What is something that was influential back in it's day but is now often forgotten despite it's importance?
What is something that was influential back in it's day but is now often forgotten despite it's importance?
Vaccines. the original against smallpox was revolutionary, probably one of the most important discoveries of human history. Smallpox was a horrendous disease but we found a way to save the lives of millions of people
And know we have outbreaks of diseases like measles because the vaccines were so effective that people starting to believe that the disease was not so bad and that the risk of the vaccine was greater than the risk of the disease 🤦♀️
Harambe. His death is what caused this timeline to branch off from the correct one.
This is also my benchmark for when it all turned to shit
Gamergate was the starting point in my mind…
facebook's reach.
Cambridge Analytica has used it for elections.
some android phones have fb factory-installed (and not easily removable).
in some countries fb data consumption is totally free~
there were reports of [publicized?] fb experiments manipulating user's feed to elicit feelings of sadness, despair and hope.
I was just thinking last night about how crazy it is that we've let a company as horrible and evil as Facebook mold and shape our society. Even governments are bending to their will. The fact that even the US government just gave up on making its own notification and communication platform and just started using Twitter and Facebook is ridiculous.
I hope the "host your own government Mastodon instance" thing catches on in the US
Voice calls.
Real-time communications over distance in general.
Monasteries. Relatively small groups of people living there have changed whole societies.
Can you give an example of such a change?
Not the op but a medieval history nerd all the same.
Monasteries actually were kind of technological powerhouses in their day. Cistercians for instance transmitted technologies, forging techniques, farming and cultivation advances and medical knowledge across Europe because basically you had a sort of "franchise" where every church they made was built and run to a regimented standard. They had the study of latin and a sort of sign language that meant travelling monks could all understand each other and since travel was fairly dangerous and rare it facilitated the transmission of scientific and philosophical thought.
It was fairly common for monasteries to provide state of the art medical care for their time which was actually fairly sophisticated in basic exchange for experimentation, the honing and propagating the research. You see the lingering effect of this in our languages. Clock comes from the word for "bells" because the mechanisms were developed originally to automatically ring the tower bells at the monestaries. Gutenberg likely got his early education in the hopes of pursuing a religious career and yhe printing press was originally to copy bibles. Latin is so entangled with modern science because those systems have their origins in monastic studies that veiwed the study of "natural philosophy" as a sort of religious observance of God's creation.
Similar situations were actually happening in parallel in other places. Religions of various sorts held a very "glue of logistical and technological ties" role in the past. Like the Muslim faith was very key in the developments of maths. Astronomy, medicine, metalworking, farming, the skills required to produce art..you track these developments in the religious temple structures of the Aztecs, Buddhists , Taoists, the Babaloynians, Greek and Romans, Egyptians and so on. Secularism taking over that role is actually all told a very new development in the grand scheme.
The creation of IMF and how it destroyed any hope for European communism post ww2
InfoSec
Y'all never listen until it's time to fix a breach or a blowout, and then y'all act like absolute mother fuckers about it too!
Just turn it off and on without being a little bitch about how you already did that, you're being walked through a trouble shooting process god fucking damnit!
Sometimes the off and on is necessary because the next step requires clean memory and the restart ensures that damn it!
Google Plus. Nobody is talking about it today, but it was the place back in the day.
I loved Google plus, there were lots of great communities
For the U.S., Marbury v. Madison.
Lawyers and legal enthusiasts know it well, but most people couldn’t name it. The case established judicial review in U.S. law.
Maybe the Steam Link/controller or the Ouya? I don't know if they were particularly influential but I feel like they both did something before it was popular.
Now there's a fair amount of game streaming devices and Android TV boxes made for emulation and gaming
Remember OnLive?
Capitalism. For all the awfulness goodness gracious, quality of life has skyrocketed as we've figured it out. Parents almost never bury their children anymore, disabled folks who aren't royalty have better lives than almost ever before, if you break a bone you can get it taken care of rather than have it heal poorly and cause pain for the rest of your life, almost no one gets literally crucified and most have access to clean drinking water in their house!!!
Yeah, we maybe don't have it as good as our parents generation but goddamn we have it so much better than their parents and grandparents etc.
(I'd argue climate change is more a political problem than capitalism. A sane society would've put a carbon tax in place decades ago and let the free market sort it out. But we get into stupid political fights and the youth, who are most affected, don't vote in primaries when it really matters.)
Literally all the benefits you mention are benefits of advancing science. All of those would still exist if there had been a global communist revolution in 1917…
Ahhh yes, who can forget the glorious communist food sciences that led to the mass starvations of millions?!?
(Heck, have you ever seen that photo of Gorbachev in a supermarket, stunned by the variety and availability of food?)
Yeah, science tends to advance more quickly under capitalism. It's not a coincidence that the scientific revolution and capitalism advanced hand in hand.
This post is completely absurd. All of these things have happened in spite of capitalism and they've developed simultaneously in non-capitalist states. We (mostly) have access to clean drinking water because of environmental activism that forced companies to stop dumping industrial waste in bodies of water. We have access to healthcare because activists maneuvered politically to ensure it became a right, not a privilege. That's to say nothing of developing capitalist countries that offer none of these privileges to their people. Capitalism didn't give us these things. If you spend any amount of time reading about the history of labor or the development of regulatory bodies, capital has hindered social progress wherever possible to avoid any restrictions or taxation. These things were demanded and fought for by the people they were affecting. Industry and finance are owed none of the credit.
