Nostalgia or Negligence?

The past continues to haunt the present

In Hungary the battles between left and right are fought along lines that have changed little over the past few decades. Indeed, the prime minister himself is seen by the right as a former communist lackey trying to reinvent or even rewrite Hungary's ignominious past with a friendlier face. Other seem to have taken cue from this: not long ago a bust of Lenin was set up in a small town square.

Disputes continue to this day over such things as street names and the appropriate use of certain symbols such as the hammer and sickle or the red star. In the case of the latter, the public display of such symbols are actually against the law (along with the swaztika), except for artistic, cultural, or educational purposes. This law, however, has been bent many times, for some often beyond the breaking point.

Such controversies over the past are not limited to the offline world, however. Several tourist web sites still feature maps of Budapest which bears the old names of Lenin or even the People's Republic. More recently, even Apple's iPhones seem to be backwards compatible in Hungary to the year 1961. As the underground zine Pestiside reveals, weather info for the city of Dunaújváros displays the city's former name into local iPhones: Sztálinváros, or Stalin City.

Dunaújváros was officially known during a decade-long dark stretch of the communist era as Sztálinváros, the Stalingrad of Hungary. Mátyás Rákosi, the Stalinist leader of Hungary, was such a devout Stalinist that he was often seen as being more Stalinist than Stalin himself. Accordingly, the country was run in such a way, complete with the trademark personality cult and a giant bronze statute of Stalin that was prominently placed in the City Park. Ultimately, both Rákosi and the statue fell during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The name of Sztálinváros, however, lingered for five years longer before finally succumbing to the trash bin of history.

It should come as little surprise that as these little reminders of Hungary's ignominious past keep popping up Hungarian anti-communists and those on the so-called political right are still seeing red. As pytey, the one who photographed the iPhone oddity writes, "I know most iPhone owners are liberal Macintosh users (like myself), but I didn't think that the iPhone was _that_ left wing."

To be fair to Apple, it probably has no idea about the information it is passing on to consumers. In this case, the weather widget is based on Yahoo's meteorology database and is only ported by Apple onto the iPhone. Yahoo, meanwhile, passes the buck elsewhere, noting the following: "Information displayed on this website is primarily based on content provided by the U.S. Geological Survey and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency."

Whether Americans realise it or not, tit-for-tat squabbles between left and right in Hungary and elsewhere are accentuated by the ignorance of their so-called experts and leaders. In fact, it's commonly joked in Hungary that Americans are so ignorant that they don't even realise that Budapest and Bucharest are two totally different cities located in different countries. Even Canadians joke about the ignorance of their southern cousins: the reason the 100 dollar bill has the geographic image of Canada on it is to inform Americans when they use the currency that they are indeed in another country and that they actually know where Canada is.

All this doesn't say much for the information society of the future. With computers and so many hand-held devices taking control of our lives, we haven't gotten that much smarter. Indeed, we really might be heading toward a New Dark Age as Mark Stahlman suggests. If those who program and configure our smart devices are just as ignorant (or even more ignorant) than we are, where does that leave the rest of us?