (at 5:33)
He lived quite near New York, just upstate a bit. We gather that from him seeing all of the river traffic to the city. He didn't seem phased at all by the motion picture camera and sound equipment. It's very likely that he had seen an airplane before. Not germane to what he said, but likely.
My grand-grandmother told me that she first saw a plane in the air in 1914 when WWI started (she lived with her parents in what is now easternmost Belarus). When the war and the Revolution ended, they became somewhat of a rarity for the next decade or so, but not extreme rarity.
If all you need is to be intelligible to the (same, small group of) people you see every day, then a local, short-lived argot will suffice.
If you're talking to people in the next village, town, state, country, continent, and/or planet over, regularly, you're going to need a more stable form of spoken comms, and coordinated evolution is more challenging.
Much as small island populations tend to evolve and diverge more rapidly than large continental ones.
I tried to rewrite it below in what I think would be a modern colloquial way. (This is a difficult question because some things might be different based on region or social class, not just because of the time when it was recorded.)
Quite a few years ago, I'd rather not say exactly how many, but, well, I was born in the first half of last century, so you can guess how old I am.
And now I'm in the, eh, pretty far along in the next century.
Oh yeah. We live in a world of change.
The trees are just like they were when I was a boy, only bigger.
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
But when I was a boy, we didn't have the telegraph and we didn't have a telephone.
Of course, none of the electric lights, or any of the other stuff that's popped up to annoy us, or help us.
The good old days had a lot of good things, you guys shouldn't think you're somehow living in the best time in the history of the world.
We're safe, but it's no better than what our parents had, and I don't think it's much better than what our grandchildren will have.
Yep, that's Hudson over there. Nice little city.
Well, I remember very well, looking out my window. I'd see anywhere from 10 to 20, almost never less than 10, sailboats on the river. Now I don't see more than one every three months.
Very few steamboats. Whenever anybody went to New York then, if they wanted to go the modern way, they'd take a steamboat. If they wanted to go cheap, they'd go on one of those river sloops.
Do you know what work is? You don't? Well, work's doing something you have to do. When you're doing something you want to do, like to do, that's play.
And now I exercise a little, but I don't call it work. I don't call this work. This is play. You see how nice that is?
A lot of what makes him sound old is the subject matter. I don't think I've heard the word "steamboat" more than two or three times in my whole life.
Another thing that made it tricky is that a lot of what he says sounds totally normal for modern American English, it's just a little... poetic? The bit about fathers and grandchildren would fit right into a modern speech or essay, for example. I might find it odd coming from a friend in casual conversation though.
There's something about the way he sees his place in the world too. He's a part of it, not a separate thing in it, if that makes sense. That perspective is something that I think has become rare.
Great question. Made me think quite a bit about how context-dependent language is, and the myriad ways just a few sentences can communicate so much more than their literal meaning.
Oh, I had the same feeling. And guess what? From time to time, I got emails from people who write like that, and others are in other styles. Some write emails that are very "user-friendly" for non-native English speakers, some write poetic sentences.
If you ask me why? I have a product mainly for writers (https://docxmanager.com) ;)
He’s got some years left but it feels good knowing I have it. It’s the sort of thing that’s value will become more and more clear as time goes on.
Highly recommend
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4CCFObSEAU
The guest, as a child in 1865, witnessed Lincoln being shot in Ford's Theatre, and was on a TV show in 1956.
He seems to be in really impressive health.
About half of all children born died before reaching the age of 20, and that mortality fell off tremendously with the 1st, 5th, and 10th years.
This chart gives life expectancy by age (rather than mortality), but you can largely infer the latter. Range is 1700--2013, though for most ages data are from 1850 onwards.
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-b...
That is precisely equivalent to "additional years of survival at year n plus year n".
The alternative notion I'd suggest is "anticipated mortality at year n for those born in year m". The latter would show a typical "bathtub" mortality curve, high initially, then lower, then climbing in late age.