Since we've "figured it out," we've made sure that most people don't have access to basic services unless they spend huge amounts of money and that the planet is in a state of disaster.
(How is this not a capitalist problem?Having the government imposed a carbon tax goes against the idea of a free market. Most of the politicians in power are capitalists.)
What services do you think people had for free earlier?
And you misunderstanding how capitalism works doesn't mean a carbon tax is against a free market any more than rules againat pouring nuclear waste into rivers goes against a free market. A free market had all sorts of rules to protect us from the excesses of capitalism, that's literally the entire point of anti-trust law, because the correct capitalist move for a company is to become a monopoly, which would be bad for consumers. Thus, we tame the excesses of capitalism.
I kind of wish there weren't so many extreme leftists on Lemmy. It's not even that I'm far away from them, politically speaking, but there's no way you can bring up Capitalism and not have angry people commenting AT you and downvotes galore.
I'm not even pro-captialism, I'm just not nearly as anti as they are and it is still nothing but hostility.
I said something positive about the USA a couple days ago and a moderator deleted my comment. The comment didn't violate any rules, he just didn't like it. The platform is what it is because it has been curated to be that way, not necessarily because everyone here feels that way. Comments that don't align with the hive mind get deleted.
I'm pretty sure these are all coincidences. It seems like a stretch to say that these are all because of capitalism. And they're definitely not because of free market capitalism.
Capitalism is what gives us our fast food and our smartphones.
It's (usually) governments keeping capitalism in check that gives us things like clean drinking water and accessibility and equality.
I doubt capitalism is quite so dramatically responsible for the specific developments mentioned. While it does create incentives to develop certain technologies faster there were other structures that were developing things like medicines, sciences and so on before capitalism really took off and things like clean drinking water wasn't really attached to capitalism except for supplying water company data that showed different companies having different death tolls to the people they serviced.
It's important to put capitalism into context. There are a lot of ills but it's a beast of different degrees. Someone running a business where they own the factory and equipment and pay employees for labor can be an efficient practice that can exist harmoniously in a fairly stable system and variations of capitalism are actually very old as it doesn't strictly apply to all privately held property - just off of how labor and investment is structured in some instances. Unchecked it can be a beast that creates abuses.
False dichotomies are currently rampant with things like the philosophy of socialism being seen as anti-capitalist. It's more accurate to say that socialism is a spectrum of interfacing with capitalism that offers a mixed system. It very rarely and only at it's farthest end seeks to stamp out every single instance of private business ownership or investment banking. A lot of thought written aince it's inception shows it's more dynamic in the variable ways it puts checks on what can be considered privately owned resources. Things like offering protections of varying degrees for labour and managing resources to create public wealth are very much throughlines but total dissolution of private property isn't really a given of the philosophy. The capitalism/libralism and socialism are often veiwed as diametrically opposed but its more useful to think of them as demi-linked on a scale that can tip from a fairly medium degree of regulated private ownership and capitalist tolerance to very public property and social ownership based structures. But basically it all still looks at resources through the lens of money and statehood existing.
Communism is more strictly anti-capitalist as it veiws all aspects of private property rights, businesses ownership, investment banking and even currency as things to move beyond. Things capitalism requires to function.
Individual property rights aren't strictly capitalism based. A lot of our modern issues are bases around free market ideas but that is more traceable to the ideas of high individual property focused libralism... Which also isn't historically all bad. At one point libralism was key to creating a more secular society based less off of privileges of patrelinieal titles... But left unchecked it creates a very misanthropic society that keeps claiming things as personal property which were once collective resources, pushing colonialism and creating new power structures just based off different metrics.
It's important I think to retain a good solid idea of where the boundaries of different ideological sources and their historical precedents actually are and not nessisarily be too quick to state one or the other is all bad. The tendency has become that to be considered that ideology every example must be stretched to it's utter extremes to be considered that ideology. There are shallow ends and deep ends of individual systems.
The history of capitalism in a more general sense is often more responsible for creating incentive to hurrying people to an early grave in the history of predatory patent medicine than it strictly is saving people. A lot of the history of scientific and technological development wasn't and still isn't driven strictly by capitalism from a funding and motive standpoint. Public money actually underlies a lot more of the significant developments... But capitalism does have a habit of driving underlying resource chains and more or less the profit driven arm of distribution - which while efficient generally causes a lot of social problems and damages.
Religion also is also not really connected directly with capitalism any more than anything else is. You can very easily have a theocratic capitalist society and generally speaking that was the norm for the early history of capitalism.
Thanks to capitalism, almost every aspect of society is being viewed through the lens of economics. Profit and loss, surplus and deficit. We're privatising everything that promises to make a profit for someone, no matter the drawbacks - healthcare, education, water supply. Everything else is being neglected even destroyed. Politics is utterly beholden to economic concerns (read: the will of wealthy donors). Which is one of the reasons why we don't have a carbon tax. The free market doesn't work in a system where growth and profit trump everything. We're literally running government like a business.
We literally have a pandemic going on in which millions of people have died completely preventable deaths in only a few years, but we didn't try to prevent those deaths for economic concerns. We literally had capitalists tell us that it's better to let those people die so we can save the economy. That's just one example of how completely and utterly capitalism has fucked up our society.
But sure, climate change is a political problem.