Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) tells the story of a middle European anarchist planting a bomb at the Greenwich Observatory – an operation which has already been utterly compromised by the police. In the world of 1910 borders were still open, just, and it was generally possible to travel without passport, but the late 19th century had seen a huge migration (larger, proportionally, than the migration we’ve seen in the last quarter of a century). The scares caused by migration would seem similar.The idea of the rapid exchange of postcards or short letters would not seem strange. The phone was spreading rapidly in a world where the postal service still delivered letters, in cities, four or five times a day. The telegraph had already shortened distances for businesses, governments, and newspapers. People assume that the internet would seem revolutionary, but perhaps not.The average speed around London by vehicle is about the same as then bikes were a common sight (in 1904 they represented 20% of traffic). Cars have replaced carts, although cars were already seen in London by 1910.The magazine market would be more of a mystery. Most of our national newspaper titles were in existence then, although there are now fewer titles.Much of London Underground was already in place (only the Jubilee and Victoria Lines are more recent) along with the suburban and inter-city train network.The tall steel and concrete buildings would be new, but they would likely have seen pictures of the American skyscrapers built in the late 19th century. Much of the built environment would be familiar, including much of the street layout and the public parks.So what might Edwardians find familiar about 21st century London? But in thinking about such novelties, people sometimes mistake form and content. and ‘novelties’, or things which are genuinely new. elements of the past which have become buried or marginalised in the present. In this, I’m also influenced by James Dator’s notion (opens pdf) that the long-term future will have three components: elements of the present extending forwards. I can say this with some confidence because I’ve done a number of 100-year scenarios recently, and in the spirit of Elise Boulding’s ‘ 200 year present‘ – 100 years back, 100 years forward – we’ve used the notion of the 1910 time traveller arriving in contemporary London to help to stretch people’s thinking. Quite a lot of the world of 2010 would be familiar to a traveller from a hundred years ago. It was one of those ahistorical things which futurists say to get attention, sometimes adding that everything is speeding up, but it’s not borne out by the briefest review. I read an interview the other day with a futurist who said that a traveller from 1910 would find the present world ‘unfathomable’. In thinking about long-term change, social change is harder to imagine than technological change.
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