Note too that the image I'd posted is literally a representation of survivorship bias: the longer an individual has survived, the longer they're likely to continue to survive.
But that's (minus n) not what I suggested; it's not equivalent to the probability of living another ten years (say).
E.g. the life expectancy of five year olds (plus that they are five years old) is not sufficient information to determine how many of them (the probability one) will live to fifteen.
So ... "probability of surviving another 10 years" is different from life-expectency. It's a variant on mortality, though expressed over a 10 year period rather than a 1 year period.
For comparison, see the SSA's actuarial life tables. This gives 1-year mortality (both as percentage and as expected survivors per 100,000 lives) for each year of life from 0 to 119:
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
I'm not aware of a compilation or chart showing changes in actuarial mortality by age over time.
There's a good chart of anticipated deaths per year (separately for women and men) in the UK:
https://understandinguncertainty.org/why-life-expectancy-mis...
What question are you trying to answer by looking at mortality probability?
Well, starting with the problem of 'life expectancy is biased by infant mortality', that it misleads people into thinking it was rare to live past 30 or whatever: stats like 'life expectancy at 20/30/etc.' are helpful.
I was just saying that I don't think 'life expectancy at x' when x is small is helpful, since in the limit we're back to where we started, and until x > end of relatively high risk, it suffers the same bias.
Looking at mortality probability would more directly show that early years are at risk, before it settles down and death is unlikely until old age. The old age curves (birth year is still the horizontal axis) would still show the truer change over time, but now so would the infant years.
You could even (/might need to) refine it to P{living another year} - P{having died within last year (or before)} or something.
People did die very easily from infections, the people that survived were usually really strong.
E.g My grandpa never caught a cold, he went to his 90s basically never getting ill. His immune system was so strong.
I go to rural areas in Europe where 80 somethings climb the mountain faster than the city kids in their 20s.
Some kids from the city have really no balance or physical skills at all, like they could not step over a stone without falling down.
Why, work's doing something you have to do.
When you're doing something that you want to do, like to do, that's play."
[0] https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/MVTN/id/5313/r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motion_picture_film_st...
The farmer in this piece saw the beginnings of the industrial revolution. That had huge implications but it took a lot of time for those implications to reach the corners of the earth. These days, ideas and technology spread and compound much more rapidly.
Re: Last 20 years, I used to travel in the early noughties before mobile phones were everywhere and none of them had cameras. Wikipedia had barely begun, Google Maps didn't exist, many countries were without ATMs or card connectivity, I even carried TCs once. You you had to pay internet cafes for sporadic internet access. Now I can pay cashless in most places, there's crypto, mobile signals everywhere and global roaming data is a thing. I once got lost in rural India in ~2011, pulled out a laptop with mobile data, a satellite map and a 3D digital elevation model. That's ... superhuman by 1960 standards. And then there's machine translation/video conferencing/libgen/cloud services.
> Electrification
Batteries leading to mobile electronics. Fundamentally changed the nature of the industrial revolution from capital equipment to consumer products. Not to mention that all the domestic technology like clothes and dish washers, robotic vacuums, and modern AC were born in the post war period.
> long distance communication
Digital telecom (transistors, protocols, the internet, etc.). Telegraph and early radio versus the internet - IMO that's like comparing chemical rockets to a warp drive.
> automobiles
Ubiquitous air travel. What was once a months long trip for the middle class is now a day long trip for anyone who can save a thousand bucks. It's impossible to convey just how world changing that is.
> refridgeration
Biotech and genetic engineering leading to the green revolution increased our carrying capacity to over 7 billion. Globalization that allows us to have seasonal produce at any time of year.
As https://www.radiolaguy.com/info/About%20battery%20radios.htm points out, "Few homes in the early 1920s where wired for AC operated appliances." so most radios "were battery operated and required more than one type of battery."
Here's a portable radio from 1924 - https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/zenith_super_portable.html .
