1972: Choose your Future(s)

 

It’s 1972. What does the American future look like, right through the early years of the 21st century? Fifty years ago, President Nixon’s panels of trusted advisors offered him a range of options regarding funding for new technological initiatives. These were big long-term projects, with effects over as much as a half-century: medicine, nuclear research, telecommunications, and transportation engineering, from space to subways.

The proposals: A famous inventor foresees a “New Rural Society”, where work, banking, and socializing are done from home with two-way TV, and home is wherever you want it to be. NASA wants the go-ahead to create a land-able, reusable spacecraft that will be the first step in opening space to private commerce. America’s cities are eager to build a new generation of automated urban mass transit, to be run on cheap, abundant, nuclear-generated electricity. Supporters of federal funding for supersonic transport airliners point to government-funded SSTs being built in Europe and Russia and ask if we’re going to sit this one out. This jumble of 70s visions is now largely settled—proven to be good or bad investments. Some are still in progress, a half-century later. And there’s still a remainder, a handful of technological question marks whose futures are unknown even now.

The Nixon administration placed its bets. I’d like to examine some of those bets in retrospect. How did it turn out? Do they make sense now? Did they make sense even in ’72? This post is part of the March 2022 Group Writing project “Now and Then”.

The Space Transportation System—the Shuttle—had emerged as NASA’s pick for its next major project after Apollo. The key idea was reusability: the shuttle would be the first orbital “airliner”, making access to space routine, at a much more affordable pounds-to-orbit price than then-current one-use, “throwaway” spacecraft. Shuttles could land at civilian airports and someday be leased to private businesses. Mathematica, then a think tank of technology consultants, projected a launch rate high enough to pay back the government’s investment.

Superficially, it seemed like not only a winner, but a no-brainer, but getting a compromise design through the aerospace industry and the federal bureaucracy to Nixon’s desk took most of his first term. The result was bigger than NASA needed, big enough for Department of Defense secret payloads, as well as the National Reconnaissance Office’s biggest spy satellites. That’s how the funding to build the Shuttle finally got put together.

The White House verdict: George Schulz, Nixon’s budget chief, signaled his approval, and his boss went along with an $8 billion plan to get a shuttle flying by 1978. It made sense for Nixon politically: with Apollo and the LBJ defense buildup fading, defense contractors were hurting badly, especially in Richard Nixon’s political heartland, rock-solid Republican southern California. After the Democratic congress made clear that with social needs unmet, the manned space program was lucky to get anything, that shuttle development budget would be chopped to $5.5 billion for a 1979 debut, “take it or leave it”. NASA took it. They knew that Nixon had cut them the best deal that they were going to get.

The aftermath: Despite a lot of manufacturing challenges, the first flight, STS-1 took place in early 1981 and the Space Transportation System’s ambitious design seemed vindicated. It worked, and for the early years of the Reagan administration, it was America’s pride and joy. But it turned out to an unforgiving, fragile system, much riskier than planned, and extremely expensive, failing in its main goal of making space more affordable. Each routine flight to low Earth orbit ended up as costly as a three-man Apollo flight to the Moon. Nixon’s people deserve little of the blame. Even the people who put them up to it, at NASA, DoD, and the intelligence community, acted with the best information they had. Transitioning the space program to private industry would eventually start to happen, with later generations of technology and of business leadership.

Another file on Nixon’s desk: Supersonic airliners had been in development since the early ‘60s. In the US, the center of the planet’s densest web of airline routes, it was accepted as a matter of course that air travel would inevitably get faster and faster. After all, that’s what had always happened. It was only expected that America’s airframe and engine manufacturers would lead the way. So it was a mild shock when Britain and France announced plans to build the Concorde, the USSR unveiled the supersonic Tu-144, and it seemed like we were dithering on the sidelines. Nixon was pressured to loosen the purse strings and catch up.

The Verdict: To the surprise of many, the Nixon White House refused to take on the burden of subsidizing the creation of an American SST.

