"He was ahead of his time".

timzil

The saying "he was ahead of his time" is often is often heard reffering to people who said things at the time which weren't popular opinion but turned out to be true. One example that comes to mind is Bob Geldof and Bannana Republic and the power of the church.

What do ye think are the critiques that someone could make about todays society which aren't exactly popular opinion now but could deem them to be regarded as being ahead of their time in the future.

Ficheall

timzil wrote: »

The saying "he was ahead of his time" is often is often heard reffering to people who said things at the time which weren't popular opinion but turned out to be true. One example that comes to mind is Bob Geldof and Bannana Republic and the power of the church.

What do ye think are the critiques that someone could make about todays society which aren't exactly popular opinion now but could deem them to be regarded as being ahead of their time in the future.

I reckon people in subsequent posts might disagree with your interpretation of the phrase.

ygolometsipe

Ahead of there time does assume us humans will continue to make
progress

I don't know if you heard but a turkey shot a Russian last week.

"He was behind his time" will never be said

timzil

Ficheall wrote: »

I reckon people in subsequent posts might disagree with your interpretation of the phrase.

Please elaborate.

XR3i

"for each man kills the thing he loves yet each man does not die"

JRant

For me the most obvious example is Noam Chomsky. He's been pretty much bang on point over nearly a half century at this stage yet the mainstream media refuse to give him airtime.

Have a listen to some of his talks from the 70's and he has pretty much called how the media, Governments and corporations are acting now.

I would argue that Geldoff was of his time more than ahead off his time. Plus he doesn't like Mondays.

JRant

XR3i wrote: »

"for each man kills the thing he loves yet each man does not die"

Mr Wilde was certainly ahead of his time.

Junkyard Tom

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), maker of big business mainframe computers, arguing against the PC in 1977.

Dirty Dingus McGee

Professor John Frink was really ahead of his time when in the 70's he declared: "I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them"

Junkyard Tom

"The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty-a fad." - Advice from a president of the Michigan Savings Bank to Henry Ford's lawyer Horace Rackham. Rackham ignored the advice and invested $5000 in Ford stock, selling it later for $12.5 million.

AllGunsBlazing

Bob Geldof ahead of his time? Please stop the Earth from spinning for a minute, I'd like to get off now.

ygolometsipe

different time zones - ahead of their time

rafatoni

AllGunsBlazing wrote: »

Bob Geldof ahead of his time? Please stop the Earth from spinning for a minute, I'd like to get off now.

Hes an arse hole of the highest order. No more ahead of his time than the man on the moon.

timzil

AllGunsBlazing wrote: »

Bob Geldof ahead of his time? Please stop the Earth from spinning for a minute, I'd like to get off now.

Yeah ok fair point about Geldof. I suppose what Im trying to say is if the church was the establishment and dictator of the narrative of public opinion in the past. Then who is the dictator of todays popular opinion and what are the things that people today believe but in the future will be debunked.

Wacker The Attacker

rafatoni wrote: »

Hes an arse hole of the highest order. No more ahead of his time than the man on the moon.

yeah yeah yeah yeah

JRant

timzil wrote: »

Yeah ok fair point about Geldof. I suppose what Im trying to say is if the church was the establishment and dictator of the narrative of public opinion in the past. Then who is the dictator of todays popular opinion and what are the things that people today believe but in the future will be debunked.

Religion in general would be my hope. Hopefully in the not to distant future people will look back and ask what the hell were all those people doing believing in such nonsense.

Jarrod

Is it just me or has the term banana republic completely changed from its original meaning? I see it used a lot on AH in reference to Ireland, which doesn't make sense to me.

JRant

Jarrod wrote: »

Is it just me or has the term banana republic completely changed from its original meaning? I see it used a lot on AH in reference to Ireland, which doesn't make sense to me.

In fairness we are a small country heavily dependent on a handful of exports ie. pharma and get dictated to by said companies far more than the average Joe soap would like to believe. Pretty much a textbook babanna repulicin the modern sense.

Tarzana2

The film 'Network' was ahead of its time. Very prescient, predicting the advent and domination of reality TV shows. 'The Truman Show' was also prescient in this way.

ThinkProgress

People who choose to live their lives with less technology. Or at least reject the insidious nature of how it has wrapped it's tentacles around every facet of our existence...

