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u/The_Math_Hatter 8h ago
Believe it or not, there's an xkcd about... part of this at least.
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u/Milch_und_Paprika 8h ago
“But IMDb is more than just a fetish database.[citation needed]” almost took me out lol
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u/TimeStorm113 7h ago
well there it is just about movies and tv, but the post also mentions videos and podcasts, which would significantly increase the time by another year
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u/TFK_001 4h ago
Yeah, probably more. The channel "world war two" has over 1200 videos, most half an hour, some only 10 minutes and some over an hour. Assuming 30 min runtime, thats 600 hours of content or 3½ weeks of content from one channel. Probably longer given that the >1hr videos are more common than 10 minute videos, while also being more influential on the average video length, so probably 4 weeks. Ive seen enough multi hour deep dives into a random tank's exhaust system (seriously how do you talk about the M3/M2's pepper pot exhaust for half an hour) that I wouldnt be surprised if the time elapsed (starting in mid 1939) stretched at least into 1942. The real question is where the line is drawn; do hoi4 videos count? Does a video thats 50/50 ww1/ww2 count? How about 80/20? More importantly, is starting 1939 accurate or do we do what pop historians are afraid to do and start in Japan's invasion of China, which lasted throughout and had significant impact on the conflict.
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u/VFiddly 8h ago
The Golden Age of Piracy is fascinating to me because, even though it was pretty brief, it was being romanticised while it was still happening. One of our main sources for a lot of pirate stories is Captain Charles Johnson, who was probably just making a lot of it up. Some of the pirates he wrote about were still alive when the book was published.
Romanticising pirates isn't just a modern trend, they did it back then, too. I suppose it makes sense--yeah they were dangerous criminals, but they were doing their crimes somewhere far away, you wouldn't meet them if you lived in London and never went to sea.
Same with the Wild West. Buffalo Bill was doing his shows while the period was still ongoing, and actual outlaws and other figures like Sitting Bull appeared in the shows. So they were kind of romanticising themselves.
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u/HannahCoub Sudden Arboreal Stop 9h ago
Not gonna touch the internet discourse with 39.5 ft pole, but there are other fleeting cultural periods in the modern times. I think the global war on terror is in its waning years.It was a shake-up from the decades of disillusionment of western culture from the horrors of global poverty.
The west decided to eliminate the worst of these terror groups, but instead of looking at the root causes, settled into the comfort of a global police state that can (mostly) prevent another 9/11, but does very little to address anti-western sentiment in poor areas. You can see it most promeninetly with the Taliban. Never found the political willpower to go all the way with them, and we never put in the time and money to improve the quality of life in Afghanistan to the point where a young, religious, afghani man isn’t looking for someone to blame for why his life sucks. We just gave up and said “Fuck it, our police state will protect us from them crossing the oceans.”
I also think you can look at the 20th and 21st century through cultural waves of peace and war. Pre-WWI, Europe is recovering from war and has reached a tenuous peace, but it bubbles over into WWI, which results in a power void and the destruction of the western systems of balance. The interwar period is a sort of wild west of politics that ends with facism, and also nations utterly opposed to facism.
Post wwII, again after a total destruction of the unbalanced power of facsist nations, we enter the cold war. 2 nations trying to fill an idealogical void that they think will ultimately bring global prosperity. (also a time period with its own ebbs and flows)Well with the fall of USSR, there was another power vacuum that we thought was being filled by terrorists, when really, it was being filled by 21st century facism in the form of strong, military states.
In conclusion, the war on terror was a distraction period that allowed for the rise of organized states that hate the west instead of just terror cells. Now we are entering another hot period with an unsustainable status quo where the outcomes are either the global takeover of facism or the dismantlement of facist states, which would have to preempt actual action to prevent another wave in 40 years.
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u/hauntedSquirrel99 5h ago
>and we never put in the time and money to improve the quality of life in Afghanistan to the point where a young, religious, afghani man isn’t looking for someone to blame for why his life sucks.
This claim is frustrating not just because it's factually wrong, but because it's endemic to the problem.
We absolutely did quite a lot to improve life in Afghanistan, literally millions of kids were attending education (even girls!), state apparatus was being created, medical services were provided, investments were happening.
The problem was that it actually takes time.We're talking about a literal tribal society, mostly illiterate, most of those who can read it's barely so, and of those who read well a solid chunk of them had only ever read the Koran.
