For example: Jaws crashed the shark population and Sideways changed the popularity of 2 different Wines.
Goethe’s book “The sorrows of young Werther” caused several suicides of people who emulated the protagonist.
The communicator in Star Trek was an important inspiration for the development of the cell phone and the creators stated that one of their motifs for developing a hand-held telephone was to have something like the Star Trek communicator.
Final Destination caused an entire generation of drivers to abjectly refuse to take up any space within a quarter mile behind a log truck.
For anybody wanting to watch the movie so they understand this meme, don’t actually watch Final Destination, because the log scene is not in there. I know this because I watched the whole movie waiting to see it, and never saw it.
The log scene is in Final Destination 2.
Final Destination 2 also had the best final kill of the entire franchise. Most of the movie is not great, but the open and close are two of my favorite moments in a cinema.
That series is so irritating. Basically kids haunted by the ghost of Rube Goldberg.
I’ve never seen the Final Destination movies, but the one with the tanning bed scene came out when I was in high school.
…Interestingly enough, that was right around when the cliquey “cool” girls stopped going to tanning salons in the winter.
I still do this for this exact reason.
I swear this is just an online meme and people are larping about it being a genuine fear.
Never seen the movies but I 100% would change lanes to avoid driving behind a log truck. I do it for other trucks, too, if they’re carrying what look like barely-strapped-down loads.
I never even considered that this wouldn’t be a common fear lol.
I can tell you it’s true for at least one person.
Refuse to? Buddy, I’m hunting for them. I don’t have to do this anymore and my family gets a big payout. Sign me up.
Bad news, the scene was CGI’d because logs don’t bounce like that.
Ya just gotta ruin my dreams, eh? /s
I’ve heard that bricks are much more effective IRL.
Might I recommend any given highway in and around Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula.
On my way!
First thing that came to mind is Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle which led to, among other things, the creation of the FDA.
That wasn’t his goal though; he’s quoted as saying: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
I know, the whole book is about how America is a giant con to get immigrants to come over so they can be exploited for profit then left to die with they can no longer work 12 hour shifts, meanwhile they get to watch their kids get poisoned by companies, ran over by commercial trucks and robbed of any dignity or chance they deserve.
Instead people read it and were like ‘omg some filthy polacks finger could be in my sausage, that’s disgusting!’
Theres still on average about 2 amputations per week across the US meat packaging industry. People are still getting maimed and killed doing a job that pays shit. You just don’t eat as much of them as you used to…
Theres still on average about 2 amputations per week across the US meat packaging industry. People are still getting maimed and killed doing a job that pays shit. You just don’t eat as much of them as you used to…
Damn, shrinkflation hitting everything
There was a minor news story about a decade ago about Tyson getting caught employing minors on the meat packing floor.
Star Trek introduced a lot of the first concepts of what we currently use as every day technology, it had a first hand tangible impact on the lives of pretty much every human alive today.
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Geordi is also why I became an engineer.
Hell yeah.
Jurassic Park caused a lot more kids to be interested in growing up to be paleantologists. Ironically, they went on to prove some of the science in the movie wrong
Somwhow, no one has mentioned Lord of the Rings, which basically invented modern fantasy.
This. You might have never read or seen LotR, but your idea of medieval fantasy is essentially LotR, I love a quote by Terry Pratchett:
J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.
GNU Terry Pratchett
That’s a great quote, thank you!
your idea of medieval fantasie is essentially LotR
I mean yeah, because Tolking also just drew from his local fables and sagas. European Volktales are all about dwarfs, elves, creatues in the mountains, corruption, evil forces and lords, magic objects, wizards and brave knights, a royal house in trouble.
Just look at the Nibellung Tale. A pre christian gemanic tale
GNU Sir pTerry.
It’s a foundational work, but I’d argue that modern fantasy is more of a synthesis of LOTR and Conan the Barbarian.
The Matrix; check out “the internet” for some examples of its influence.