The first commercial domestic clothes washer was 1937 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washing_machine#Automatic_mach... , so not post-war.
Robotic vacuums were 1990s - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_vacuum_cleaner#History .
> IMO that's like comparing chemical rockets to a warp drive
Warp drives don't exist.
I think you underestimate the impact of chemical rockets. And telegraphs.
The telegraph made it possible for information to travel around the world within a day. "It's impossible to convey just how world changing" it was.
> .. Globalization ...
Globalization dates from at least the East India Company.
Modern agriculture also requires a non-sustainable use of fossil fuels, destroys ecosystems to raise meat animals more cheaply, and generates huge monocultures tempting the next great blight. "Genetic engineering" also includes making farmers economically dependent on the patented seeds from a small number of seed companies.
Speaking of which, post-war air conditioning, combined with cheap power from fossil fuels, meant that millions could move to places like Phoenix or Los Vegas and live in houses with styles meant for, for example, Cape Cod, rather than local vernacular architecture like thick adobe walls. Gigatons of CO2 emissions, to maintain a certain style, and because tearing down forests for stick building is cheaper in the short term.
At some point, it's just going to come down to a difference of opinion over which transformation(s) were more qualitative and which were more quantitative. Suffice it to say that I regard all of your counterpoints are quantitive changes, and all of my original points as qualitative.
I acknowledge that there are different opinions about this.
The same can be said for every one of your examples. Automobiles: horsepower, but more! Like, literally. Last time I saw a car ad, they used the word horsepower. A century later.
> At some point, it's just going to come down to a difference of opinion over which transformation(s) were more qualitative and which were more quantitative. Suffice it to say that I regard all of your counterpoints are quantitive changes, and all of my original points as qualitative.
What makes automobiles qualitative and airplanes quantitative? That sounds very hand wavy.
Over time various forms of "mass" transits steadily increased the ease (and thus possibility) of taking longer journeys, but always on a schedule decided by the transport operator.
The development of the automobile (and the infrastructure that it requires) eventually changed this to make it feasible for an automobile owner to undertake almost arbitrary journeys without reference to a transport operator's schedule, and without requiring relatively unusual levels of "explorer-ness" as would have been the case of foot and horse travel.
So there was an inflexion point somewhere at which independent long distance travel switched from being something done only by a tiny percentage of people to something that was quite accessible.
That (for me) is the qualitative change.
Air travel is the quantitative change layered on top of that, which makes the possible distances and destinations of such travel more expansive.
Vertical filing system, c. 1900 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filing_cabinet#Vertical_file
"information science" as a field c. 1895 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet
punched cards + tabulation machines c. 1890 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machine
Any of these 50 year periods brought pretty significant change depending upon where you lived and how much that change was either positive, negative, or didn't affect you as much.
There's also a whole backdrop of significant changes in medicine throughout the different periods which are pretty major if you were one of the people who would have died absent antibiotics or a polio vaccine or whatever.
Now drop them in 1985 instead. No video on demand or highspeed connections or cell phones. CONNECT 1200.
Certainly 1985 was even more all this; a lot of people didn't even have VCRs for time-shifting at that point or home PCs. Prior to joining a company that had an internal email system in 1986, I didn't even have email except in a very fragmentary way through organizations like CIS.
Even into the 2010s, ubiquitous GPS and things like restaurant search, especially internationally, weren't the seamless experience they (often) are today.
Maybe this is a just a trivial wording mistake, but the "replaced" here is completely inaccurate. "Changed" would be fine.
Now when I need to go somewhere, I open up Google Maps and tell it where I want to go and what form of transport I'm using to get there and I have a route. My documents are on my phone and now my forms of payment are as well. If I'm meeting up with someone and they're running late, they usually let me know through a messaging app. All of this really changed the pace of going places and doing things, _especially_ travel. This all feels mundane to us, but try dropping a kid who grew up in the internet age to navigate without their Maps app, and the vast majority of them (especially the ones that aren't outdoorsy) would probably have a tough time.
