But were the 1990s gayer than the 1890s?
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Hmmmm… 
Good question. Probably equally gay? But just in different ways?
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My grandmother on my mother’s side was born in 1890 and died in 1980. Her husband died in 1918 in the flu epidemic.
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Man, I thought it was just me!
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We were all trained to think of the 21st century as an era of space travel and robot butlers and things like that, and none of it has really happened yet, so of course it’s easy to forget.
There has been one invention that really sets the 20th and 21st centuries apart though – social media. SixDegrees in 1997, Friendster in 2002, MySpace in 2003, Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006. And now it has such a hand in everyone’s lives, even if they don’t use it directly.
I mean, you could also probably talk about all the changes to the international order, starting with 9/11 and the illegal invasion of Iraq. And now we have Putin and Brexit and whatever the hell Trump manages to get away with. But that’s not really unrelated, is it? Rich assholes hoping to dismantle everything for profit is not new, but the way they track and warp the public’s response is. And on a happier note, I don’t think we are stuck with that any more than the 20th century was all its beginning. We have lots of chance to make things better in the next 80 years.
But in any case, if you ever have trouble remembering this is the future now, there you are – think of it as the century of social media and you’ll be reminded dozens of times a day.
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Yeah, weirdly, I see us as “post-future” now… There was a book I read, maybe it was Time Travel: A history by James Gleicke?:
Where he sort of made that argument…
I think so, though it’s certainly part of a longer history of mediated communication in general.
I’ve been trying to find a clip of this scene for the past few days, but am failing… it cuts off right at the moment that is critical, where she starts to say that “I didn’t expect to find myself living in the future, but here I bloody well am…” I used to have that in a gif, but it’s since gotten deleted.
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Everything that happens flows out of what came before, but you have to consider what stage it’s reached if you ever want to recognize eras. 
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It looks like it’ll be more like this:
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I want to be Lowly Worm or one of the Bug People riding in the train.
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More on point with every passing year.
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YOINK!!!
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Living in a converted mall, and the challenges of converting unused retail spaces into (hopefully) affordable housing:
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The comparisons to biological evolution are a little stretched, but still an interesting overview.
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