Comment by contingencies | Hacker News Reader

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Strongly disagree. The internet has totally replaced most previous industries. No aspect of daily ritual, be it education, work, play, language or chore is untouched and global media has altered the status quo for culture and commerce. Most of that in the last 20 years.

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.

Yeah 1920-1970 saw lots of changes as well--perhaps as many net as 1970-2020. But if we talk about 20-25 years, I can guarantee you that dropping any reasonably plugged in person--of whatever age--from today into 1995 and tell them to do a job, shop for things, get information about something, etc. and it will be a pretty unsettling and frustrating experience. Certainly more so than the shift from 1970-1995.

A lot of us "reasonably plugged-in" people were doing those things back in 1995. It is easier today, though.

I probably had access to the Web from a Unix workstation by then. Had BBS systems and things like FTP earlier. At that point though, none of those things had any material effect on how I lived my day to day life (other than computer hobby-related). I think when I checked a few years ago, my first order from Amazon wasn't until sometime in the late 1990s, for example. And I don't recall using the Internet for anything really work related until around that time as well. If you want to go back a few more years to 1990, I doubt I had a cell phone yet.

Back in 1995, a movie called The Net was released. One scene near the beginning showed the main character ordering pizza online. I don't think any pizza chain had online ordering until later in the '90s.

Just rewatched that movie funnily enough. Yeah, most of what we think of as the Internet, or at least the Web, started to be in the consumer radar post-1995.

Pizza Hut offered online ordering in 1994.

I believe ordering food was a thing on Minitel in the 80s, which may have been the inspiration.

1890-1940 was vast in terms of change. Electrification, long distance communication, automobiles, refridgeration ... just totally overwhelming compared with anything since then.

Well, and you had the Industrial Revolution a bit before that.

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.

It's all a matter of perspective.

> 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.

The problem with all these counterpoints is that they take an initial change eg. automobiles and offer a "more" version e.g. air travel.

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.

It's hard to say. Even before automobiles we had penny farthings and early bicycles, before that we had handcarts, and before even that we had animal-driven wagons. Likewise before electrification, humans were already using water power in the form of water wheels for everything from sawing wood to grinding flour. When I look back at history, I realize that humans have been innovating for millenia, so it's really hard to say if one thing was more "innovative" than another.

> The problem with all these counterpoints is that they take an initial change eg. automobiles and offer a "more" version e.g. air travel.

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.

It is a bit hand wavy. To take the travel example ... it wasn't that long ago that only a tiny percentage of people would ever have considered a journey beyond what could be accomplished on horseback (or even on foot) with all supplies being carried (except perhaps water).

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.

The first automobiles were less of a qualitative change from horses than the change to modern automobiles. They were less reliable than horses with more limited range.

The first versions of most technologies are typically less of a qualitative change over their precursors. Even with computers, that's largely true. I'd say that's rarely a sensible metric to use.

"Batteries leading to mobile electronics" existed in the period 1890-1940.

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.

I remember an article where they interviewed someone who was 100 and asked him what was the biggest improvement in technology in his lifetime. He answered, "indoor plumbing," without hesitation.

To add, information management changed drastically in that period too.

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

1995 is still recognizably modern.

Now drop them in 1985 instead. No video on demand or highspeed connections or cell phones. CONNECT 1200.

I didn't have broadband at home in 1995 though probably had 28k bps or something like that over a phone line--which still charged per minute outside of you immediate set of exchanges. Not sure I had a cell phone. If I did it was for occasional use for specific purposes. And you didn't really have video on demand for another decade, at least. Very little ecommerce.

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.

1200 would have been unbelievably fast in 85. Try 300 acoustic couplers. I was a student lab tech in my high school in 83 or 4. Being the ahole I was, I’d walk into the lab and whistle loudly fully knowing that everyone’s terminal would freak out with line noise. BofH indeed.

I have to disagree with your timeframes a bit at least for home PCs. I never had an acoustic coupler but I had a 1200 and subsequently faster modems starting in about 1983. I did use acoustic couplers on teletypes in the mid 1970s.

I world have looked upon you with envy in 1985. :)

I'm not surprised that a high school computer lab would have been lagging by a few years. I'm guessing I was at a 1200 direct phone jack modem connection in 1985 (which would have been my first modem).

There was no video on demand in 1995, and cellphones weren’t at all common. There was barely video on demand in 2005.

Not sure why the downvotes. Yes, even early 2000s was a different world traveling. Print everything out. Generally work off paper maps.

Even into the 2010s, ubiquitous GPS and things like restaurant search, especially internationally, weren't the seamless experience they (often) are today.

> The internet has totally replaced most previous industries.

Maybe this is a just a trivial wording mistake, but the "replaced" here is completely inaccurate. "Changed" would be fine.

The internet completely changed the idea of preparing to go somewhere. As a kid, when I went somewhere, I would (with parents' help) look at the map for directions, bring my documents in a folio, and make sure I had all the documents on my way back. I have fond memories first reading maps then printing out directions to go driving. When I was going to college I spent the weekend before classes started trueing up the campus map with the reality on the ground. And of course, meeting up with people was all about setting a common time and just having faith that your friends/family would show up at that time. Oh and every time I'd take transit, I'd grab the transit route book, or stare at a wall of train lines for minutes to figure out which combination of lines I needed to go where.

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.

I still rarely use Google maps or any map program when driving and only recently got to the point where that made things harder. I love technology and the internet but do not like mediating existence through a smartphone. But doing with out a smartphone is looking more and more difficult to do now. Which means it's time to learn to install Lineage OS or something similar.

> The internet has totally replaced most previous industries.

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.

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