Why did they turn thumbs down on it while they turned thumbs up on the Shuttle? Unlike manned space travel, passenger air transportation had (almost) always been civilian, funded by private industry. The postwar airplane makers’ biggest indirect subsidy was the ability to turn military freighter and bomber airframes into civilian airliners, and then jetliners. That progression stopped at the supersonic border; planes like the B-70 Valkyrie weren’t adaptable to passenger use.

Now, to be sure, it was also true that the politics of the decision weren’t helpful to Boeing’s fledgling 2707 SST. State of Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, widely mocked as “the senator from Boeing”, would be a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, as he would be in 1976. There was no great eagerness to do Scoop any favors. But the primary driver of White House indifference was a general feeling that if the airlines and the plane makers want this to happen so badly, between them they’ve got plenty of money. Let them work it out themselves.

The Aftermath: The European and Soviet SSTs were money pits; Nixon’s planners turned out to be right about that. The technology wasn’t ready for the market.

The snapshot effect of one single time threshold isn’t a complete way to capture change when most big projects, private and public, are in progress for a decade or more. But there are times when, by chance, critical go-or-no-go decisions on several of the more significant national choices line up. 1972 was one of those times.

One consistent theme is Nixon’s genuine wish to enforce GOP austerity; he was the first White House penny pincher, the first would-be government shrinker, in decades. He was a populist. Paradoxically, that was combined with a Wall Street lawyer’s eagerness to prove that lofty, utopian Democratic goals could best be achieved by practical, free-market Republican means. There’s nothing wrong in that. It’s admirable when it creates success stories. That’s provided that, at the outset of a spending decision, you wonder from time to time if you’re too tacitly accepting those goals without examining them. With Richard Nixon sailing towards an easy re-election, he was looking to burnish his legacy.

This is where another proposal–mass transit–comes into the story. It was then accepted as a fact of economic life: business required proximity to other businesses, the denser the better. Successful cities had densely packed downtowns, so once a city reached a certain size, commuters needed weekday alternatives to driving. The first generations of subways and elevated trains were built and run by profit-making private businesses. From the onset of the Depression forward, though, hard times and misguided New Deal policies turned almost all of them into wards of the state.

That’s where things stood, forty years later, when Nixon listened to a growing chorus of big businessmen who were alarmed at the deterioration of America’s major cities, where their corporate headquarters were. They didn’t romanticize transit; they regarded it the way they regarded elevators in tall buildings, unglamorous but essential to getting the workers to the job. This issue wasn’t as politically polarized as it is today. More metropolitan areas were run by Republicans back then, and mass transit projects involved lucrative GOP specialties like bond issues and capital investment, as well as enriching constituents like attorneys, accountants, large electrical contractors, construction, real estate, and land development companies.

By then, as critics frequently complained, many cities in Europe, Canada, and even the USSR had cleaner, faster, more modern subways than New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. Montreal, which had just hosted a spectacular show at expo67, had quickly built itself a fairly standard-issue subway system in time for its opening, but had endowed it with some strikingly handsome station designs at low cost. That’s the combo that every city administrator wanted. When Nixon was sworn in, two American cities, San Francisco and Washington DC, had already started building ambitious new mass transit systems, with a third—Atlanta—ready to join them in a few years.

The Verdict: Instead of opposing them, the Nixon administration gave them a surprisingly sympathetic ear, and skeptical Republicans in Congress went along with the White House. This was the sometimes-seen, sort-of liberal side of Richard Nixon, but it was also shrewd politics.

Nixon approved federal funding of then-current proposals as well as several pilot projects, because he had a plan—convince aerospace companies suffering from the post-Apollo 11 funding letdown and defense cutbacks to create subsidiaries that would make subway and light rail transit vehicles, hardware, and software. The idea was to preserve their skills and physical facilities until the next (inevitable) defense funding surge by giving them profitable, government-funded sidelines that would exploit their capabilities of manufacturing passenger transportation with high technology content.