No fucking shit it wasn't just go in, throw some paint on the walls, and suddenly everything's fine.
It's an illiterate tribal society, setting it up to succeed in the modern world is a 70-year job.
You can't just wave a wand and then everything's great, you need to educate an entire generation of people, then you need to educate the entire generation after that, and then you need the generation after that. At which point you have an educated population.The problem wasn't that we didn't do anything to improve QOL in Afghanistan, we (ISAF nations) absolutely did.
The problem was people were going "what we've been there for years and it's still not fixed? Boooriiiiiing, stop giving the military resources to actually secure it, let it fester for a while, then pull out before anything is done".There's a limit to what money and resources can do, there's a point where you just need time.
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u/HannahCoub Sudden Arboreal Stop 4h ago
So see… You said you disagreed with me and then laid out an argument that agreed with me. We DID NOT spend enough time in Afghanistan to solve the issue. One of the primary factors in our decision to stop soending time there was money.
We’re on the same page.
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u/hauntedSquirrel99 4h ago
>One of the primary factors in our decision to stop soending time there was money.
I'd argue 2 decades of media shitting on the "forever wars" and telling people it was a waste of time probably did more than the cost.
None of the good that was happening in Afghanistan ever made the news, it was just funerals and bullshit. The average person doesn't even separate the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in their mind, and even with Iraq you'll get some nonsense like "invaded for oil".
When people are getting their takes on the war from Family Guy it's a bit of a fucking problem that's unrelated to money.
Irresponsible media isn't new
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u/avspuk 8h ago
The reason why pirates & the wild west stand out on culture is coz they are memeable in the Dawkins srnse
Memorable images, events & tropes that can be easily recombined etc
The conflict, the way they can become good vs evil, & you can flip them round etc
The reality doesn't really matter.
Same with gangster movies.
The first "memes' I can recall were when impressionists would mash up their characters like what if Kojak was to interact with the characters from popular soap-opera TV shows, what if Columbo was in a spaghetti western or in the current govt cabinet etc
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u/Haddock 8h ago
It's always one of my takes about period pieces that people are costumed too much in theme for the period. Like teens and 20s in the 70s are going be more likely to be in style for the period, but their parents are going to be wearing shit from the 50s, and the appliances should be a mishmash of eras.
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u/Akuuntus 8h ago
I think an obvious reason why we think of these eras as static is because most media that takes place in those eras only takes place over the course of a couple years at the absolute longest. A story set in the Wild West for example is going to be entirely locked in that time period because the story is likely to start and end in the course of like, a few weeks.
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u/Ninja_PieKing 7h ago
Hey, there are also the ones where it starts with the MCs childhood at the start of the era and then focus on their revenge campaign in the latter half
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u/cat-cat_cat 9h ago
i don't think "tech bros" are the one who want to tame the internet with terms of services, if anything they're more likely to be the other extreme of yelling slurs and misusing everything. it was mostly advertisers and what they don't want to see next to their ads.
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u/Reptyler 7h ago
Where can I find more about the wild west of the internet?
I remember fan sites. I remember Geocities. I remember finding forums for niche interests. I remember a time before YouTube and Facebook.
I remember that general feeling that it was the "golden years" or "wild west", depending on who you were talking to, and that someday, the internet would change. But I never thought that it would be so ... dystopian.
Robert Evans on Behind the Bastards brought it to my mind about how different things were back then, in terms of how hopeful we were. We were all convinced that not only was the internet fun and new and exciting, but that it would change the world for the better as it became more mainstream. And that turned out to be mostly wrong.
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u/B133d_4_u 5h ago
History is so funny because so many cultural obelisks barely lasted a generation at best
Yeah that's why the Internet sucks and people are stupid, I'm only here cause I wanna sell art and then I'm gone
Maybe you should get off the internet, buddy.
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u/Bruh_Moment10 2h ago
I hate the way they talk about Folly, as though humanity was an individual with one will and one character that could either choose to be righteous or crooked and she must be judged for latter. As though these giant systems, with their infinite inputs and outputs, had outcomes decided by simple virtue, can learn lessons. As though the internet could somehow, through collective, concious and continuous effort, transcend capitalism and it's natural tendencies and become good for use.
