If I remember correctly, the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics; which, I guess, was kind of a big deal, back then.

Thankfully nothing horrible happened in the next 10 years or so

I thought this bit was fascinating:

> Blom begins with Stravinsky, whose famous orchestral work The Rite of Spring was inspired by ancient Russian dance rituals. A melange of old folk music and arresting dissonance, the piece’s first performance in Paris 1913 triggered one of the most infamously violent reactions of any concert-hall audience in history. As Blom puts it bluntly, “all hell broke loose”:

> “During the first two minutes the public remained quiet,' Monteux [a musician] later recalled, “then there were boos and hissing from the upper circle, soon after from the stalls. People sitting next to one another began to hit one another on the head with fists and walking sticks, or whatever else they had to hand. Soon, their anger was turned against the dancers and especially against the orchestra... Everything to hand was thrown at them, but we continued playing. The chaos was complete when members of the audience turned on one another, on anyone supporting the other side. A heavily bejewelled lady was seen slapping her neighbour before storming off, while another one spat in her detractor's face. Fights broke out everywhere and challenges to duels were issued.”

There’s something about the image of a concert hall full of rich, fancy people erupting in a melee that is just delightful

I'm reminded of how time pieces such as sundials changed societies, and how some ancients almost lost their minds due to this new development.

“The Gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish the hours---confound him, too Who in this place set up a sundial To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small pieces ! . . . I can't (even sit down to eat) unless the sun gives leave. The town's so full of these confounded dials . . .” ― Plautus

I can't imagine what it would have been like to grow up with horse and carriages only to see us landing on the moon before you die. That's some serious societal whiplash.

I do like to imagine future generations looking back on the era of the internal combustion engines with absolute horror.

"You won't believe this, but for like 200 years, any time a person wanted a machine to move stuff, those apes would carry around tens of gallons of some crazy toxic combustible fluid which they'd spray into a heavy block of metal then bung 20,000 volts of electricity through it to make it explode. Just to spin a wheel! Then they'd pump the poisonous fumes out from the rear of the machine like a cloud of evil flatulence. Into the same air they breathed! There were literally billions of these machines all over the planet. Everyone owned one! There was so much of it, the planet started getting hotter! It was crazy!!"

Based on the title I thought that the article was going to include the Mexican Revolution, which also started in 1910.

During the early industrial revolution people used to present themselves for medical help after complaining that the incessant repetitive action and rotation of engines (e.g. beam engines) hundreds of miles away from them was sending them vibrations which disturbed their sleep. Of course they only started having this problem after reading about such contraptions in newspapers.

I’m not anxious about rapid technological change.

I care about the fact that technology is used to undermine democracy and destroy social cohesion.

> cultural critics of the early 1900s were confident that it was unnatural for people to move so quickly

Google says that horses can go up to 70 km/h (45mi/h). Did cars (and bicicles) go so fast then?

The acceleration is evident in public health trends as well, especially in perinatal and childhood deaths and infectious disease.

The last 150-200 years really is remarkable historically speaking. I don't think we've grasped what to do with it completely.

Anyone interested in a fictional take on this period could consider Pynchon's "Against the Day", although it is no light challenge. It takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the years following WW1 and, appropriately, tells a sprawling, disorienting story that feels overwhelming at times.

> Disoriented by the speed of modern times, Europeans and Americans suffered from record-high rates of anxiety and a sense that our inventions had destroyed our humanity.

Were they wrong?

> “Automobilism is an illness, a mental illness. This illness has a pretty name: speed... [Man] can no longer stand still, he shivers, his nerves tense like springs, impatient to get going once he has arrived somewhere because it is not somewhere else, somewhere else, always somewhere else.”

Previously:

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

-- Blaise Pascal (~1650)

USA had a nearly constant per person economic growth rate of 2%/year in the last ~150 years, perhaps going as far back as the beginning of industrial revolution.

Extrapolating such curves into the future suggests the current AI revolution is simply the last and latest node in a string of revolutions and it's nothing special.

If you think about it, having the world's all information at your fingertips (google), and in your pocket (iphone) might have been equally revolutionary. And before that came TV, radio, car, train, boat, plane, electricity, gas engine, steam engine etc as revolutions.

There's nothing that suggests the economic output per person is accelerating beyond the historical 2%/year. What could be reasons? Perhaps limited electricity, compute, AI model quality, computer speed etc.

So, the more analytical side of me thinks what we're experiencing is nothing extraordinary. It's just another revolution in a string of many :)

Obviously, my other, the more human side gets scared and feels afraid about the meaning of life, and humanity's place in it.

I remember reading Theodore Roosevelt's biography by Edmund Morris and being shocked how he was basically able to text everyone he needed to be in contact with while president through the telegraph system.

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day is an interesting read on this and explores the rapid changes in a far more human way than anything else I have read on the period. He renders it as the period when technology and knowledge ceased being things of the select few and become a large enough part of the average person's life, and this being what caused the real change; knowledge fundamentally changed society's relationship with the unknown and technology played a shell game with what is inconvenient. His treatment of photography and the development of film is really interesting and does an amazing job of showing what we lost as well as what we gained.