The Aftermath: With mixed results, Boeing teamed up with Vertol to make subway trains for Chicago, and Grumman switched from lunar landers to city buses. Major defense contractors like Rohr, Raytheon, and General Dynamics worked on automated train control systems. This heavy bias towards electronics and high tech seemed to make sense but it was misguided; the most successful start-up transit systems, like Baltimore, Buffalo, and Los Angeles, would be frugal and use conventional rail technology. So far at least, more futuristic forms of mass transit are still mostly seen in theme parks, airports, and a handful of other locations that lend themselves to high-end modern design and modest passenger volume.

The last Nixon-era proposal we’ll review claimed the virtue of minimizing the need to spend money on transportation, either long distances by supersonic air or short distances through downtown subway stations. The New Rural Society (NRS) was a set of proposals by Peter Goldmark, who had just retired as CBS’s director of research. What NRS suggested, using phone and cable connections to enable large numbers of people to work, shop, bank, and socialize remotely, has long since become reality. Although it was much in common with the internet we know, NRS wasn’t digital. Goldmark emphasized that it could be implemented with existing early 70s analog tech and upgraded later.

He was smart enough to specify that he wasn’t claiming that everybody could work from home. Most of the nation’s work—manufacturing, food, retail, you name it, would still be done at job sites, but much office work could be decentralized, making dense downtowns of office buildings less and less needed. A west coast think tank with the ponderous name of Institute for the Future ran estimates of the millions of travel hours that would be saved by teleconferencing, one of the key parts of NRS, and found that the need for urban mass transit would plunge. This has recently been proven, in 2020-’21. Just as NRS predicted, downtown office rents would plummet.

The Verdict: Nixon punted, deferring Peter Goldmark’s New Rural Society proposal for further review. The potential public savings were enormous, as was the prospect for changing city life, but the technology was premature. Since the eventual profits would largely go to AT&T and the makers of the equipment, for the time being they could bear the cost of research. In the meantime, the White House ordered Cabinet agencies to start making greater use of teleconferencing to slash lavish travel budgets.

The Aftermath: If the federal government had gone full speed ahead on NRS, it might have hastened the birth of online society by roughly 15 years. We would have had services like CompuServe, Genie, and Prodigy somewhat earlier. Changing people’s patterns of living and working still would have taken time. But it’s an interesting what-if question.

Those were some of the major choices made by the Nixon administration over a two-year timeframe, a half-century ago. There were ideas that just didn’t make the cut, would emerge later, or were benched. One of the latter was artificial intelligence, a longtime darling of university and federal funders, which was about to be exiled to “AI winter” for consistently overpromising and underdelivering. Another was a 1981 manned flight to Mars, wildly expensive even by Apollo standards. Some promising cancer research led to dead ends, but Nixon was generous with medical funding. Fusion reactors had always been ten or twenty years away and still were in 1972. They still are today, but who knows? There’s talk that it’s different now. This time, it could be for real.

The pace of change is hard to guess. Some people spend their careers working on things that take decades longer than expected. On the other hand, one day you wake up, and videos of an earthquake in Nepal are posted within moments by legions of teenagers with iPhones. It’s a different world. What could 2072 bring?

This post is part of Ricochet’s Group Writing Project, administered by Clifford A. Brown and open to all members. Participation is not only welcome, but encouraged! 

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  1. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Gary McVey:

    The Verdict: Nixon punted, deferring Peter Goldmark’s New Rural Society proposal for further review. The potential public savings were enormous, as was the prospect for changing city life, but the technology was premature. Since the eventual profits would largely go to AT&T and the makers of the equipment, for the time being they could bear the cost of research. In the meantime, the White House ordered Cabinet agencies to start making greater use of teleconferencing to slash lavish travel budgets.

    The Aftermath: If the federal government had gone full speed ahead on NRS, it might have hastened the birth of online society by roughly 15 years. We would have had services like CompuServe, Genie, and Prodigy somewhat earlier. Changing people’s patterns of living and working still would have taken time. But it’s an interesting what-if question.

    UCLA’s Network Measurement Center sent a host-to-host message to the Stanford Research Institute in October 1969, and ARPANET was up (usually) and running (occasionally).  UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah came online the month after that.