These people will be seen as visionaries in the future!

RobertKK

I see inventors and people who create new things while making the accepted way obsolete as people who are ahead of the times, People who disrupt the accepted way, like Reed Hastings with Netfix, Elon Musk with many things including Tesla, online payment, Steve Jobs with the iPhone.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin with Google. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, Jack Dorsey and 3 others with twitter, Jeff Bezos with Amazon.

These are the sort of people who were ahead of his time as they looked at what existed and made something new mainstream.

Tarzana2

RobertKK wrote: »

I see inventors and people who create new things while making the accepted way obsolete as people who are ahead of the times, People who disrupt the accepted way, like Reed Hastings with Netfix, Elon Musk with many things including Tesla, online payment, Steve Jobs with the iPhone.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin with Google. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, Jack Dorsey and 3 others with twitter, Jeff Bezos with Amazon.

These are the sort of people who were ahead of his time as they looked at what existed and made something new mainstream.

And they make it look so easy, when of course it's not.

I mean, the idea behind many of these thing is simple, but none of us came up with it. And probably not many of us have it in us to come up with something like any of the above.

I think so many people long to be a successful entrepreneur, so many of us want the ego boost of coming up with the next novel, groundbreaking idea, of being seen as a visionary. That's why there are so many start-ups. But to come up with something like that I'd say is very rare.

DEFTLEFTHAND

Junkyard Tom wrote: »

"The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty-a fad." - Advice from a president of the Michigan Savings Bank to Henry Ford's lawyer Horace Rackham. Rackham ignored the advice and invested $5000 in Ford stock, selling it later for $12.5 million.

"Guitar groups are on the way out, the Beatles have no future in showbusiness"

Dick Rowe of Decca Records after the Beatles auditioned for the label in early 1962.

In fairness he would later redeem his reputation by signing the Rolling Stones.

Eugene Norman

ThinkProgress wrote: »

People who choose to live their lives with less technology. Or at least reject the insidious nature of how it has wrapped it's tentacles around every facet of our existence...

These people will be seen as visionaries in the future!

Oh. Absolutely. I think we all hate the internet here.

TheLastMohican

XR3i wrote: »

"for each man kills the thing he loves yet each man does not die"

That you Fingal O'Flaherty?

Eugene Norman

JRant wrote: »

For me the most obvious example is Noam Chomsky. He's been pretty much bang on point over nearly a half century at this stage yet the mainstream media refuse to give him airtime.

Have a listen to some of his talks from the 70's and he has pretty much called how the media, Governments and corporations are acting now.

I would argue that Geldoff was of his time more than ahead off his time. Plus he doesn't like Mondays.

Chomsky wasn't ahead of his time. That isn't to say he isn't correct but his left wing views are in no sense dominant, and in fact modern leftism is identity political rather than focussed on corporate and US power.

Tarzana2

Shakespeare of course. I think that is why he remains so popular. So many of the themes in his works are as salient and ubiquitous now as they were centuries ago. His works are pretty much the proof of the proverb "The more things change, the more they stay the same". Basically, people were assholes then, and they're still assholes now. :pac:

TheLastMohican

ADAM obviously

Anyone who installed solar panels for generating electricity in the 1970s was way ahead of the time.

Menas

People who hitched a lift on Noah's arc were ahead of their time.

Wibbs

I'd add in HG Wells.

Junkyard Tom wrote: »

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), maker of big business mainframe computers, arguing against the PC in 1977.

And in 1977 he was right and would continue to be right until the internet really took off. Pre the internet PC's were extremely useful in business, design, science etc, but in the home they were pretty much only of use for interested hobbyists and gamers, connecting them in a huge network gave them their everyday purpose. A pre interwebs computer was akin to having a car in a large driveway. You could tinker with it, start it up, rev it, even drive back and forth a few car lengths, but until you have access to a road network it's not much use.

There've been a few good examples mentioned already(not Geldof though. Very much of his time, merely reflecting it). Futurists nearly always miss something big that changes everything. The aforementioned internet a good example. Very few futurists and writers spotted that one coming, or the social effects it would bring with it. We're not even sure today how far down that rabbit hole we're going to go.

