[1] https://hackaday.com/2020/02/07/raspberry-pi-serves-up-24-ho...
I am regularly watching historic news footage (1950s and 1960s) from the archives of my local TV station. While the people are indeed friendlier than today (and much more eloquent), they don't seem happier. They don't seem less stressed. The general problems are the same. I watched a bit from 1961 about the growing problem of extreme weather events (they discussed whether the atomic bomb was responsible). Another bit from 1962 reported youth crime at an all time high and blamed alcohol, sex and movies. They showed 15 years old tricking themselves into student clubs in Heidelberg to consume alcohol and drugs. A few weeks ago, I watched a bit about the Hong Kong flu pandemic in 1969 (40.000 deaths in Germany alone) where they discussed countermeasures like quarantine and closing schools.
Also, a national TV station here shows "News from 20 years ago", where they just show the entire evening news from exactly 20 years ago. I have been watching this for years now, often while I am walking around the room. Just from the audio, it is often very hard to decide whether the news is from today or from the 90ies. The topics are often the same: politicians accusing each other of X, party Y announcing they now do X, violent conflicts in X, latest election polls, fear of war in Y.
When I watch these bits, I often think of these lines from the Joan Baez song "Hello in There" [0]:
Me and Loretta, we don't talk much more
She sits and stares through the back door screen
All the news just repeats itself
Like some forgotten dream that we've both seen
Wow... the first channel I landed was CBS from 1992 with coverage of the recession with the day labor for manual workers in Los Angeles with white guys next to Mexican laborers, and then as if that wasn't absurd enough the next segment for the 'Michelangelo virus' with John Mcaffee (the guy who I saw said he'd eat his dick if BTC didn't reach $1 million [0]) was pumping his anti-virus software in Santa Clara like it was the pre-cursor to Y2k or something. And then wrapped up with the breaking up of the Soviet Union's Red Army military disbanding to serve as local counterprts for now independent soviet satellite nations.
I'm not sure why I felt I was watching all of this like it it was the first time, even though I lived all of through this and saw a lot of it in TV first hand back then... it was incredibly surreal.
0 https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/john-mcafee-dick-bitcoin-bet...
I'm also running a web crawler to discover fresh music videos from various music blogs.