Fears about old things when they were new. Click to read Pessimists Archive Newsletter, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
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30 years before parents and lawmakers sought to save youth from smartphones via age limits and bans in schools, a similar conversation took place about a pre-cursor to the cellphone: pagers Through the 1980s pagers became increasingly popular with teens, and also:
Today marks the 54th anniversary of the moon landing. In retrospect it has almost unanimous support and adoration in the US: pleasing the left as an example of the power of public funding and the right as a triumph of the capitalist west against the
We will be exploring the history of fears about technological unemployment.
The Sony Walkman is now iconic of the 1980s, eliciting nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of owning music, rather than renting it.