One example that was recently pointed out to me: the first 737 was closer in time to the wright brothers first flight than to today

A favorite book on the period is "Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914" by Frederic Morton. Freud's city was one of the centers of Europe's neuroses. It was also a center of political ferment under the lid weighted down by the Hapsburg monarchy.

Notably, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, and Tito were all there at the same time.

> Physicians warned that "diseases of the wheel" came by "the almost universal use of the bicycle" and that "serious evils" might befall the youth who rode without restraint. Moralists condemned women who “pedaled along gleefully, having discarded their corsets and put on more practical clothing, including trousers.”

Modern takes on gender roles feel as deeply unserious to me as this take. Whenever I hear about the tradwife trend or hear some pundit blaming the "fertility crisis" on women liberation it sounds just like these 20th century takes.

Is there a reason so many articles are referencing the book Abundance?

A great example of how things were viewed at the time is the poem by AB "Banjo" Patterson: "Mulga Bill's Bycycle", first published in 1896.

'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that caught the cycling craze; He turned away the good old horse that served him many days; He dressed himself in cycling clothes, resplendent to be seen; He hurried off to town and bought a shining new machine; And as he wheeled it through the door, with air of lordly pride, The grinning shop assistant said, "Excuse me, can you ride?"

"See here, young man," said Mulga Bill, "from Walgett to the sea, From Conroy's Gap to Castlereagh, there's none can ride like me. I'm good all round at everything as everybody knows, Although I'm not the one to talk - I hate a man that blows. But riding is my special gift, my chiefest, sole delight; Just ask a wild duck can it swim, a wildcat can it fight. There's nothing clothed in hair or hide, or built of flesh or steel, There's nothing walks or jumps, or runs, on axle, hoof, or wheel, But what I'll sit, while hide will hold and girths and straps are tight: I'll ride this here two-wheeled concern right straight away at sight."

'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that sought his own abode, That perched above Dead Man's Creek, beside the mountain road. He turned the cycle down the hill and mounted for the fray, But 'ere he'd gone a dozen yards it bolted clean away. It left the track, and through the trees, just like a silver steak, It whistled down the awful slope towards the Dead Man's Creek.

It shaved a stump by half an inch, it dodged a big white-box: The very wallaroos in fright went scrambling up the rocks, The wombats hiding in their caves dug deeper underground, As Mulga Bill, as white as chalk, sat tight to every bound. It struck a stone and gave a spring that cleared a fallen tree, It raced beside a precipice as close as close could be; And then as Mulga Bill let out one last despairing shriek It made a leap of twenty feet into the Dead Man's Creek.

'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that slowly swam ashore: He said, "I've had some narrer shaves and lively rides before; I've rode a wild bull round a yard to win a five-pound bet, But this was the most awful ride that I've encountered yet. I'll give that two-wheeled outlaw best; it's shaken all my nerve To feel it whistle through the air and plunge and buck and swerve. It's safe at rest in Dead Man's Creek, we'll leave it lying still; A horse's back is good enough henceforth for Mulga Bill."

The Sydney Mail, 25 July 1896.

Came for insufferable comments, left satisfied.

The last paradigm shift was radio, everything since then has been evolution and miniaturization.

Not mentioning The Incredible Mr Toad is a miss

The quote about speed (of cars) at the beginning is somewhat curious.

That's because in 1910 cars were a lot slower than trains.

Let's compare the progress made by the modern world against the life of the tribes on the remote untouched islands.

Unfortunately the stories of success of the modern world were written by the modern world. So what we call as success or progress is only valid in modern world. There is no language or terms that can describe success and agreed upon across these two worlds.

For example, you may be able to wipe out that tribal population within minutes. But that may not mean success or progress, in terms of adaptation to the surroundings. Dinosaurs also ruled the land with their might. But adaptation is something different from being mighty. The context can get much more mightier against you.

Most of scientific and industrial advances were made by people who have no survival struggles and who were greedy for money or reputation. A lot of it was not needed for human adaptation and evolution.

Sadly we seem to have lost our sense for good.

I think the article and the book tend to forget the terrible living conditions in cities back then, and instead psychologize them.

More than half of people in big American cities lived overcrowded -- that is, >2 people in a room, INCLUDING KITCHENS! Many rented just a bed for half a day! They slept, and the other half the other person, who worked in night shift, slept on it.

In big cities, the traffic in the streets, with horse carriages riding on cobble stone, and cars, started at 6:00 and lasted till midnight. Steam locomotives made a lot of noise and smoke. That's cortisol, lower immunity, more other consequences.

And bear in mind, not everyone had electricity, not to speak of central heating. You had lots of chimneys everywhere. Not everyone had sewer, tap water and so on. I guess, a good deal of these people migrated to cities from more quiet places, and since there was no notion of harmful environment.

We tend to be surprised why modernism got so much traction, and even the best architects hated cities (e.g. Frank Lloyd Wright, who wrote something like "a city plan is a fibrosis"), but the reasons were everywhere, real and brutal.

So I'm pretty sure the reason for people being nervous, is quite physical, not "people were scared", as you may conclude from the article (although this is not explicitly stated).

[EDIT] Forgot about the social environment. When you move to a big city as an adult, without the college/university to give you social fabric, you're quite lonely. And in big cities this fabric was getting thinner with urbanization. And you're short on money, can afford only a bed, and count every cent. I think it's a more serious reason to get neurotic than times changing too rapidly.