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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by WhyEssEff@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

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

[^1]: kinda not now technically, depending on context [^2]: definitively now

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[-] happybadger@hexbear.net 40 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] Biggay@hexbear.net 9 points 1 week ago

Its also not even consistent within the art world. there are entire branches of arts that dont start calling themselves modern until the '60s.

[-] FourteenEyes@hexbear.net 35 points 1 week ago

Confidently naming this time the Now Period and the End of History, as all things that can happen already did

[-] Wheaties@hexbear.net 18 points 1 week ago

de-encyclopedia The Contemporary Era began four hundred years ago...

[-] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 34 points 1 week ago

It's fine, future historians will just label this the Late Iron Age or the Steel Age or the Silicon Age.

[-] Wheaties@hexbear.net 33 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 29 points 1 week ago

Historians like Enzo Traverso or Losurdo already argue this, that WWI and WWII are actually a long Second Thirty Years War

[-] CrawlMarks@hexbear.net 9 points 1 week ago

The late revival of the roman empire.

[-] FourteenEyes@hexbear.net 22 points 1 week ago

or how the US is gonna be mistaken for latter half of the British Empire.

same-picture

[-] Thorngraff_Ironbeard@hexbear.net 21 points 1 week ago

I mean the world wars and the interwar period is basically a 30 years war situation.

[-] hexaflexagonbear@hexbear.net 29 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 19 points 1 week ago

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".

[-] Lemister@hexbear.net 9 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] BoxedFenders@hexbear.net 21 points 1 week ago

nah, this is the age of petroleum and microplastics.

[-] Rom@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago

The age of PFAS and Covid

[-] hexaflexagonbear@hexbear.net 21 points 1 week ago

We should do a bad job of record keeping so they call it the second dark age.

[-] sentient@hexbear.net 18 points 1 week ago

with how easily digital records decay i've seen it argued that this could be the case

[-] Thorngraff_Ironbeard@hexbear.net 13 points 1 week ago

I think they might have a reason other than our records keeping to call our time the second dark age

[-] kleeon@hexbear.net 17 points 1 week ago

later bronze age collapse

[-] CrawlMarks@hexbear.net 8 points 1 week ago

The right angle age. Cause all of our buildings are boring squares instead of shapes that work with the environment

[-] Barx@hexbear.net 23 points 1 week ago

Guy holding a Bronze axe circa 2000 BC: "I've got the best idea for what to call right now".

[-] Cammy@hexbear.net 16 points 1 week ago

This confused me to no end when I was younger. I would also like to flay their soul.

[-] Awoo@hexbear.net 16 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] Parsani@hexbear.net 16 points 1 week ago

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

[-] Philosoraptor@hexbear.net 16 points 1 week ago

Attending my first "modern philosophy" class as an undergraduate and starting with the 1600s was very confusing.

[-] hotcouchguy@hexbear.net 15 points 1 week ago

Me, 30 years in the future, living in the post-contemporary age, posting this same thing on the post-internet

[-] Llituro@hexbear.net 14 points 1 week ago

modern architecture: steel and glass

modern philosophy: "I think therefore I am" -- Descartes

yeah, shit's very very silly

[-] Lemister@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago

Stalinist architecture is modern and it actually looks very nice.

[-] Llituro@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago

i don't have a problem with it, i'm just pointing out that in these two different disciplines the word "modern" denotes two periods that differ by a couple hundred years.

[-] CthulhusIntern@hexbear.net 13 points 1 week ago

They probably also called themselves modern in the past. We usually consider what "epochs" or "eras" are after the fact.

[-] Infamousblt@hexbear.net 12 points 1 week ago

Yeah but see now we can have post modern and post post modern and then we can decide we're gonna do re modern so we can do pre pre re modern and then pre re modern and then re modern and then post re modern and then post post re modern and then we can do pre pre re re modern and pre re re modern and

[-] TraschcanOfIdeology@hexbear.net 11 points 1 week ago

Mo'dern, mo'problems

[-] Dolores@hexbear.net 11 points 1 week ago

counterpoint, it brings me joy to call something from 1816 modern lea-finger-guns

[-] glimmer_twin@hexbear.net 10 points 1 week ago

I always just assumed it was like the orange the fruit/orange the colour situation, and the era was called the modern era before people were like “oh this is a modern [meaning new/contemporary] kitchen”

[-] DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml 10 points 1 week ago

We used to call it the Napoleonic era, but then he died and we haven't really come up with something good since.

[-] Lemister@hexbear.net 8 points 1 week ago

I thought modern ended around like the 90s or so. Its Post-Modern now

[-] TraschcanOfIdeology@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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

[-] Tatar_Nobility@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 week ago

Early maturity is finding out as a child during literature class that the “modern” times are centuries old...

[-] anarchoilluminati@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago
[-] sleeplessone@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago

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.

this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2024
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