3mo ago

whoever is responsible for naming a historical epoch the "modern" period needs to be spiritually punished by mysterious forces in an unusual manner

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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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.

Confidently naming this time the Now Period and the End of History, as all things that can happen already did
- The Contemporary Era began four hundred years ago...

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.
- 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
- nah, this is the age of petroleum and microplastics.
  
  The age of PFAS and Covid
- later bronze age collapse
- 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".

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.

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

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

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

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

modern architecture: steel and glass
modern philosophy: "I think therefore I am" -- Descartes
yeah, shit's very very silly
- Stalinist architecture is modern and it actually looks very nice.
  
  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.

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

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

counterpoint, it brings me joy to call something from 1816 modern

Mo'dern, mo'problems

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

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”

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

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

Yup.

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.

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