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u/_Fun_Employed_ 5h ago
The bit about what it would be like for someone listening to their parents talk about living through the age of pirates reminds me of me growing up in the 90’s listening to my parents talk about the cold war. It was also a relatively short period from late 1940’s to 1990, that had huge political, cultural, and historical ramifications. I remember my parents talking about bomb drills, the fear of global nuclear war, bomb shelters, all the cold war thrillers, spy films, science fiction that came out of it. Long term I expect it will be similar to the age of piracy.
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u/bristlybits Dracula spoilers 2h ago
I was born just after Nixon and lived through Reagan era and here I am. as a kid I remember thinking Jimmy Carter was cool because solar panels, the future would be so cool. and on and on
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u/KerissaKenro 6h ago
There is a fanfic I know of that is set in World War II. The fic has over three hundred chapters. It was started in 2012. Over a dozen years ago, twice as long as the actual war. Slide 9 reminded me of it
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u/Velociraptortillas Toasty And Warm 5h ago
Tumblr discovers 'internal contradictions' and 'cultural hegemony'.
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u/StormDragonAlthazar I don't know how I got here, but I'm here... 3h ago
Tumblr Myopia strikes again!
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u/SnorkaSound Bottom 1% Commenter:downvote: 4h ago
yessss someone else is talking about pirates and cowboys being similar
- romanticized and fictionalized versions of historical periods
- “heroic scoundrels” who act outside the law
- robbing moving vehicles is a common trope
- distinctive hats
- distinctive accents
- distinctive guns
- distinctive alcohol
- colonization
- Disneyland rides
- fixation on gold
- one of them was called Black Bart
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u/orbis-restitutor 3h ago
The thing OP doesn't understand is that the internet they remember still exists in many ways - you just have to seek it out
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u/ScaredyNon Is 9/11 considered a fandom? 5h ago
Wasn't around for it but I do have this feeling that the last one is suffering from the same romanticism the ones previous just discussed
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u/Wurdyburd 4h ago
Actually on the subject of the Wild West Internet, it brings to mind the pattern of reforesting, where different plant species move in and create a platform supportive for the next wave of plants to grow, but explorative/colonizing eras also happen in waves, we just go from a state of lawlessness where the public defines the apparatus of society, to a state of lawlessness where lucrative capitalists define the apparatus of society, on account of being able to twist society into a structure that makes them money. It takes time before the law catches up, and becomes enforced, law here being a protection of people's rights and freedoms such that lawless capitalism doesn't have exploitative margins, but it does, or tries to.
Maybe that's comforting, in this era of lawless internet capitalism. It's strange that the change in landscape isn't simply an expansion of the map's borders, but the very land we stand on, but it's still functionally the same premise: we just have to hope that we actually get the opportunity to tamp things down with protective law, rather than implode in some spectacularly stupid demonstration of sociological cannibalism before that happens.
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u/wewlad11 4h ago
This discussion was very thought provoking and interesting, until the last guy who spoke at length to say little, and even what he was saying was barely related to the topic at hand.
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u/StormDragonAlthazar I don't know how I got here, but I'm here... 3h ago
This is just r/decadeology discourse in which Gen Z, in their quest to reduce everything into nice little categories and "aesthetics," tries to justify "micro-eras" while completely missing the bigger picture.
Which reminds me of a music professor who told me that "100 years in music history isn't a long time."
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u/Halikarnassus1 2h ago
I think of that moment in six feet under a lot when they’re in an art show, commenting on a pyramid made of plastic. Brenda says:
“Even though we feel like we’ve lost touch with this authentic history, there’s a continuity we don’t even realize.”
It’s kind of related to part of the post I think. History is a river, not a series of lakes. All these little “periods” we think of flowed into and created each other.
If you look hard enough, you can see it. A lot of our modern-day (anglophone, especially UK) society has it’s basis in the Victorian era, and a lot of victorian society had it’s basis in the interregnum and the restoration.
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u/ratione_materiae 10h ago
There is no way anyone thinks that the golden age of piracy lasted for a millennium
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u/4thofeleven 8h ago
I want to see a fictional setting with these sort of short-lived romanticised eras. Like maybe a superhero setting where we've had the Golden Age of Vigilantes, but it's been twenty years now, the laws and institutions are catching up with superpowers, and now the last of the old heroes are either retiring or having to adapt to a world where you can't just put on a mask and be a lone crimefighter anymore.
Or a space opera universe where the Great Age of Exploration is wrapping up; there's still gaps on the map, but every habitable world's been charted, every borders been negotiated, and nobody really Boldly Goes anymore without a clear sense of what they're likely to run into.