    1974.

     

    Two-way television? How quaint.

    • #1
  2. Jimmy Carter Member
    Jimmy Carter
    @JimmyCarter

    Gary McVey: Institute for the Future

    I wonder how many years and how many millions the committee spent coming up with that name. 

    • #2
  3. David Foster Member
    David Foster
    @DavidFoster

    “The Aftermath: If the federal government had gone full speed ahead on NRS, it might have hastened the birth of online society by roughly 15 years. We would have had services like CompuServe, Genie, and Prodigy somewhat earlier.”

    Or…maybe…the subsidized analog  infrastructure would have stalled the development of mass two-way communications at that level, and neither the CompuServe-type services nor the commercial Internet would ever have happened.  

    See my post on the French online service Minitel, and the comment on Minitel in this review of a book by Glenn Reynolds.

    • #3
  4. DonG (CAGW is a Hoax) Coolidge
    DonG (CAGW is a Hoax)
    @DonG

    The Shuttle has always been an over-promised program.   It survived as a jobs program and the expenditures were spread across hundreds of Congressional districts.   The military always kept a rocket program going, because they knew not to trust the Shuttle program. 

    As for super-sonic transport, the airline industry is really a low-margin cost cutting business limited by fuel costs.   Most people will waste an hour or two in their travel to save $50.  Those people and package services define the airline business model and about 500 mph is the sweet spot for making money.    People want to travel faster, but don’t want to pay for it.

    • #4
  5. Clavius Thatcher
    Clavius
    @Clavius

    What a great snapshot of early 1970s history!  Nixon is so overshadowed by Watergate that details like this are lost. 

    Yet another great post.

    • #5
  6. Clavius Thatcher
    Clavius
    @Clavius

    David Foster (View Comment):

    “The Aftermath: If the federal government had gone full speed ahead on NRS, it might have hastened the birth of online society by roughly 15 years. We would have had services like CompuServe, Genie, and Prodigy somewhat earlier.”

    Or…maybe…the subsidized analog infrastructure would have stalled the development of mass two-way communications at that level, and neither the CompuServe-type services nor the commercial Internet would ever have happened.

    See my post on the French online service Minitel, and the comment on Minitel in this review of a book by Glenn Reynolds.

    I wondered when Minitel died.  I booked SNCF tickets to Geneva from Paris on our Minitel in 1989.  It was pretty cool except for the French keyboard.

    • #6
  7. The Scarecrow Thatcher
    The Scarecrow
    @TheScarecrow

    Don’t forget that Nixon also opened the door to China and its long-term plan to dominate the world.

    50 years later it’s going swimmingly.

    • #7
  8. Judge Mental Member
    Judge Mental
    @JudgeMental

    The Scarecrow (View Comment):

    Don’t forget that Nixon also opened the door to China and its long-term plan to dominate the world.

    50 years later it’s going swimmingly.

    The turning point on that was Most Favored Nation status.  That was Clinton.

    • #8
  9. GLDIII Purveyor of Splendid Malpropisms Reagan
    GLDIII Purveyor of Splendid Malpropisms
    @GLDIII

    Some of us spend a youthful summer and fall of 1971 in Cocoa Beach watching the steady near weekly traffic to our future heading to space, and the seemingly endless vista of possibilities.

    Now left wondering what happen to that heady enthusiasm that is seemingly lost at sea with a generation confused about pronouns and words that inflict “physical” violence.

    How did the entropy happen so fast?

    • #9
  10. Hang On Member
    Hang On
    @HangOn

    Gary McVey: The Aftermath: If the federal government had gone full speed ahead on NRS, it might have hastened the birth of online society by roughly 15 years. We would have had services like CompuServe, Genie, and Prodigy somewhat earlier. Changing people’s patterns of living and working still would have taken time. But it’s an interesting what-if question.

