- Oct 2023
-
environmentalhistory.org environmentalhistory.org
-
Kovarik, William. “Ethyl-Leaded Gasoline: How a Classic Occupational Disease Became an International Public Health Disaster.” International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health 11, no. 4 (2005): 384–97. https://doi.org/10.1179/oeh.2005.11.4.384.
Samizdat version: https://environmentalhistory.org/about/ethyl-leaded-gasoline/
-
- Oct 2022
-
Local file Local file
-
The result of this historical amnesia is that the presentgeneration is easy prey to distortions of the past
Active historical amnesia is a feature that can dramatically disrupt and change human culture. Naturally this can be either a good or a bad thing depending on the subsequent changes with respect to broader society. Given stronger historical context, however, one might better plan for future changes and benefits.
Historical amnesia is harder to implement in smaller, close knit Indigenous oral communities, but with the right conditions in highly connected and dramatically diverse world wide communities it can be implemented at mass scale as has been shown by recent social media and political shifts creating a post-truth society.
-
- Mar 2022
-
hackeducation.com hackeducation.com
-
The tech industry's historical amnesia — the inability to learn about, to recognize, to remember what has come before — is deeply intertwined with the idea of "disruption" and its firm belief that new technologies are necessarily innovative and are always "progress." I like to cite, as an example, a New Yorker article from a few years ago, an interview with an Uber engineer who'd pleaded guilty to stealing Google's self-driving car technology. "The only thing that matters is the future," he told the magazine. "I don't even know why we study history. It's entertaining, I guess — the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn't really matter. You don't need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow." (I could tie this attitude to the Italian Futurists and to fascism, but that’s a presentation for another day.)
-