Louis Anslow
Writer and technologist
Louis Anslow is the author of Pessimists Archive, a project to jog our collective memories about the hysteria, technophobia, and moral panic that often greets new technologies, ideas, and trends.
The war on artificial ice
Decades before states started banning lab-grown meat, manufactured ice was the “unnatural” alternative under attack.
America tried to ban fake photos in 1912
Mistakes made by the US government 100 years ago could help us determine the best way to regulate AI-manipulated images and videos today.
Pac-Man turned 45 today. The surgeon general once warned that playing it could make kids violent.
Officials’ warnings about the impact of video games on kids were never proven true. They may be making the same mistake with social media.
Skype is dead. Here’s why it almost wasn’t born.
Threatened by their low cost, traditional telephone companies tried to get long-distance internet phone services banned in the 1990s.
Pager panic: When beepers were infiltrating schools
Cities and schools once actually arrested students for carrying this dangerous technology.
When the Mac was a “munition”
Macs were once deemed a threat to national security. Will today’s AI rules seem similarly outdated when we look back on them?
Is the disruption caused by AI art actually new, or does it just feel new?
From paint in tubes to typewriters to photography to digital art, the history of creativity is a history of disruptive technologies.
Today, people fear Twitter. In the 1850s, they feared telegrams
Telegrams elicited the exact same concerns, including the spread of misinformation, “addiction” among youth, censorship, and impersonation.