     CompuServe was around since 1969 and the White House and much of the Federal Government had email and text messaging at computer terminals by the end of the Carter administration. It was a clunky system with little security. To find your emails, you had to go onto the server and search through everybody else’s emails. And all the addresses were a series of numbers. And there were no web browsers. The bad old days. I remember them. The Washington Post and the New York Times were quickly added onto the network so that those at the White House and those at Pentagon and State Department could see the stories that were going to appear as they were being edited and a reaction prepared. 

    • #10
  11. Hang On Member
    Hang On
    @HangOn

    The Scarecrow (View Comment):

    Don’t forget that Nixon also opened the door to China and its long-term plan to dominate the world.

    50 years later it’s going swimmingly.

    Yeah, if we had only had brilliant administrations and foreign policy establishment to push China and the Soviet Union/Russia closer together. 

    • #11
  12. DaveSchmidt Coolidge
    DaveSchmidt
    @DaveSchmidt

    I worked for the company that made the brakes for BART.  The company cratered trying to produce a workable system.  

    The folks at UCSB, where I did graduate work, regularly boasted about their role as pioneers of the Internet.  English professors who couldn’t manage their PINE accounts would brim with pride.  

    • #12
  13. David Foster Member
    David Foster
    @DavidFoster

    The microprocessor was only introduced in 1971, and to the extent that people were conscious of it at all by 1972, they thought of it as an embedded component for calculators, dishwashers, industrial control systems, etc.  But it certainly expanded the realm of what was possible in broad-based computing and communications.

     

     

     

    • #13
  14. David Foster Member
    David Foster
    @DavidFoster

    Also see my post The Past of the Future.

     

     

    • #14
  15. Barfly Member
    Barfly
    @Barfly

    David Foster (View Comment):

    The microprocessor was only introduced in 1971, and to the extent that people were conscious of it at all by 1972, they thought of it as an embedded component for calculators, dishwashers, industrial control systems, etc. But it certainly expanded the realm of what was possible in broad-based computing and communications.

    I was into digital circuit/algo design at the time, knew all the techniques for mapping logic into multiplexers and other MSI. I hated microprocessors, loved PLAs.

    • #15
  16. RightAngles Member
    RightAngles
    @RightAngles

    Clavius (View Comment):

    What a great snapshot of early 1970s history! Nixon is so overshadowed by Watergate that details like this are lost.

    Yet another great post.

    Agree. Nixon was actually one of our best presidents (though I wish he hadn’t made the EPA or opened up China), and he didn’t direct or plan Watergate. How ridiculous that two reporters threw themselves heart and soul into it and that there was a book and a movie about it, and then they all ignored and even covered up far worse things such as Hunter Biden, Benghazi, rampant voter fraud, the immigrant caravans, and Epstein to name but a few, all done by Democrats.

    • #16
  17. Henry Racette Member
    Henry Racette
    @HenryRacette

    Well done, Gary. Thanks for the perspective.

    • #17
  18. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    DonG (CAGW is a Hoax) (View Comment):

    The Shuttle has always been an over-promised program. It survived as a jobs program and the expenditures were spread across hundreds of Congressional districts. The military always kept a rocket program going, because they knew not to trust the Shuttle program.

    As for super-sonic transport, the airline industry is really a low-margin cost cutting business limited by fuel costs. Most people will waste an hour or two in their travel to save $50. Those people and package services define the airline business model and about 500 mph is the sweet spot for making money. People want to travel faster, but don’t want to pay for it.

    The SST didn’t “pencil out”, and no amount of lobbying from Boeing and PanAm was going to change Nixon’s mind. The required supersonic shape precluded a passenger cabin big enough to carry enough people to pay for the ride. For the foreseeable future–and even today–it would exist, if at all, as a limited, ultra-luxury service. 

    The environmental and consumer movements were just getting started back then, and surprise, opposition to the SST’s sonic boom wasn’t coastal and liberal. The planes needed distance to speed up and slow down from supersonic cruise; New York and L.A. were never going to hear the boom. The term “flyover country” could have been coined to describe the people who’d be hearing it fifty times a day because of screenwriters and wealthy lawyers going coast-to-coast twice as fast. 

    • #18
  19. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Clavius (View Comment):

    What a great snapshot of early 1970s history! Nixon is so overshadowed by Watergate that details like this are lost.

