Thought Exercise...Blast from the Past

[DGS49]

Rip Van Hinkel is an electrical engineer who was cryogenically frozen in 1960. He was thawed and physically renewed last week. He has all of his mental faculties, remembers all of the technical concepts and information he had when he was frozen. You have been tasked with helping him transition to the modern world and culture.

Your first assignment is to explain to Rip the significance of Elon Musk buying a controlling interest in Twitter.

Where do you start?

 

[Dogmaphobe]

Where do you start?

At a brew pub that produces top notch IPAs.


Is there really any better way?

 

[night_son]

Rip Van Hinkel is an electrical engineer who was cryogenically frozen in 1960. He was thawed and physically renewed last week. He has all of his mental faculties, remembers all of the technical concepts and information he had when he was frozen. You have been tasked with helping him transition to the modern world and culture.

Your first assignment is to explain to Rip the significance of Elon Musk buying a controlling interest in Twitter.

Where do you start?

You start by showing Rip a personal computer, the internet, a cell phone, social media and explaining all of the formerly mentioned modern technology over quite some hours. Of course, one would also need to explain the relative nature of "facts" and "truths" depending on one's personal ideology, and how unlike the news in his time period, modern journalism is intended more for entertainment value than the reporting of true events. Making Rip understand that reality is now variable and interpreted in many forms, most of them pure bullshit, would be a task I'd rather not undertake. Lastly, old Rip would need a crash course in gaslighting and psychological warfare before he stood the slightest chance of preserving his sanity. My advice to Rip would be to climb back in his cryostasis pod and set his next alarm for a millennium or two. Perhaps by then some level of sanity might have returned to the human world.

 

[TroglocratsRdumb]

How can a person explain that we have Transvesties running our country now?

 

[DGS49]

My point, which should be obvious, is that the things that are important to us today were incomprehensible to previous generations. Conversely, the things that previous generations fretted about (the Bomb, the population explosion) have turned out to be No Big Deal.

Accordingly, it is likely that the things we fret about today...global warming...will puzzle future generations enough to ask, "What were they thinking?"

Were I explaining things to Rip Van Hinkle, obviously the first thing would have to be to explain the World-wide Web, what it is, and how we are all connected to it. Then social/communications media, and their influence on public opinion. Then the literally incomprehensible amounts of wealth that a few entrepreneurial types have been able to accumulate, giving them the "power" of actual governments.