But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past

doesn’t mean a transformative period would be transparent to the people actually experiencing it; this is why I ask how a modern paradigm shift would feel, as opposed to what it would look like or how it would operate.

the Internet slowly reinvented the way people thought about everything, including those things that have no relationship to the Internet whatsoever.

What this game illustrates is how vague our understanding of history truly is. We know all the names, and we have a rough idea of what those names accomplished—but how much can that be trusted if we can’t even correctly identify when they were alive?

In Western culture, pretty much everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality.

The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true—both objectively and subjectively—is habitually provisional. But the modern problem is that reevaluating what we consider “true” is becoming increasingly difficult.

It’s among the few remnants of the pre-Internet monoculture;

This is what happens when any populist, uncomfortable thought is expressed on television.

“multiple truths” don’t really mesh with the machinations of human nature: Because we were incessantly told one version of a story before hearing the second version, it’s become impossible to overturn the original template.

it’s quietly become the most natural way to think about everything, due to one sweeping technological evolution: We now have immediate access to all possible facts. Which is almost the same as having

an aspect of pop appreciation that latently informs everything else about it: the tyranny of the new.