    Yet another great post.

    Many thanks, Mr. C! And that also goes for RightAngles and you other kind folks. Thanks for reading!

    • #19
  20. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    The Scarecrow (View Comment):

    Don’t forget that Nixon also opened the door to China and its long-term plan to dominate the world.

    50 years later it’s going swimmingly.

    Remember the expression “the China Card”? Nixon used China against the USSR, which was vastly more powerful at that time. When circumstances change, so does the chess game. 

    On another thread I made a comment including an 1850s inspired animated map of world alliances. 40 years earlier, Britain and Russia fought France. In the Crimea, Britain and France fought Russia. In World Wars I and II, all three countries fought Germany. After the war, Germany joined the West against Russia. 

    No permanent enemies, no permanent alliances. Only national interest is eternal. 

    • #20
  21. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    GLDIII Purveyor of Splendid Ma… (View Comment):

    Some of us spend a youthful summer and fall of 1971 in Cocoa Beach watching the steady near weekly traffic to our future heading to space, and the seemingly endless vista of possibilities.

    Now left wondering what happen to that heady enthusiasm that is seemingly lost at sea with a generation confused about pronouns and words that inflict “physical” violence.

    How did the entropy happen so fast?

    Don’t forget that 1971 was the height of cop killing, domestic bombings, black militancy, and bra burning outside of the Miss America pageant. 1971 is when Congress really started beating up on the space program. On the screen, it was the era of Little Murders, Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry, The French Connection and A Clockwork Orange. Somehow, the culture came back from all that. Six years later, the hit movies were Star Wars, Rocky, and Smokey and the Bandit

    It could happen again. But we have to do more than wish for it. 

    • #21
  22. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Judge Mental (View Comment):

    The Scarecrow (View Comment):

    Don’t forget that Nixon also opened the door to China and its long-term plan to dominate the world.

    50 years later it’s going swimmingly.

    The turning point on that was Most Favored Nation status. That was Clinton.

    A fine historical note, Judge.

    • #22
  23. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    David Foster (View Comment):

    “The Aftermath: If the federal government had gone full speed ahead on NRS, it might have hastened the birth of online society by roughly 15 years. We would have had services like CompuServe, Genie, and Prodigy somewhat earlier.”

    Or…maybe…the subsidized analog infrastructure would have stalled the development of mass two-way communications at that level, and neither the CompuServe-type services nor the commercial Internet would ever have happened.

    See my post on the French online service Minitel, and the comment on Minitel in this review of a book by Glenn Reynolds.

    Peter Goldmark knew that digitizing was on the way–AT&T’s long distance trunk lines were already being converted–but digital to the home would take decades of investment. Better, he thought, to get people in the habit of seeing downtowns as being obsolete in the long term. To him, success wasn’t measured in throughput speeds, but in millions of people choosing to live farther from cities. NRS was device-and-system agnostic. Could it have been an obstacle later? Sure. 

    • #23
  24. RightAngles Member
    RightAngles
    @RightAngles

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    GLDIII Purveyor of Splendid Ma… (View Comment):

    Some of us spend a youthful summer and fall of 1971 in Cocoa Beach watching the steady near weekly traffic to our future heading to space, and the seemingly endless vista of possibilities.

    Now left wondering what happen to that heady enthusiasm that is seemingly lost at sea with a generation confused about pronouns and words that inflict “physical” violence.

    How did the entropy happen so fast?

    Don’t forget that 1971 was the height of cop killing, domestic bombings, black militancy, and bra burning outside of the Miss America pageant. 1971 is when Congress really started beating up on the space program. On the screen, it was the era of Little Murders, Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry, The French Connection and A Clockwork Orange. Somehow, the culture came back from all that. Six years later, the hit movies were Star Wars, Rocky, and Smokey and the Bandit.

    It could happen again. But we have to do more than wish for it.

