Anger at the future has a perfect record. It has never, not once, in the entire history of human civilization, successfully prevented the future from showing up. The future just keeps arriving, indifferent to how anyone feels about it, like weather.

But people keep trying. And the arguments are always, always the same. Here's an incomplete timeline.

1820s - 1840s: The Horse Thing

When railroads started replacing horse-drawn transport, people lost their minds. This wasn't a gentle cultural disagreement. The state of Ohio literally considered a law requiring trains to stop every time a horse-drawn carriage was in sight. Doctors wrote papers claiming that the human body could not withstand speeds over 30 miles per hour and that traveling that fast would cause passengers' bones to melt. Actual physicians said this. With straight faces.

Turnpike companies, which made their money from horse traffic, lobbied to have railroads banned outright. Farmers claimed the noise would prevent chickens from laying eggs and that sparks from locomotives would set every field in America on fire.

None of this worked. The trains came anyway. Within twenty years, the same people who protested them were buying tickets.

1870s - 1890s: The Electricity Panic

Gas lamp companies fought electricity with everything they had. They funded newspaper editorials about the dangers of alternating current. They weren't entirely wrong, to be fair - early electrical systems killed a decent number of people because the safety standards were, let's say, still under development. But the argument wasn't really about safety. It was about gas lamp companies not wanting to become gas lamp museums.

Thomas Edison, who should have been on electricity's side, got so angry about AC current specifically that he publicly electrocuted animals to prove it was dangerous. He killed an elephant named Topsy at Coney Island in 1903 to make a point about alternating current. The point he actually made was that Thomas Edison would kill an elephant to win a business argument.

AC current won anyway. Your house runs on it right now.

1890s - 1920s: The Car Itself

This one's the best because people are now angry about electric cars while apparently forgetting that people were angry about regular cars. Towns passed laws requiring a person to walk in front of every automobile waving a red flag. Vermont briefly had a law requiring a "person of mature age" to walk an eighth of a mile ahead of every car to warn horse riders. Speed limits were set at 2 mph in some places. Two.

Woodrow Wilson, who later became president, said in 1906 that the automobile was a "picture of the arrogance of wealth" and would incite socialism. Newspapers ran editorials calling drivers menaces. Pedestrians threw rocks at cars.

Then Henry Ford made them cheap enough for everyone and suddenly everybody wanted one and pretended they'd never been upset about it.

1950s - 1960s: Television Will Ruin Everything

When television arrived, the predictions were spectacular. Children would go blind. Families would stop talking to each other. Reading would die. Democracy would collapse because citizens would be too distracted by Howdy Doody to vote.

The FCC commissioner in 1961 called television a "vast wasteland," which is still a pretty good burn honestly. But the people who said television would kill radio said it with such confidence. Radio was real, radio was honest, radio required imagination. Television was lazy, passive, the end of culture.

Sixty years later we are mad about the same things but with phones now. We cycle through the same panic with different screens every generation.

1970s: Calculators Will Make Children Stupid

When calculators became affordable, teachers and parents organized to keep them out of classrooms. The argument was that if children could press a button to get an answer, they would never learn to think. Schools banned them. Editorials were written. It was going to be the end of mathematical literacy.

Now there is a calculator in every phone on earth and somehow engineers still exist.

1980s: ATMs Are Destroying Human Connection

Bank tellers went on television to say that ATMs would destroy the personal relationship between a bank and its customers. People said they would never trust a machine with their money. Some banks ran ad campaigns emphasizing their human tellers as a competitive advantage.

Within ten years, the same people were annoyed if an ATM was out of service. The transition from "I will never use that" to "why isn't that working" took maybe six years on average.

1990s: The Internet Is a Fad

Newsweek ran an article in 1995 by a guy named Clifford Stoll called "The Internet? Bah!" where he argued that online databases would never replace daily newspapers, that e-commerce was doomed, and that no one would ever read a book on a screen. He wrote, and I'm quoting: "no online database will replace your daily newspaper." Clifford Stoll was a smart person. He was also wrong about everything in that article. Everything. All of it.

People said email would never replace letters. They said online shopping was for weirdos. They said you couldn't trust strangers on the internet, which, okay, that one had some merit. But the conclusion - that the internet itself would fail - aged so badly that it's become a punchline.

2000s: Self-Checkout Is an Insult

When grocery stores introduced self-checkout, people wrote letters to the editor. Actual letters, on paper, mailed with stamps. The complaint was that the store was making customers do the work of employees and that it was dehumanizing and that they would never use it.

Today those same people stand at the self-checkout with their reading glasses on, scanning their own groceries, getting mad when the machine says "unexpected item in bagging area." They adapted. They just refused to admit it.

2010s - Present: Electric Cars Will Never Work

And now here we are. The charging infrastructure isn't there. The range isn't good enough. The grid can't handle it. They're too expensive. They're too quiet. They're not quiet enough. The batteries are bad for the environment. The batteries are too heavy. You can't road trip in one. The resale value is terrible. The resale value is too good, actually, and that's suspicious.

The arguments come from everywhere and they contradict each other and none of that matters because the pattern is the same pattern it has always been. A new thing shows up. People get mad. The new thing gets better. People get less mad. The new thing becomes normal. People get mad at the next new thing.

There's a version of this list that goes on forever. People were angry about frozen food. People were angry about automatic transmission. People were angry about women wearing pants. People were genuinely, passionately angry about umbrella usage in the 18th century because Jonas Hanway started carrying one in London and men threw trash at him for it. An umbrella. People threw trash at a man because he didn't want to get rained on in a new way.

The throughline is always the same. The future arrives. Some people hate it, loudly, with great confidence. Then they use it. Then they forget they ever hated it. Then their grandkids find an old newspaper editorial and laugh.

I don't know if Teslas specifically will be the car everyone drives in thirty years. Maybe it'll be some company that doesn't exist yet. Maybe the whole concept of owning a car will seem quaint. I genuinely don't know. But I know that the anger - the specific flavor of anger that says this new thing is dangerous and wrong and will destroy what we have - that anger has been wrong every single time. Without exception. Over centuries.

Somewhere right now, someone is writing a furious comment about electric cars from a device that was impossible thirty years ago, connected to a network that was a joke twenty-five years ago, sitting in a house lit by electricity that people once called witchcraft.

The future doesn't care. It just keeps showing up.