Wrong

I find it funny, complicated, and interesting how often narratives turn out to be wrong.

This is typically obvious in hindsight. Often many years, decades, or generations after the narratives are commonplace.

The best heuristic I have found to explain why this happens is also the simplest.

From Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

1. Anything that is in the world when you are born just works and is normal and ordinary — a natural part of the world.
2. Anything that is invented between 15 and 35 is new and exciting, and you can get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after 35 is horrible and a detriment to society.

The worst kind of argument about any new technology is “you don't need [new thing], you can already do that with [old way].”

Recent and common examples:

• You don't need a car, you have a horse!
• You don't need e-mail, we have mail!
• You don't need e-commerce, you have stores!
• You don't need Instagram, you have photo albums!
• You don't need Google Maps, we have paper maps!
• You don't need TikTok, we have cocaine!

Examples from around the internet of predictions going both ways. Please share any other good ones.

• Why the internet will fail — Newsweek, 1995.
• Worst tech predictions of all time — by some of the most famous tech entrepreneurs.
• Our brains won't be able to keep up with them — In 1904, The New York Times reported on a Paris debate about the dangers of driving at high speeds because the human brain couldn't travel that fast.
• Recorded music will destroy all musical ability — In 1906, composer John Philip Sousa warned about The Menace of Mechanical Music, lamenting that automatic music devices were replacing the lute.
• Electricity is just a fad — Junius Morgan to his son JP Morgan.
• Telephones will never catch on — In 1876, Western Union president William Orton dismissed Alexander Graham Bell's telephone as “idiotic” and declined to buy the patent for $100,000.
• “There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” — Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, 2007.
• “Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” — Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946.

Tweets and Other Material

• Ben Tossell shares an image with the caption “Sounds familiar” — a historical prediction that mirrors modern skepticism.
• Jeff Bezos frames a 2006 BusinessWeek cover calling AWS a “risky bet” — AWS now generates $62B+ in annual revenue.
• Jon Erlichman shares the skeptical iPhone headlines from 2007 — media consensus was wrong within a year.
• Balaji on how non-obvious every step of the digital revolution was: the web, Google, iPhone, and Facebook were all widely doubted at launch.
• An image showing a prediction or parallel that proved wrong.
• Documenting Bitcoin: “Something to think about” — early Bitcoin criticism mirrors past dismissals of transformative technology.
• Jon Erlichman: 22 years ago, Palm was worth more than Apple and Amazon combined.
• Tascha: Smart people can get all the facts right and still comprehend nothing — Amazon was “just books,” Netflix was “just DVDs,” NFTs were “just jpegs.”
• Clifford Stoll's 1995 Newsweek quote: “No online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher.”
• Olivia Moore traces huge consumer apps back to their very first Reddit posts — every major product faced enormous doubt at launch.
• Marc Andreessen: “I remember this panic too!” — on how AI anxiety mirrors every past wave of technological fear.
• Pessimists Archive: The Eiffel Tower was once called a “techno-dystopian vanity project” — it's now one of history's most beloved landmarks.
• George Mack: 8 things ignored by the media that will be studied by historians.
• The Fernie Swastikas, a 1922 Canadian hockey team — before the Nazi era, the swastika was a symbol of good luck and friendship in North America.
• Christopher Rufo on Harvard's documented plan to push certain occupations above 90% women and minorities.
• Paul Graham: For every ton of CO₂ rich countries stop emitting, developing countries add five — the climate problem is being misframed as primarily an emissions-reduction challenge.
• On AI-generated games looking mediocre: every new medium looks primitive at first — we forget what early video games looked like too.
• Pessimists Archive: The 1970s were not actually screen or phone-free — correcting the nostalgic myth of a simpler, technology-free past.
• Cory Watilo on Morgan Freeman's famous clip: racism is a learned trait — kids don't naturally see color.
• Marc Andreessen: The Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914), the most fertile era for technology in history, happened under high tariff regimes.
• Wall Street Mav: “Hypocrisy lvl 1000” — an image highlighting a glaring contradiction in modern beliefs or policy.
• Andrew Curran: Music and entertainment always peaked exactly when you were a teenager — it's nostalgia bias, not fact.
• Balaji: The past was often better. The future can be brighter. Dystopia is today's politics — both traditionalists and technologists can agree on that.
• Arjun Khemani: A historical thread on how every generation of adults has blamed the younger generation for society's decline.
• “For a good reason. He predicted today's world.” — on a historical figure whose warnings turned out to be prescient.
• Pessimists Archive: “Don't make me tap the sign” — on a recurring historical pattern of moral panic that keeps repeating.
• Pessimists Archive: The Forgotten War on Beepers — in the 1980s, pagers triggered a moral panic about youth and drug use that mirrors modern tech panics.
• Pessimists Archive: A 1979 archival find showing a historical anxiety that echoes today's concerns.
• Bitcoin Magazine: “Bitcoin is just a fad” — a reminder of early dismissals of what became one of the most significant financial innovations in decades.