    We certainly do.  There’s something more sinister about it this time around. In the 60s and 70s (the 60s didn’t end until about 1976 really), the Left was a true counter-culture. The media and mainstream society treated them as the outliers they were (and should always be).  They were treated with disapproval or ridicule. Sometimes it was kind of a tolerant pat on the head and a “go home, little nitwits.”  But now the media, much of mainstream culture, and even the federal government are behind them. A recipe for fascism.

    • #24
  25. The Scarecrow Thatcher
    The Scarecrow
    @TheScarecrow

    RightAngles (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    GLDIII Purveyor of Splendid Ma… (View Comment):

    Some of us spend a youthful summer and fall of 1971 in Cocoa Beach watching the steady near weekly traffic to our future heading to space, and the seemingly endless vista of possibilities.

    Now left wondering what happen to that heady enthusiasm that is seemingly lost at sea with a generation confused about pronouns and words that inflict “physical” violence.

    How did the entropy happen so fast?

    Don’t forget that 1971 was the height of cop killing, domestic bombings, black militancy, and bra burning outside of the Miss America pageant. 1971 is when Congress really started beating up on the space program. On the screen, it was the era of Little Murders, Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry, The French Connection and A Clockwork Orange. Somehow, the culture came back from all that. Six years later, the hit movies were Star Wars, Rocky, and Smokey and the Bandit.

    It could happen again. But we have to do more than wish for it.

    We certainly do. There’s something more sinister about it this time around. In the 60s and 70s (the 60s didn’t end until about 1976 really), the Left was a true counter-culture. The media and mainstream society treated them as the outliers they were (and should always be). They were treated with disapproval or ridicule. Sometimes it was kind of a tolerant pat on the head and a “go home, little nitwits.” But now the media, much of mainstream culture, and even the federal government are behind them. A recipe for fascism.

    Exactly.

    • #25
  26. Hang On Member
    Hang On
    @HangOn

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    It could happen again. But we have to do more than wish for it. 

    I hope you’re right, but with the studios either being owned by China or kowtowing to the Chinese market, I wonder. Unfortunately. 

    • #26
  27. GLDIII Purveyor of Splendid Malpropisms Reagan
    GLDIII Purveyor of Splendid Malpropisms
    @GLDIII

    RightAngles (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    GLDIII Purveyor of Splendid Ma… (View Comment):

    Some of us spend a youthful summer and fall of 1971 in Cocoa Beach watching the steady near weekly traffic to our future heading to space, and the seemingly endless vista of possibilities.

    Now left wondering what happen to that heady enthusiasm that is seemingly lost at sea with a generation confused about pronouns and words that inflict “physical” violence.

    How did the entropy happen so fast?

    Don’t forget that 1971 was the height of cop killing, domestic bombings, black militancy, and bra burning outside of the Miss America pageant. 1971 is when Congress really started beating up on the space program. On the screen, it was the era of Little Murders, Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry, The French Connection and A Clockwork Orange. Somehow, the culture came back from all that. Six years later, the hit movies were Star Wars, Rocky, and Smokey and the Bandit.

    It could happen again. But we have to do more than wish for it.

    We certainly do. There’s something more sinister about it this time around. In the 60s and 70s (the 60s didn’t end until about 1976 really), the Left was a true counter-culture. The media and mainstream society treated them as the outliers they were (and should always be). They were treated with disapproval or ridicule. Sometimes it was kind of a tolerant pat on the head and a “go home, little nitwits.” But now the media, much of mainstream culture, and even the federal government are behind them. A recipe for fascism.

    Just got back from the hanger, and this is better than the reply I was formulating for Gary.

    Take a bow RA…

    • #27
  28. RightAngles Member
    RightAngles
    @RightAngles

    GLDIII Purveyor of Splendid Ma… (View Comment):

    RightAngles (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    GLDIII Purveyor of Splendid Ma… (View Comment):

    Some of us spend a youthful summer and fall of 1971 in Cocoa Beach watching the steady near weekly traffic to our future heading to space, and the seemingly endless vista of possibilities.

    Now left wondering what happen to that heady enthusiasm that is seemingly lost at sea with a generation confused about pronouns and words that inflict “physical” violence.