Fun fact, the Internet was around long before The Matrix. We even had fledgling VR before then. Google VRML and The Lawnmwer Man.
Yesterday I stumbled upon a Sliders episode (probably from 98) where everybody is wearing VR goggles
Do you mean The Matrix the movie, or The Matrix the thing William Gibson created in 1983?
Maybe the 1850s rebrand of 3000 year old math concept of arrays?
I still remember the long lines on launch day.
They keep saying consume product, but no one ever talks about Kronecker product…
The Matrix was very much an expression of a subset of hacker culture of its time. Not a trendsetter.
It also gave us Elon Musk…
No. Fuck no.
Ye. Thats where this whole “we live in a simulation” comes from that elon is a follower off
He is an asshole from birth, no need to assign blame to any external entity.
I didnt blame him geing an asshole on matrix?!?!
You did say matrix “gave us Elon”. What did you mean by that, then?
The 24 hour news cycle. It made the news dependent on ratings and turned into an entertainment medium to fill all of the extra hours. Before that, it was a half hour of local news and a half hour of national news at dinner time and at bedtime with snippets of news in the morning on things like the Today Show. CNN created a format, Fox added imaginary outrage, and things went downhill from there.
(Personal case, but i think i am not alone) I have been interested in science since Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, i was a kid when it aired.
For me it’s Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Beekman’s world was on around the same time. I used to love watching them both, although I don’t remember much of either of them
Also, does anyone remember Mr. Wizard?
The Hindenburg crash. If it weren’t for the newsreel, it would have been a unique airship crash and the airships would have continued to fly. But because it was shown in every theater as a newsreel for months, the interest in airship travel tanked and fleets were dismantled. It was actually a safe form of travel for the time. While tragic, only 35 people actually died, which is peanuts to a large air liner crash.
It’s actually crazy to me that cruise ships exist but cruise zeppelins don’t. You are telling me me there isn’t a market for a treetop rainforest cruise because of a crash from almost 100 years ago but people will still fly on a 737???
A cruise zeppelin could only work as an extreme luxury thing. A ship can carry tons of stuff, but a zeppelin is pretty limited, especially compared to the size of one.
For sure, it would be stupid expensive, it still surprises me that it nobody has tried it.
I will never forgive them for what they stole from us
And 62 of the 97 survived. It blew my mind to learn that.
I remember reading that most airships at the time used helium, but due to the war Germany had to use hydrogen instead. This is what made the hindenburg explode.
If they had used helium there wouldn’t have been any issue.
The book Unsafe at Any Speed was partly responsible for the formation of both the US Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Nader should’ve been president dammit
Afaik it basically introduced automotive safety as a thing in the US. People just didn’t care before.
How about war of the worlds radio broadcast?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_radio_drama)
Karl Marx’ “Das Kapital” pretty much invented communism.
Malleus_Maleficarum/Hammer of Witches/Hexenhammer from 1486 was a rather popular book about witchcraft that helped popularize witchhunts, greatly helped by massive technological advances in book printing a few decades earlier.
Not really. It dunked so hard on capitalism that people are still afraid of it, and serves as a theoretical basis for many things, but communism is not new or invented.
Did communism exist as a political concept before Marx’ works?
Yes.
You’d be naive of history to say otherwise.
Marx formalised an industrial era ideology from many existing concepts, evolving it further politically and economically to reapply those concepts to, what were then, modern times with rapidly expanding globalisation.
He was no Jesus, but he did preach the gospel.
I think they’re under the impression that until white western people formalize it, it doesn’t count. Which as a native I come across like weekly.
Yes, although it wasn’t as widely known.
