Douglas, I first worked in the 70s, where the last of the unrepentant [jerks] from the era depicted by Mad Men were still controlling the workforce. And I’m a lot older than the youngsters who got all the bucks in the dotBoom. I saw was rampant alcohol consumption did in the workplace. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that each generation has to learn a number of painful lessons all over again.
Tangurena3
Karma: 29
the future will almost certainly contain some things that we would find shocking
I’m going to state this more forcefully: “the future will certainly contain things that we would find shocking.”
One need only look to the past to see what moral fashions have changed. If you need a refresher on what offices were like less than 50 years ago, watch some episodes of Mad Men. During the dotBoom of the late 90s, I found drinking on the job (most software companies at that time—or at least the trendy ones—had soda machines or refrigerators stocked with not just free soda and juice, but free beer as well) to be shockingly unprofessional. I flunked several job interviews for stating it out loud.
Two roads diverged in the woods. I took the one less traveled, and...
Utopia: that has made all the difference. Dystopia: had to eat bugs until Park rangers rescued me. Wierdtopia: got to eat the bugs until the rangers threw me out.
For an example of a sexual wierdtopia, I’d recommend the movie zerophilia. Kinky, but not porn, and heck, my library has 2 copies.
Movies that were made in say the 40s or 50s, seem much more alien—to me—than modern movies allegedly set hundreds of years in the future, or in different universes.
They had different moral fashions. It is how the movies portray such moral fads that shows how different we’ve become. I haven’t seen the f*d up remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, but one of the principle plot elements of the first one is that some random stranger who Mrs Benson only met a few hours ago, gets to “babysit” her child unsupervised all day. Today, all anyone can think about a similar situation is “child molester.”
What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They’re just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they’re much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
If it were up to me, when Akon is saying “We found unacceptable the alternative of leaving the Babyeaters be. We found unacceptable the alternative of exterminating them” I’d also have included something like “we aren’t positive that our translation mechanism is free of defects.”