h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You could clock off work and forget about the job (no email, no cellphones)?

Identity theft only happened in films like Day of the Jackal, and then only to dead people?

When parents could let their kids out to play without social services getting involved?

when you were allowed to decide for yourself how risky you wanted your life to be?

When you didn't have to be careful what you say in front of your television?

That television thing! My eyebrows raised at that!

I suspect that threat is being massively overblown as is the story I saw on the evening news about you car at risk of hackers.


In both cases there have been absolutely zero reported incidents.

As if to illustrate the point, I'm on my way to the pub for a drink with a friend this evening and I get a text from work asking if I can do some extra work on one of my days off

I replied in the negative.

I actually do forget about work after clocking out. I have done for over a decade now. There's a downside. I miss having opportunities to earn overtime. I haven't seen a dime of overtime in well over a decade.

During my first full time job after leaving school (mid 70s), I worked a regular 40 hour, Monday to Friday week (no such thing then as zero-hours contracts either) at a sweet factory, and was able to forget work after clocking off, but every Saturday morning, if I wanted it, there was a few hours overtime to be had, cleaning. I really enjoyed doing that because you got to come in a little later (9am instead of 8am), the place was quiet and peaceful (none of the machines were running), the atmosphere was relaxed (because there were no machines to keep up with), and after we got out, around 12.30pm, we all headed off to the pub until chucking-out time at 2.30.

Which probably disposed of all the overtime money we'd just earned

The same was true of one or two of the other sweet companies I subsequently worked for, but after 1982 and until I moved to Texas, I was self-employed, and when you're a sole trader there's no overtime and no forgetting the job, ever. I didn't experience regular work again until I got the job at the CD store.

I really miss the feeling of those Saturdays. There was a pleasant rhythm to it. Yes, pubs didn't stay open all afternoon like they do now, and it was always a bit of a pain having to leave before the international sports special section of World of Sport came on (the pub we went to had one television in the corner, permanently tuned to ITV, with the sound turned down), around 3pm, and it would have been nice to be able to stay there and watch the wrestling too. But if I spent that long supping ale in the pub I'm not sure I'd be able to stay conscious for Mick McManus, Les Kellett and Kendo Nagasaki anyway.

And because the pubs kicked you out at 2.30, well, that was a good reason to go and see some footie, either a local amateur league game, or off to Upton Park for the Hammers. Which finished just in time to come home for Doctor Who, tea, and off out for some more Or stay in and watch Morecambe and Wise/The Two Ronnies.

That sounds quite nice even if I don't really care for sprots.

You could clock off work and forget about the job (no email, no cellphones)?

I was on call half the time so NO i Don't.
I do now I've retired

I'm not keen on sprots either (whatever they are )

It was nice, BG. I realise though that in order for me to experience it, other people had a different kind of Saturday because they had to work behind the bar, or at the football ground, or in the shops we might have gone to.

But I think we're in danger of failing to see the wood for the trees here by concentrating too much one thing. What I'm getting melancholic and querulous about is that so many of the 'improvements' and innovations we've had in recent decades might not have made such an improvement to our life as we might like to think.

And that's quite possibly a feeling our parents might have had about the simpler, less hectic time I'm getting all sentimental about because they in turn wouldn't have had the plethora of entertainment opportunities I had as a kid and a teenager, nor the kind of spending cash I had once I started work and all the consumer goods and fashions to spend it on. My former father-in-law for instance, often laments that he misses the pleasure he used to get from tinkering with his car engine because you can't do that any more - they've got computers controlling them now, and if something starts to go wrong you can't just get out the spanners and the screwdrivers and fix it - you have to take it to someone with the right diagnostic facilities (another computer) to put the fault right. And spend a lot of money doing it.

So it's all relative.

But, when, in the 1970s and 80s, people who thought they knew what the future might look like started talking about things like videophones, or wristphones, or any of the kind of technology we already have or are about to get (but still no flying cars ), they could hardly have foreseen any of the privacy issues these innovations have brought about.