From the wiki on Communism:
One of the first uses of the word in its modern sense is in a letter sent by Victor d’Hupay to Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne around 1785, in which d’Hupay describes himself as an auteur communiste (“communist author”).[72] In 1793, Restif first used communisme to describe a social order based on egalitarianism and the common ownership of property.[73] Restif would go on to use the term frequently in his writing and was the first to describe communism as a form of government.[74]
As a political concept? Not in the exact words we use. Marx is what we can call a “discursive formation” for related and interconnected socio-political theories (just as Freud would be one for psychoanalysis). He gave us the standardized vocabulary, and effectively spoke it into being as we now conceive of it. I’m sure other posters are going to tag in quickly on this, but the tl;dr: there have always been class struggles. I would absolutely say it has always been a political matter. As far as a collectively-realized political concept, this has not always been the case. It really accelerated during the Industrial Revolution and the “Manifesto” pamphlet.
Edit: forgot to say, that’s a good question!
There hasn’t always been class struggle. Early communalism took up the bulk of human history, and was classless.
We can’t know how the unwritten portion of humanity went outside what we see in ruins. Modern anthropology seems to indicate that humanity has a deep urge towards social restructuring and politics. To frame it even as broadly as “classless communalism” is to ignore the tendency to reimagine society.
See The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow for more
We can reimagine all we like, and of course something as general as “classless communalism” is going to be reductive. There are many different types of existing capitalist and socialist societies, and there were many types of feudal and slave societies before them. Having social structure is not the same as having classes, either. Far-future communism will be highly structured and yet will not have classes.
Yes, but we’ve observed hunter gatherers who keep slaves, which is a class. And that’s not even touching on gender as a class. The book I referenced is written by an anthropologist and an archeologist trying to not let their left wing ideologies color their vision of the past, but rather to use modern academic ideas of the past as an inspiration and guide for our ability to reshape society going forward. I’d really recommend giving it a read, even if you find yourself ultimately disagreeing with the points.
True, however, there at some point is a social revolution creating the conditions necessary for a political revolution. So we have to ask ourselves, at what point did this classless society tip? What changed? I don’t have an answer, but something shifted to necessitate class struggle.
Agriculture created class society. Once it was discovered, the division of labor appeared, and thus from it sprang the division of society into workers and owners. The advancement to the next form of class society came alongside improvements in the means of production and distribution, creating new social relations and thus new classes to overtake the old.
Hasn’t agriculture always existed in some form, and then would class struggle not have always existed? Or do you mean a specific advancement (perhaps a technological point aka social revolution) that caused this division?
Yes. There were earlier Utopian socialists such as Robert Owen. Marx created dialectical materialism, advancing on Hegel’s idealist dialectics, and thus invented historical materialism and scientific socialism, the basis of all existing socialist states since Marx.
Might come as a shock, but most households are, in fact, communist.
Not quite the same. Communism is a fully collectivized global system, households are individual units within broader societies.
Most households are patriarchal.
Yes. Many “primitive” (as the euro-centric description typically was at the time) tribal societies were.
Early communalism is not the same as communism, nor was early communalism something consciously understood within its historical context as agriculture and class society had not truly come into existence yet.
Dracula and Frankenstein both came out during the same year, 1931. Dracula was so popular in early 1931 that they were able to do all of Frankenstein by the end of the year. Can you imagine?
Those two began the modern era of horror. Modern being not silent.
I guess talking about a movie? Frankenstein book came out in 1818 and Dracula book came out 1897.
They mention the silent and modern era. Obviously talking about audiobooks.
Book on phonograph.
They must be: Dracula 1931 and Frankenstein 1931
By that time ‘Dracula’ was already plagiarized as ‘Nosferatu’ in 1922, since F.W. Murnau wasn’t given the rights to adapt ‘Dracula’, so he shrugged his shoulders, changed a few things and made his own film. Inventing some stuff on the way like Nosferatu being affected by sunlight, about which Dracula and folklore vampires never gave a shit.
The 1931 ‘Dracula’ is notable partly due to its set having been used at nights to make a Spanish-language version in parallel. Which is considered better than the English-language one, because its crew had access to the English dailies and could check what worked and what didn’t.
Well it certainly didn’t leave me silent
