😳1980s Anti-Computer FANATIC goes COMPLETELY INSANE!

I am still trying to figure out WHO this guy is and WHY he is so upset. In the olden days, we would have called him a Luddite, anyone who was "against progress" or against the crushing uniformity of the Machine Age. But this guy! He not only gets upset about computer technology - he becomes HYSTERICAL, ranting and almost weeping from grief and despair! Or something like that. Maybe he just hadn't figured out computers yet. As it turned out, NOBODY had to figure out ANYTHING, so all my own worst fears never came true. Technology was dumbed down and dumbed down until there was nothing much to learn any more. No one saw THAT coming, I'll tell you!

RETROFUTURISM: one of my favorite things

I love how people in the past predicted the future. The future that is now OUR past. For some reason, this almost always involved cooking and kitchens where everything was automatic and worked by itself. It never happened. And who would keep cleaning and refilling those food dispensers? (Staff?) And how come we never hear about "infra-red" cooking any more? Was it just too Jetsons to be practical?

😳JENNIFER GREY in EMBARRASSING '80s Computer Dating Video!😳

I will admit to stealing this video from a magnificent YouTube channel called Pics and Portraits. Why it's called that, I do not know, because a soporific-sounding announcer keeps coming on and saying things like, "You're watching Sleepcore. Pleasant dreams."  So was the channel originally called Sleepcore? Did someone else steal the name, or - . Or did it get shut down, the way I have also been nearly shut down for no particular reason except benevolent plagiarism? 

But the art of stealing reached the level of the sublime when I saw a comment under one of the Sleepcore videos. A guy was complaining about some aspect of the content, I think the format of it, because it made it harder for HIM to upload everything onto HIS channel. In other words, he was openly admitting to stealing ALL of this guy's content, whole and unedited. The Sleepcore guy just told him he had nothing to complain about, which was true.

As if that were not weird enough. . . the YouTuber behind Pics and Portraits admits to using "repurposed" material. A nice way of saying "stolen". Which means I am either not really stealing it,  or stealing pre-stolen material. Kind of like "distressed" jeans, which I would never want to wear because, let's face it, most days, I am distressed enough already.

This little gem is just one of a genre called "retrofuturistic computer horror stories", in which we're all told we will soon be swamped in a sea of ignorance about computers unless we scramble to find out EVERYTHING about them. Long strings of incomprehensible techno-babble soon follow, just to make sure we feel properly terrified and thrown off-balance. This stuff must have been produced by sadists. Suffice it to say that none of it ever came true.

I know nothing about computers after all these years, and still use them fairly competently, at least to the point of maintaining a blog and a YouTube channel. So that was a bunch of bunk. Some of these retro-mini-dramas tried to put a more positive spin on the oncoming horror. Jennifer Grey is excruciatingly cute in this little snippet, which extols the virtue of a magical system which allows a teenaged couple to draw pictures together without actually being in the same room. Both are supposed to be nerdy, unpopular kids who can't meet anyone in the usual way (whatever THAT is), but the whole thing just fizzles because Jennifer Grey is charismatic and sweet, and the guy is - well, he's  a doll, and I wouldn't have minded at all having him for a boy friend in 1972. But this was long before the prototype of the nerd as pop culture hero. 

I think the real truth of all this, besides the fact that both of them are well into their 20s, is that Jennifer Grey needed the work (this was a couple of years before Dirty Dancing), and the really cute guy was the only one who auditioned. 

"Futurist" Makes Ludicrous Predictions about Year 2000

The title says it all. This guy is an absolute idiot, but people were paying attention to this sort of thing back then! This is edited down from an agonizing 30-minute interview, in which the interviewer, who looks a little crazy himself, sits there looking baffled. . .