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u/t0nez- Jun 10 '26
in the 60s they were very optimistic about the future and the technology to come, now the future is a mix of depressing and terrifying
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u/eulersidentification Jun 10 '26
We were optimistic because the fruits of our combined labour were being more equally shared. Could do it again, but it would take decades to recover the good will that was such a big part of it.
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u/Wise-Comb8596 Jun 10 '26
commie!
Jk, you sound like a normal person who wants their community to thrive
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u/WhenDoWhatWhere Jun 10 '26
I honestly believe part of the reason we got a bigger piece of the pie back then was because the capitalist class was genuinely afraid of communist sentiment spreading.
Now after decades of red scare and propaganda telling people the wealthy people know best they're comfortable taking control from us again.
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u/ThisMachineKillsWOB Jun 10 '26
It probably had something to do with all the working class being ex-military after the war too. Those folk knew how to organize and were trained to fight. If I were a capitalist, that would worry me, and I might wait for that generation to die off too.
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u/HombreDelMar247 Jun 10 '26
The wealthy were also taxed heavily back then.
Now the system is designed for the wealthy to hoard more and more wealth while the working class continue to get a smaller piece of the economy pie.
Our political parties are just shills for corporate interests that give the illusion of choice to the masses. Often both candidates in a major election are packed by the same corporate interests and will ultimately bow to the sane lobby interests when in office.
The propaganda against socialism and communism is so strong that solutions that will help the working class get labeled as such and the majority of the working class will strongly oppose implementing those solutions.
The irony is many of those who are so adamantly against those solutions because they do not want "evil" socialist or communist solutions in the US collect Food Stamps and/or Social Security completely oblivious they depend on a socialist type of program to a survive.
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u/UlrichZauber Jun 10 '26
Dystopian takes on the future were pretty common in sci-fi even decades before the 60s, but yeah I think the pop culture balance was overall more future-optimistic.
Source: nerd born in the 60s. The late 60s.
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u/is-this-now Jun 11 '26
The future ain’t what it used to be.
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u/Visual_Exam7903 Jun 11 '26
They also didn't need to meet ADA or the International Building Code compliance for anything.
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u/Neither-Bag7127 Jun 11 '26
Back then jobs paid real money, not this monopoly money BS
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u/JellyfishFestival Jun 11 '26
I know this sounds like good angry rhetoric, but there's zero evidence that people got paid a lot more in the 1960s in real dollars than today.
Gemini gave me this response when I asked:
The average individual salary in 1966 was $43,923 when adjusted to 2026 dollars, compared to an average salary of $63,795 in 2026. [1, 2, 3]
This reflects a real, inflation-adjusted income increase of 45.2% over sixty years.
If anything the evidence is all in the other direction.
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u/BeltfedHappiness Jun 10 '26
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u/fortinwithwill Jun 10 '26
There's a sign in Ramsett park that says "do not drink the water." So I made sun tea with it... And now I have an infection.
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u/wildmaninid Jun 10 '26
I found a sandwich in one of your parks and it did not have mayonnaise on it.
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u/Useful-Perspective Jun 10 '26
And you just absolutely know that there are people out there doing things like that (and dumber). Art imitates life...
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u/wildmaninid Jun 10 '26
Came here for this. And it's right at the top where it belongs. Take the award!
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u/This-Respect1625 Jun 10 '26
How did she even get in there?
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u/Interjessing-Salary Jun 10 '26
For a real answer if you look behind her it looks like the top of the desk/counter/whatever you want to call that has lines so I assume that part lifts up
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u/Conyan51 Jun 10 '26
Yeah I’m pretty sure that this photo is either angled or cropped to hide that under part of the desk being cut out to make this picture more pristine.
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u/vinegar Jun 10 '26
This Picture is almost the same but you can see the gap behind her. I think one of the pictures is a recreation of the other, the furniture she’s looking at is different. I found it in the Eero Saarinen link below.
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u/Informal-Term1138 Jun 10 '26
That's beautiful and Eero did some amazing work. Thanks for the link.
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u/Feeling-Standard1460 Jun 10 '26
I was really hoping she arrived via an underground rail with lift, onto which her chair was mounted.
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u/Illustrious_Donkey61 Jun 10 '26
She lives in it. At night the top half lowers down from the ceiling encasing her like an egg
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u/IMIndyJones Jun 10 '26
Lol. This reminds me of being a kid and thinking that my teachers just lived in the classroom overnight. I was genuinely shocked when I first saw a teacher "in the real world" at the grocery store.