Other than other media distribution and telecommunication industries, and some of retail, it hasn't replaced much. It has impacted lots, but impacting and replacing are very different.
Still no flying cards, robots to do our work, AI, fusion, etc.
Not that there is anything wrong with subjective impressions like this.
On the other hand, the boring automobile I drive every day is practically a spaceship compared to the death traps of the 1970s. And of course probably 90% of advances in computing have occurred since the early 1970s.
I will say one thing I noticed and dislike about myself is how impatient and 'privileged' I've become. I mean, we used to order from Sears or Penney's catalogues as a kid and that stuff took weeks to arrive, and we were thrilled. Today it's all instant gratification. Amazon is a day late and we(I) act perturbed.
I like to watch this Louis CK clip, it really puts me back in place...for a while.
Overall I think she had a relatively simple, but comfortable life. She remembers getting electricity in the 1940s. Before that, they had plenty other ways to provide lighting and heat, so it didn't matter much. The family wasn't rich, but never lacked anything.
Later in her life things got more busy with more travel, vacations, especially after retiring in the 1970s.
She's still very busy with activities every day, but the last couple of years with the pandemic and restrictions was tough. Now that things are getting back to normal, she's really relieved. Even a simple thing like going to the hair-salon makes her day.
I'm curious what you think is worse in the West now than it was a century ago.
Seems like until 100 years ago it was a lot of work to get obese while today it kind of happens if you don't watch out.
Deaths from alcoholism and drug addiction are vastly higher.
I guess that's just societal progress, which is not only a good thing, but a great thing!
I read a while ago but can't find the source - the average person these days eats better than the King of France did a few hundred years ago... I think about that a lot
From one terrible gift-giver to another: Once you are no longer poor and the people around you also aren't poor and can afford the things they want, gift-giving becomes about knowing the person. What have they always wanted or needed, but wouldn't get for themselves?
When you distill gifts to a monetary exchange they lose all value. Know the person, show you care, share that you thought about them, that you put effort into their gift. Then gifts become magical and amazing once more.
Your mom appreciates a $600 weekend getaway with her son/daughter infinitely more than a $600 fancy bluetooth speaker.
As Ted Lasso said in a recent episode – the effort is the gift.
Not telling you like I'm teaching you something, I'm literally writing my line of thoughts after reading what you wrote - so thanks.
Your mom appreciates a $600 weekend getaway with her son/daughter infinitely more than a $6000 fancy dohicky
You give them a reference picture or two, some details and you'll get amazing work back. My wife really likes Studio Ghibli movies and I got a poster done of our kids holding Totoro's hands. Friends looking like super heroes. Folks pets. Honestly really fun gifts to give.
I waited like 6+ months for it(to not pay scalper) and then when I had it. I waited another 1 or 2 weeks before installing it.
I've developed a weird habit of not opening things I've ordered for many days or even weeks. Its not really intentional or I'm not fighting back any urges. It does feel a bit therapeutic and it helps keep perspective on importance or value of things.
I'd definitely recommend people trying to disconnect the instant gratification for things that aren't immediately needed.
would make this read as less entitled and more purely descriptivist.
The magic started to wear off later when technology started feeling hostile. Instead of me being in charge, my technology started doing things against my wishes and I had no power to stop it. There's been this increasing sense of technology constantly pushing and clawing at my boundaries, trying to spy on my and report back from me unless I check a dozen options and even then it may not be enough. Technology updating itself when its inconvenient, or breaking itself, or installing stuff I didn't ask for, want or consent to.
There's also the fact that this creepy boundary pushing technology is feeling more and more mandatory and a built in part of society, so its becoming harder to avoid and the sense that 90% of people have just shrugged given up.
But even now in my 40s I occasionally find a gadget or bit of software that seems magical, so I don't think for me its an age thing.