The "post modern" future of today is quite a different one to how we might have imagined it in the 60's or 70's. Then the future was somehow more advanced, bigger, shinier, more outward looking. These days we're a little more cynical, more inward looking.

Personal future gazing? I don't think the much hyped singularity is going to happen. Not for a very long time, if ever.

Menas

Menas wrote: »

People who hitched a lift on Noah's arc were ahead of their time.

By how many degrees? :pac:

GerB40

Mark Twain was definitely ahead of his time. His criticism of church, government and society are so relevant today. He definitely defies the stereotype of the dumb American from the deep south...

LordSutch

JRant wrote: »

I would argue that Geldoff was of his time more than ahead off his time.

Agreed.

When he wrote Banana Republic he was calling it as it was in Ireland, at that time!

rubadub

Wibbs wrote: »

And in 1977 he was right and would continue to be right until the internet really took off. Pre the internet PC's were extremely useful in business, design, science etc, but in the home they were pretty much only of use for interested hobbyists and gamers.

In the mid 1980s the majority of people I know had a computer in their house. He made no comment on the amount or type of usage, people obviously did want them in their homes.

Wibbs

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

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. Not many were concerned about that in the 70's 80's or even early 90's when he was active, now everyone is familiar with the NSA through Snowden, etc.

He's actually my favorite terrorist. He wouldn't even use modern technology in his bombs, he made them from wood, which resulted in them being only occasionally fatal. That's keepin it real.

Wibbs

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.

LordSutch

H.G.Wells was ahead of his time.
James Dyson is ahead of his time.

wendell borton

"War is coming. 1941, they say. And there’ll be plenty of broken crockery, and little houses ripped open like packing-cases, and the guts of the chartered accountant’s clerk plastered over the piano that he’s buying on the never-never. But what does that kind of thing matter, anyway? I’ll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it was this. IT’S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN.
All the things you’ve got at the back of your mind, the things you’re terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. It’s all going to happen. I know it — at any rate, I knew it then. There’s no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there’s no way out. It’s just something that’s got to happen."

-George Orwell

donegaLroad

as someone mentioned before, Noam Chomsky..

Robert Fisk,

Mark Boyle (the guy who lives without using money),

the Philosopher Alan Watts (although he died in 1973)

eviltimeban

DEFTLEFTHAND wrote: »

"Guitar groups are on the way out, the Beatles have no future in showbusiness"

Dick Rowe of Decca Records after the Beatles auditioned for the label in early 1962.

In fairness he would later redeem his reputation by signing the Rolling Stones.

I don't know if that classes him "ahead of his time", as he wasn't exactly proved right.

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.

K-9

I'd say Dave Allen was ahead of his time with humour mocking the Church. Gay Byrne up to a certain time, discussed things that would have been taboo at the time.

Sports wise Alex Higgins always reminds me of the phrase, took on shots that nobody would have dreamed of doing in snooker before him.

Savage Tyrant

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.

mzungu

Marshall McLuhan got within the ballpark of foreseeing the Internet and advancements in communications capability with the Global Village. Ahead of his time in my view.

Although that pales in comparison to Brian Lenihan's the "worst is over" and "we have turned a corner" from the Budget speech 2009! The foresight of a sage right there

mzungu

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.

Bluefoam

Donald Trump, ahead of his...... Nah

Skylinehead

Wibbs wrote: »

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.

It wasn't the machine it is now, and you're right that it was a toy, but his statement was still completely off the mark.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."

No reason? Anyone? He was wrong, completely.

whatawaster81

Michael J Fox was ahead of his time when he went back to the future.

Who knew hoverboards would take off like that, I don't leave my house without mine.

Earthhorse

Eugene Norman wrote: »

Chomsky wasn't ahead of his time. That isn't to say he isn't correct but his left wing views are in no sense dominant, and in fact modern leftism is identity political rather than focussed on corporate and US power.

I don't see what his views being dominant have to do with it. He was prescient in his analysis.

He has been interviewed by mainstream media, though it is true that his ideas have by no means reached a mainstream audience.

The_Valeyard

whatawaster81 wrote: »

Michael J Fox was ahead of his time when he went back to the future.

Who knew hoverboards would take off like that, I don't leave my house without mine.

Go to youtube

Type in: how it should have ended, back to the future.

Sit back
Watch
Enjoy