oh wow look at me I'm a human! when do I live? now, clearly. Everyone older than me lived in these descriptive periods of history that define the je ne sais quoi of the everything. I'm gonna tell everyone in the future that I'm living in the "now" time! wowwww, fuck you dickhead, real fucking selfless ain'cha. now we have to deal with the mass confusion every time someone distinguishes between modern[1] and contemporary.[2] i want your incorporeal form toyed with by forces unknown to me because you've slightly inconvenienced literally everyone in the modern day. jackass
We used to call it the Napoleonic era, but then he died and we haven't really come up with something good since.
I just read this on redsails and it's relevant.
[Bukharin's educational materia]l reduces the task to asserting that one is a special person simply because they were born in the present time, and not in any one of past centuries. We might recall here the story of the French petit bourgeois who discovered the word “contemporary” and thought it made him sound fancy so he printed it on his business card. In every time there has been a past and a present, so “being of the present” is a boast only good for ridicule.
I'm firmly a modernist. It's the future they stole from us and few things make me angrier than 1900-1930s art history. Calling it modernism and modern art was such a misstep. When I ran /r/modernart our #1 post and #1 removed post was people who mistook that word for contemporary and had no idea what modern meant in relation to premodern or postmodern. It's such a stupid term with no better substitute.
Its also not even consistent within the art world. there are entire branches of arts that dont start calling themselves modern until the '60s.
Attending my first "modern philosophy" class as an undergraduate and starting with the 1600s was very confusing.
Confidently naming this time the Now Period and the End of History, as all things that can happen already did
It's fine, future historians will just label this the Late Iron Age or the Steel Age or the Silicon Age.
like how World War 1 and 2 are gonna get covered as a single event, or how the US is gonna be mistaken for latter half of the British Empire.
Historians like Enzo Traverso or Losurdo already argue this, that WWI and WWII are actually a long Second Thirty Years War
or how the US is gonna be mistaken for latter half of the British Empire.
I mean the world wars and the interwar period is basically a 30 years war situation.
WWI is pretty intimately linked with the race for Africa and the colonial wars. There’s definitely a telling of 20th century history where you treat the two world wars as discrete events, with WWI marking the end of the colonial wars, and WWII marking the beginning of the Cold War and decolonization.
Is WWII not just an extension of these colonial wars by the powers that "lost" in the race for colonies? Japan attempts to take the Asian colonial possessions of the British and the Americans, the Italians attempt to take the North African colonial possessions of mainly France and Britain (as well as their own colonial war in Ethiopia), and Germany attempts to apply colonialism as well as colonial tactics of control and genocide to Eastern Europe in its mission to create colonial "living space".
Yes Germany, Italy and Japan were the upcoming revisionist powers that tried to disrupt the old world order of the Anglosphere and France. The United States had already supplanted Britan pre-bellum as the largest economy and the internal closed market of the british empire was threatened to be opened to the dollar by south africa. While Russia was seen as a threat due to its (potential) and later realized industrialization.
Thats why Lenin predicted the Pacific war from Japan against the United states, before it happened.
We should do a bad job of record keeping so they call it the second dark age.
with how easily digital records decay i've seen it argued that this could be the case
I think they might have a reason other than our records keeping to call our time the second dark age
The right angle age. Cause all of our buildings are boring squares instead of shapes that work with the environment
Guy holding a Bronze axe circa 2000 BC: "I've got the best idea for what to call right now".
This is a tangent, but the fact that we just decided to term an entire period of history which reaches back decades as "contemporary" is the actual end of history
The industrial era has always made more sense to me. It begins with the printing press and the mechanisation of all production eventually ending with ww2 which neatly leads us into the Information Age.
I thought modern ended around like the 90s or so. Its Post-Modern now
It's been post-modern at least since the 1940s. The world wars made it clear that modernity and it's promises were in crisis
Me, 30 years in the future, living in the post-contemporary age, posting this same thing on the post-internet
This confused me to no end when I was younger. I would also like to flay their soul.
They probably also called themselves modern in the past. We usually consider what "epochs" or "eras" are after the fact.
The Contemporary Era began four hundred years ago...