I'm sure lots of people disagree and have a very different experience, but for me that's a big part of why technology has lost its magic.
As for your view on technology, while many of us here share it, let's not forget how small HN crowd in general population is. Like you said, people shrugged, but most probably never even thought about it.
Depression is up, house prices to income ratios are much worse, education and healthcare costs are both way up while quality (measured by test scores and healthy life years) has barely changed, social connections and number of friends are down...
Just because you can now afford 10 computers rather than 1 (who would even want 10?) does not mean you are better off.
But what about cost of housing -- interest rates are much lower, does that offset the costs?
There is also the fact that when you are young the world is your oyster, so many possibilities ahead. Then you get old, you are now over the hill, your life has pass you by, and you don’t really have much to look forward to except deteriorating health and death.
But it’s not all solely age dependent IMO. I think a 90s teen would be happier - or at least more excited - than today’s. While as a stupid kid you likely won’t pay attention to politics, at least not back then when all that stuff was “hidden” in stuffy newspapers, but you probably felt the more hopeful “end of the Cold War” zeitgeist. Things were looking up. Consumer computer technology was advancing at a neck breaking speed. Video games became mainstream and midway through turned 3D. The Internet and the Information Age with all its (overly) optimistic promises were upon us - while the negative effects never crossed our minds. We were all (supposedly) headed into an amazing future.
Today … I personally can’t find anything to be excited about.
Perhaps our metrics just don't capture the things that really matter to people very well.
For my part, I took the step into ordering some kit for cardboard crafting just now. Modern wood glues(I am getting Elmer's Max) are unbelievably strong, and a pure shellac finish brushed on will add some rigidity and waterproofing which could be further enhanced through hydrophobic coatings. Corrugated cardboard itself is a limited material, but it's so easy to get and to work with - my first project will simply be to build a small workbench, and then I'll go from there. I have several ideas already planned.
I lost all interest in TV programming, the kids got me a Roku and I already forgot it's plugged-in. My list of YTube channel bookmarks has grown by leaps since Covid. History is big!
For example, I’ve flown dozens of times but it’s still flipping amazing that we figured out how to get huge tubes of metal to FLY. At 30,000 feet in the air! And at 500 mph, too! It’s absolutely bananas.
Or that I can just pick up my phone and chat with a friend in Argentina, who’s like 8,000+ miles away, no problem.
Although I probably take that for granted more than flying. If it weren’t for having to deal with TSA at 6 am, I’d probably be like a giddy kid each time I fly.
It's not you. It's age rather than "times". It doesn't matter whether you lived in the 1st or 21st century. Same stuff happen to anyone.
People telling you you can get more, you should get more, you should want more.
People pushing you to do more, in life, at work, push yourself to the limit and burn, we all want more.
Just use and do as much as possible and then abruptly die, like a fucking idiot.
>Filmed on July 13, 1929.
>87 year old farmer in garden describes work versus play, describes changes that have occurred, and describes travel by automobile versus stagecoach.
https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/MVTN/id/5313/r...
Googled around and an earlier upload w/o the subtitles have the "MIRC @ SC.EDU" watermark https://youtu.be/RS27u6IqWt0
It's the Moving Image Research Collections at the University of South Carolina https://sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/university_librar...
I can't access the library catalog tho for some reason. Trying to find it in the online collection.
>87 year old farmer in garden describes work versus play, describes changes that have occurred, and describes travel by automobile versus stagecoach.
https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/MVTN/id/5313/r...
It's interesting to think that these people who might be 130 in 2150 could have a direct connection back to the 1920s.
Once we get comfortable with human cloning, we can create headless human clones and remove any HLA immune triggers.
You could do organ, or better, head transplants. A young immune system plus some drugs and a person could be rejuvenated and made young again.
From there it's a hop, skip, and a jump to full BCI and brain uploads. Immortality.
he seems physically robust for his age, probably eats food he grows without calling it "fair trade organic", get news once a month...