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The Future Isn't What It Used To Be

By bcohen on May 2, 2007.

The blog Paleo Future has an amazing series of postcards showing past visions of 2000. Go here to see them all. I've given one sample below. (Thanks to TMN for the link.)


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It's a weather machine (full size here)

I'd never seen this Paleo Future blog, but now will mine it heavily for technology studies courses. The History of the Future has always been an intriguing topic -- how our visions of what the future will look like have shifted across historical contexts. By seeing how these images are culturally situated, we get a nice corrective to the kind of technological utopianism that has today's college students unable to envision a post-iPod world, let alone a post-automotive world. So now next semester they'll get a new bevy of images to go with that section of the class. Yeah for them.

A propos to our site, check out Paleo Future's page of posts about World's Fairs.

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Dammit Ben. I was going to write about this today (see here at the FILTER)! Also, well done Mollishka on the North Pole pic - it puts an interesting historical perspective into the challenges of things like simulations and projections...