"He was ahead of his time".

Sure Rub, but I still think yer man's general point was a valid one. The 80's computer was more a toy, a games machine. And a bit of a fad if anything. Not having a Vic 20 or whatever in your house made pretty much zero difference to someone's life. Today and from say the turn of the millennium onwards it would.

Clampdown wrote: »

The Unabomber. Sure he was a nutjob and murderer but his whole manifesto was about how technology would be used to erode people's freedom and privacy by large scale organizations.

What he and others missed was the extent by which people were happy, even going out of their way to give up their privacy to large scale organisations like Facebook, google etc.

Actually that's a prediction I'd make; privacy is dying. At least the kind of privacy we had over the last say century. Personal privacy is actually a bit of a blip in human culture and history. Most societies going back tens of thousands of years lived cheek by jowl on top of each other and knew each other very intimately. In tribal societies loners are almost unknown, as is social anxiety. When civilisations and farming rose it didn't really change much. Only the very rich and powerful could afford a kind of privacy and most didn't bother. Their slaves/servants knew them better than they knew themselves and many such types had even less privacy than the average. Religious ascetics were about the most private and they were considered real outliers. In the future with our global village ever more connected on a personal level I reckon it'll be the technoascetics that will again be the real outliers.

Savage Tyrant wrote: »

Bob Dylan I've heard said was ahead of his time.... He's my favourite musician by a long way, but I've no experience of his rise to the top of his game first hand.

Great musician no doubt, but not sure about being ahead of his time. Kudos is given for the switch to electric but that was merely hopping onto an already existing merry go round...and leaving behind all those hardline crusty Greenwich Village folk heads

Musically bands like Kraftwerk and some of the other late 60s and early 70s Krautrock acts were forefathers to modern day electronica scene, and were most definitely ahead of their time.

eviltimeban wrote: »

The Beatles were ahead of their time, and more specifically, some of their tracks were. "Tomorrow Never Knows" for example, while groundbreaking at the time didn't have the same impact as "Strawberry Fields Forever" did a year later (as it was only an album track). But nowadays it is essentially the blueprint for modern dance music - repetitive drum and bass pattern, samples, unusual vocal effects. That track was definitely ahead of it's time as nothing else from the era (including most other Beatles tracks) sounded like it.

Yea that track was so out there, as one commenter put it "it landed like a spaceship from the future in the middle of the 1960's". I don't think they even realised what was going on. That's actual genius for you though. They were also dabbling with "world music" before it was a thing, and electronic music with it. A song like Here comes the sun is actually stuffed with synthesisers, but most people don't even spot it. They didn't make it a feature, it was there as an addition. I remember watching an outtake, I think it was from the Let it be sessions where McCartney was musing on the future of music and riffing on the idea of sound and video and multimedia before it was a term.

Savage Tyrant wrote: »

Bob Dylan I've heard said was ahead of his time.... He's my favourite musician by a long way, but I've no experience of his rise to the top of his game first hand.

For me I'd see Dylan as a man, an artist not so much ahead of his time, but of time in general. No great vision of the future, more something that at his best would just always be relevant. Again, genius at work.

Riddle101 wrote: »

How about Leonardo da Vinci? He was a true Renascence man who was not only an artist, but also a scientist, architect, engineer and inventor. I think most famous is that he came up with the Helicopter centuries before it was built.

Even smarter R, he came up with the parachute. That's some atomic level forward planning right there from our Leo.

I have so much time for him I have to say. Beyond the obvious Discovery channel and tabloid "genus" overviews he was a remarkable bloke. We'd be here all day noting his contributions to the future on so many subjects. Except for his poetry. Oh god he was cringe level awful. And he put so much effort into it too. TBH I love that about the guy. Makes him human, understandable, normal as it were.

He was really well liked among his peers too, even though he was equally well known as a bit of a flake. He rarely finished what he started, but folks still liked him. His Last Supper was peeling as the ink on his cheque dried. Indeed the monks thought so little of his efforts they stuck a doorway under Jesus and that's why he has no feet.

Another "scandalous" thing about Leo was he kept wearing "young" man's clothing until he died. I love that about him. He was an awful sucker for pretty male apprentices though, but even when one tried to blackmail him and take him to court on accusations of gay stuff, his mates and the judiciary were very much with Leo. He just comes across as a wonderful and genuinely nice eccentric lad. His peers are at pains to praise him for being great craic, a wonderful dinner guest and an even better mate. He inspired daft levels of loyalty, even when he stiffed people for the bill.

Interestingly as far as the thread subject goes, in one way he was very old fashioned, out of time. Namely regarding the relatively new tech of printing at the time. He didn't engage with it at all. He did a one off frontispiece for a good mate of his who asked/plied him with fine wines and grub, but that was it and he only did it as a favour, because that's who he was. It would be like he was alive today and refused to use the internet, but as a favour he knocked up a front page in HTML. Odd, but like I say so much like him to accommodate a mate.

Yea, as far as being ahead of his time, the lad from Vinci nails it, or is right up there at the top.

*Rambling Aside* these days it's so much about specialisation and narrow focus and that's cool and more power to the elbows of those who excel at that, because fcuk me that stuff's hard, but IMH I think we should try and drag back the true renaissance man(and woman) ideal into focus in a general way. The person who aspires to a broad knowledge of as much as possible in the arts, the sciences, the philosophies and the physical body too.