Louis Anslow

Dec 2, 2024 | newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org | Louis Anslow

The Oxford Dictionary just added "brainrot" as its newest official word—a cynical, but tongue-in-cheek term for consuming too much short-form social media content. However, the word isn't actually new - in the archives we found examples going back as far as a century and a half of ‘brainrot’ being used in the context of unhealthy consumption of (new) media.

Oct 31, 2024 | newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org | Louis Anslow |Jefferson Pooley |Michael J. Socolow

Remembered as history’s most infamous radio broadcast, a 1938 dramatization of H.G. Wells “TheWar of the Worlds” reportedly caused widespread panic when listeners thought a fictional news broadcast of an alien invasion was real… The day after broadcast sensationalist headlines ran from coast to coast: The New York Times placed “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact” front and center, with the report beginning: “A wave of mass hysteria seized thousands of radio listeners...

Oct 10, 2024 | newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org | Louis Anslow

Amid the turmoil of The Great Depression, one of history’s great intellectuals shared a very unintellectual hot take: he blamed automation for taking all the jobs and causing the economic chaos that would define the 1930s. His name? Albert Einstein. In a 1933 speech the famous physicist argued that automation — rather than war debts—were the primary causes of the economic turmoil in his home country of Germany, and the United States.

Oct 4, 2024 | techdirt.com | Louis Anslow

In recent weeks there has been a flurry of laws, regulatory proposals, and lawsuits regarding “deepfakes,” along with the usual rising levels of concern in the media about how the world won’t be able to handle this. For some perspective, the Pessimist’s Archive just published a story highlighting how a nearly identical fear gripped the world in 1912 regarding “fake” photos. We’ve republished it here, with permission, though you really should subscribe to the Pessimist’s Archive as well.

Sep 24, 2024 | newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org | Louis Anslow

Concern about deceptively edited photos feels like a very modern anxiety, yet a century ago similar worries were being litigated... Portrait photography gave rise to an industry of photo ‘retouching’ - analog ‘beauty filters’ - to flatter subjects in a way portrait painters once did.