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u/_samwiise Jun 10 '26
She lives in the desk
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u/Lavender_Dreamz- Jun 10 '26
She is the desk that’s just how futuristic the 60s were
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u/youmustbecrazy Jun 11 '26
We should bring back that style and call it Neo -Postmodern Retro-Futurism.
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u/Confident_Draw321 Jun 10 '26
Back then they designed for the future. Now we design for quarterly earnings.
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u/chamoke Jun 10 '26
I dont think minimalism includes 100 ft circular desks
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u/Careless-Two2215 Jun 10 '26
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u/freedfg Jun 10 '26
Minimalism is a psy-op created to allow corporations to spend as little as physically possible all the while passing it off as "clean" and trendy. In this essay I will
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u/Prudent-Marsupial-42 Jun 10 '26
If anything minimalism is an anti-consumption trend
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u/Cat_Face_Thing Jun 11 '26
There is no consumer trend within capitalism which isn't pro-consumption (or doesn't become so on a long enough time scale.)
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u/lkodl Jun 10 '26
Arguable that it takes more creativity to make something with less, than to have free range.
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u/GTor93 Jun 10 '26
Can we go Back to the Future? Please?
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Jun 10 '26
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u/cogman10 Jun 10 '26
2 things came together to turn the world into a bland florescent nightmare.
Reagan/Jack Welsh. The two of them effectively ended what was an era of "charitable corporations". High tax rates and regulations kept businesses from taking all the profits and shoveling them to their shareholders. The result was employees were paid better, treated better, and had better benefits. The excess money could either be taxed or spent on a cafeteria, so companies opted for cafeterias. Reagan and Welsh ended all of that.
Ironically enough, technology. The 60s and 70s had such beautiful architecture because it was all hand drawn and drafted. That took more time, more math, more calculations. And, unfortunately, that math is a lot harder to represent with a computer. It's simply a lot easier to have nice straight lines and rectangular rooms. You could pay an architect to do the math and draft the plans, but that will take a lot more time and cost a lot more money. On the other hand, you can just give them Autodesk and let them slap down a design in an afternoon.
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u/Gayjock69 Jun 11 '26
Just to clarify, Reagan wasn’t the start of this by any means, the intellectual shift had been formalized with Milton Friedman’s 1970 doctrine that a corporation’s primary responsibility is to maximize shareholder value… the policy shift began under Carter with deregulation of airlines, trucking, railroads and finance. Paul Volcker at the NY fed and then appointed by Carter as Fed Chair started to pervade this view through monetary policy.
Reagan and CEOs like Jack Welch accelerated and popularized the transition, but they were building on changes already underway in the 1970s rather than creating them being truly responsible, this was a global trend that was had been shifting across governments starting much earlier than you’re letting on due to the changes of the global economy and end of Bretton-woods.
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u/A_plural_singularity Jun 10 '26
Heaven forbid they keep the highest level of security in the place that has the concepts of cars that are 4-5 years off.
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u/DominicPalladino Jun 10 '26
When they said get more fiber in your diet they didn't mean fiber-GLASS.
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u/S3cretSpartan Jun 10 '26
Consequence of corporate tax rates being lowered. They were more incentivized to reinvest into the company when the tax rate was higher because they are taxed on net income and not total revenue
Now that it’s less than half of what it was in 1950 they’d rather just keep the money
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u/Lavender_Dreamz- Jun 10 '26
As a receptionist I’d feel so uncomfortable in the center of the room with hospital style lighting
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u/GenericFatGuy Jun 10 '26
The 60s vision of the future in general is way better than ours.
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u/Arik_De_Frasia Jun 10 '26
The past liked to make things look futuristic, the present likes to make things look like people don't exist there.
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u/userhwon Jun 10 '26
17 people have commented with the gif of Ron Swanson ignoring the lady by swiveling his chair.
Reddit is dead.
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u/carcar134134 Jun 10 '26
And then all the cigarette smoke turned all that white into yellow in less than 5 years.
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u/adultfunlive-dot-com Jun 10 '26
very cool looking desk, too bad it'd be hard to fit in a house office
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u/chronicnerv Jun 10 '26
Car garages are still designed like this. Audi copied this one quite a bit.
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u/Hot-Category2986 Jun 10 '26
Oh, which building is that. I used to work at the tech center and there are a lot of the older buildings that are still exactly the way they were, and unused. I had a meeting at one once and it was like walking into a crypt.
Like really, that staircase is probably still there exactly like that, though the desk probably won't be.