    How did the entropy happen so fast?

    Don’t forget that 1971 was the height of cop killing, domestic bombings, black militancy, and bra burning outside of the Miss America pageant. 1971 is when Congress really started beating up on the space program. On the screen, it was the era of Little Murders, Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry, The French Connection and A Clockwork Orange. Somehow, the culture came back from all that. Six years later, the hit movies were Star Wars, Rocky, and Smokey and the Bandit.

    It could happen again. But we have to do more than wish for it.

    We certainly do. There’s something more sinister about it this time around. In the 60s and 70s (the 60s didn’t end until about 1976 really), the Left was a true counter-culture. The media and mainstream society treated them as the outliers they were (and should always be). They were treated with disapproval or ridicule. Sometimes it was kind of a tolerant pat on the head and a “go home, little nitwits.” But now the media, much of mainstream culture, and even the federal government are behind them. A recipe for fascism.

    Just got back from the hanger, and this is better than the reply I was formulating for Gary.

    Take a bow RA…

    • #28
  29. Jim Kearney Member
    Jim Kearney
    @JimKearney

    Gary McVey: If the federal government had gone full speed ahead on NRS, it might have hastened the birth of online society by roughly 15 years.

    Right as usual Gary, but I’m glad it didn’t!

    The 1990’s were wonderful in media partly because smartphones hadn’t yet been invented. TV, prompted by competition from cable, reached a full ripening and maturity of content. It was the decade of masterworks like NYPD Blue, Seinfeld and Frasier and of fast-moving dramas like Law & Order and ER which brought mass audiences and profitability to established genre conventions as never before. Even while audiences fragmented, there was still centralized national content produced by brilliant and well-supported genius creators. It was also the decade when Fox News Channel first challenged the mainstream media, when Rush Limbaugh built out and sustained the audience he had begun on radio in the late ’80s; and when the internet was a convenience not yet marred by the negatives of social media.

    The foundation for the creative and economic explosions of both multichannel television and broadband owes back to 1972 and an obscure action of a government agency. This was the FCC’s “Cable Television Report and Order” which opened the door for community antenna television systems to import distant broadcast signals and program original channels. Enter HBO, local sports channels, and “truck chasers” begging installers for connectivity. Then in 1975 the FCC added satellite distribution to the cable operators’ tool chest, leading to the 1980 boom year for national cable networks. With profits from basic and premium  subscriptions, cable added digital broadband and telephony to its packages in the ’80s and ’90s, building the wired and fibered “information superhighway” that much of the internet still rides on.

    Government and academia played critical roles in developing the internet itself but it was the private telecommunications business, unleashed by the deregulation which began in 1972, which brought it into our homes. The largest public infrastructure project since Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway Act was the work of a private industry, first unshackled during the administration of Ike’s Vice-President.

    • #29
  30. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Well, that goes to show: Always trust content by Jim Kearney!

    Yes, the great invisible guiding hand of capitalism came to life and built the infrastructure needed to make the New Rural Society possible. This wasn’t entirely new. Even back in the late Twenties, the phone companies were momentarily in control of radio and also of talkies. A 1956 decree kept the Bell operating companies out of data processing as well as other monopoly-prone businesses, and for that and other reasons the public face of 70s-80s cable TV was as a local, entrepreneurial industry with its own set of wires, trucks, and linemen. 

    It didn’t necessarily have to go that way. The Bell Picturephone was two way television (admittedly, kinda low def) that used ordinary paired phone wires; three pairs of them: video in, video out, and audio. The signal couldn’t go very far over ordinary wire, but in most cases it didn’t have to: the switching stations were nearby. Much later, in the Nineties, the first widespread broadband (-ish) home technology, ISDN, was sent over those ordinary wires. 

    The Economist noted that the old joke about ISDN, “It Still Does Nothing”, had been replaced by “I Smell Dollars Now”. 

    As you rightly point out, “cable” came to mean two things: the physical side of it, the precious wire that gave access, but also the type of TV programming that resulted from relaxed or non-existent morals standards.  

     

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