It's quite a balancing act. On the one hand, I've virtually forgotten what it's like to wonder about something, but have to either let that thought go and not follow it up, or hope there might be something about it in that outdated encyclopaedia in the sideboard, or make a conscious decision to go the library and look it up, who knows when, rather than simply do a websearch or read a Wikipedia article about it. On the other hand, if I went to the library I wouldn't have to think about who might be tracking my movements and making a record of what I was looking up, nor would the information I got be so likely to be contested ("picture or it never happened") because there was far less information to be had, because it took more effort to find it, because it was more likely to be authoritative and because there was virtually none of the kind of misinformation that pervades the www.

And I guess it's quite likely that some of the kids and teenagers who have grown up with smartphones and the www and world at their fingertips will in turn have similar feelings about this 'simpler time' when they get to my age.

Yep. They'll long for those halcyon days of youth. But what will they long for in particular? We can only guess and anyone who's looked at the predictions of futurists past knows how poorly those predictions usually are. This is the year of Marty McFly's future so we've seen many stories about how close the predictions of that film were. (Video teleconferencing, smart appliances, virtual reality headgear - check. Hoverboards, self lacing shoes - they're working on it. Mr. Fusion and, as you pointed out, flying cars - nope! (but do you really want distracted drivers navigating in three dimensions?))

Unfortunately we can make a few predictions that are likely inevitable. They have to do with the bleak future climate change holds for them. But as to future technology and culture we're pretty much clueless.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/jan/02/what-back-to-the-future-part-ii-got-right-and-wrong-about-2015-an-a-z

I've just reminded myself of this.

"I want things to be simple and uncomplicated, like they was when I was a nipper. There was no decisions then. It was grey flannel shorts with braces all winter, and khaki shorts with your underpants showin' all summer. If you didn't wash your feet in the slipper baths you got chinky rot. If you spent too long in the bogs with Health and Efficiency you got bloodshot eyes and hairs on the palms of your hands. It were all so simple and uncomplicated. That's what I want now - a simple and uncomplicated life."

That's Carter Brandon, speaking in 1976 (which is exactly the period I'm having sentimental recollections of) about how complicated things are now, and pining for his own 'simpler time', in I Didn't Know You Cared. So he (ie, Peter Tinniswood, the writer) was clearly not as happy as I was with mid 70s

I'll be honest though. It's not so much the simpler time itself, the childhood with fewer worries that I'm missing. I have no wife, no kids, no car, no debt, none of the responsibilities that adults usually have around their neck, other than making sure the rent gets paid each month. I live a relatively care-free (although not stress-free) life, comparable to the time when I enjoyed those Saturdays.

My current wistfulness goes deeper than that, and is more wide-ranging, in terms of society. The great driving force of our planet - business - has far too much of the upper hand at the moment. Everything is cyclical, and in that respect I think we're at a particularly low point. Employers, whether large or small, but generally large, are less likely to treat their workers with the same kind of respect and dignity they would have 30 or 40 years ago. I look back at all the benefits my dad got from his (nationalised) employer, and wonder at them. They're not in the same league as the pampering that Google employees are said to get, but they're far better than what the same workers for the same (now privatised) companies will be getting.

This came up on the BBC today http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31360870 Smart devices: Is privacy loss inevitable?

Only if we let it. Only if roll over and let it walk all over us (do nothing about it) or tickle our belly (allow ourselves to be seduced by its 'benefits').

http://youtu.be/b1Vc6oJ2qOM

Can you tell me what that is before I open the link? I've made it a rule now not to open anonymous links, even innocuous-looking links posted by people I trust, and to try to name any links I post myself, a practice I've yet to remember to do every time, but I'm getting there.

By the way, I quite like sprots. No so much the beansprots you get at healthfood shops, but definitely Brussels sprots

It's a short YouTube link from the TV series Parks & Recreation, an episode I just happened to watch last night and this clip is pertinent to your previous statement.

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