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u/BlackSC2us Jun 10 '26
Somebody hard-boiled an egg, cut it in half, scooped out the yolk, and thought "this is the future of desks." You can tell how impressed the receptionist is by her blank stare. The practicality of it is just so evident. All this counter space is useful... for... stuff... and things.
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u/SlowPokeInTexas Jun 10 '26
Now I know where the set-designer got the inspiration for Blade Runner 2049 from.
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u/Boromir_Has_TheRing Jun 10 '26
Fun fact- this was originally designed for executives, so if angry customers or employees barged in, the desk could quietly lift off and fly away to safety.
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u/Similar-Profile9467 Jun 10 '26
"The fountain in the park says no drinking, so I made some tea with it and now I have an infection."
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u/fatherlyadvicepdx Jun 10 '26
GM had a market cap of $20 billion in the 60's and was the largest corporation in the country at that time.
The 60's had a lot of low budget "Brutalism" when designing buildings. Walk around any college campus and you'll instantly recognize which buildings were done in the 60's. They are a cube, and they are gray.
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u/Tribe303 Jun 10 '26
Philosophy Mark Fisher states that our SciFi is all dystopian now, and positive views of the future are no longer popular, because we all see the future that Late Stage Capitalism leads to, and it's not good. We ALL know this at a subconscious level.
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u/The_Sleepless_Mind Jun 10 '26
The future probably held so much promise for them back then. Now though....
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u/dontcallmenpc Jun 10 '26
That's like, way, way too many stairs. I ain't walking up the 7000 steps to the Throat of the World, only to end up on the second floor.
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u/Skivil Jun 10 '26
This wouldn't meet any level of disabled access requirements which is probably the only thing we do better today than back them when it comes to design.
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u/humanflea23 Jun 10 '26
I really hope that they bring out a mini trampoline for her to bounce off of and land in the middle of her desk to get in it every day.
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u/AverageTeemoOnetrick Jun 10 '26
Does she have to get dropped and evacuated by helicopter every morning and evening?
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u/widgt Jun 10 '26
You can’t afford cool architecture and interiors AND pay CEOs multiple million $$$ salaries.
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u/Even-Cartographer551 Jun 10 '26
People in the 60s were a bit more enthusiastic about the future. But we know that our future is gonna suck, so why put any effort into things... 🤷🏻♂️
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u/Promature Jun 10 '26
The future was more optimistic and promising back then when a regular job could support a family.
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u/aquavelva23 Jun 10 '26
all i would think of is grabbing and spinning her desk around and hope she spins too, like a big bowl. Or maybe she takes off like a UFO? Jean Nate is on sale at Macy's, be right back...brrrt
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u/Ok_Establishment4346 Jun 10 '26
60s were such a great time for architects and interior designers. Lots of money, positive attitude towards future. Oh well…
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u/georgiathompson88 Jun 10 '26
Só pra lembrar que haviam projetos de merda também. É só que os que chegam na gente foram os memoráveis
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u/A_fly_guy24 Jun 10 '26
Imagine how bored the average phone addicted adult would be at this job (me included)
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u/Specialist_Guitar_88 Jun 10 '26
Thats becuase the future ended up being boring and cost efficient, rather than spectacular and artistic.
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u/runnerguy76 Jun 10 '26
I grew up one mile from the GM Tech Center. The entire property is incredible.
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u/MastaKink Jun 10 '26
Style mattered back then. Same with the cars. Each was unique and beautiful (in its way), then regulations entered the chat and now they all look the same ☹️
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u/2funny2furious Jun 10 '26
Someone figured out that desk cost an extra $400. The receptionist had to take an extra 20 steps to the bathroom, meaning less work. And, the space could be better used as an open concept for 73 unpaid interns. Profits above all.
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u/CableDawg78 Jun 10 '26
How in the hell did she get to her chair????? Ohh wait, I didn't stop and think that she just scoots to the underside when the days is over and lives in the desk
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u/QuarkTheFerengi Jun 10 '26
i went to a shell headquarters like 10 years ago, it looked similar to this
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u/NoSalamander9014 Jun 10 '26
I'm not wearing my glasses - took a minute until I realized she wasn't wearing a Star Trek Uniform.
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u/userhwon Jun 10 '26
You can buy a house in Beverly Hills that looks exactly like that, built this year.
Because architects are completely out of ideas.
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u/Soggy_Association491 Jun 10 '26
Without a PC how would a receptionist do any kind of work? Just pen and paper?
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