americans were real convinced history ended after they murdered the soviet union
at this point I’m living out of spite to see their empires collapse
Not trying to be egotistical but I really think Millennials and some early genZ (at least in the west+Japan) had the most transformative, and possibly fulfilling childhoods. The pace of visible and perceptible tech change were unparalleled.
Basically if you had a childhood without a computer, and then got a computer before you hit adulthood crystallized intelligence, you experienced the biggest social-technological change ever in human history, while also being able to navigate in the "after" phase. And also our generation was unique in that the change happened all at once within only 10 years' time, while stuff like cars, electricity, etc were rolled out much more gradually over a longer time span
Web 1.0 was so fucking cozy. Everything after 2012 sucks and everything after 2017 ultrasucks
I also think we're probably the most alarmed generation on some deep emotional level because of the huge contrast between our child/adolescent lives and our adult lives (at least for the ones who're paying attention)
As a late millenial, I kinda disagree, maybe its just from being in a family that had computers in some form for most my childhood life. All I've seen as I've grown up are cool improvements in tech being increasingly misused, in a world where we are in a never ending recession and austerity culture and it's never ever time to have fun or relax. I don't feel like there's any meaningful contrast between the shittiness of then and the shittiness of now, except remembering that the early internet benefitted so much in its first 10-20 years from being untouched by old rich fucks and corporations.
Then I look at photographs of my parents and they were out in their late teens and twenties roaming and rocking, rather than worrying about finances and jobs and their lives being controlled, they tell tales of when you could just walk into a building and get a job and you were set - I wasn't there but it looks a lot more fulfilling than my younger days.
Imagine the 70s. No aids, everyone dressed like a complete asshole. Disco. Leaded gas. What a time to alive.
I'm for sure not saying the 70's were good, or were better in every way. But for most peoples' childhoods, I'd guess more fulfilling.
It really depends on where you're living. The 90s boom on the west was built practically on top of decades of dictatorships and shock doctrine on latin america for example. If you were in Mexico during the 90s, your parents' lifetime savings had just vanished on an unprecedented devaluation. The outlook was poor as hell.
had the most transformative, and possibly fulfilling childhoods.
Narrator's voice
"We didn't"
People try to compare climate dread to the fear of nuclear war in the 80s. And it's like okay boomer: nuclear war was a possibility. Climate change is going to happen. The window to stop it closed forty years ago. The end of the world is locked in.
Also nuclear war is something that's entirely within the geopolitical system. You can't negotiate with climate change
I remember reading shit that atheism would spread all over because its logical and most people hadn't heard of it and would use their uh, logic and reasoning to not be religious because of the internet
it kind of has? depending on when you're talking about, I guess, but things like people saying they were jedi on UK relgion surveys started taking off 15-20 years ago and way more people are (willing to say) they're non-religious than 30 years ago.
religious fundamentalists are being shittier but reactionary american christians have been on that trajectory since at least the 1970s and they're mostly losing the culture and only winning things like the supreme court in the face of liberals' horrible incompetence.
The new atheists severely overestimated the positive effect of the internet, I thinks that's obvious. They thought religion is just about indoctrination and information while disregarding material conditions. Giving internet access to an African child is not going to make the Christian missionaries any less effective.
But statistically speaking religion is still definitely on a decline specially in the first world and if not for climate change or neoliberalism then imo most of the western world would be atheist by the end of the 21st century.
This one's at least kind of understandable, I think. A lot of the people who said this were people came fundamentalist backgrounds and had been brought into atheism by the internet, then wound up congregating (lol) with others who'd followed the same trajectory.
Oh and remember when they said tablets would replace laptops. lol. That was embarrassing.
Tablets didn't replace laptops because smartphones were already doing it
I am cursed to live the rest of my ilfe remembering the ten years of golden age internet when corporations and rich fucks didn't known how to monetize it yet. Was it perfect? No. Was it a true exploration of human community and thought and knowledge? Hell yeah it was.
Remember when every other website had tons of gif images and god awful midi music you couldn't turn off?
I grew up extremely Evangelical. I remember hearing that in the next couple decades, we would be getting technology that allowed for us to get a chip implanted in our hand that would act as identification, a digital wallet, a car key, and a pass to use for public transportation or entry into places. But this would of course be used as the Mark of the Beast and if you refused the chip, you'd be beheaded by the Satanic one-world government.
True, my son's grandma still believes that the Covid vaccines have the Mark of the Beast nanochips inside of them, lmao.
Not to be attempting logic with an inherently illogical concept, but isn't it a major part of the mark of the beast that everyone knows it's the mark of the beast and gets it anyway? If people are unaware, by definition it cannot be the mark.
Kind of just an aside, but after constantly hearing about Mark of the Beast, and the antichrist doing bad stuff, from apocalyptic evangelists, I thought it was interesting that Revelation, the part of the bible the mark of the beast is from, makes 0 mention of the Antichrist, but just 'the Beast'.
I also like the general theories that a lot of these vague allusions, with the number of the beast, and the antichrist, and the Man of Sin, are pointed political commentary at the then-current Emperor Nero, and aren't really supposed to be far off predictions, but rather saying, "Hey, we gotta stop Nero NOW, or he'll fuck shit up like this!" Decent amount of evidence to this, though its still far from certain.
IT'S HERE AND IT'S CALLED A SMARTPHONE :agony-immense:
THAT'S THE GOVERNMENT SPYING ON YOU :agony-limitless:
I remember in 07 thinking that smart phones would never catch on because typing without buttons was terrible. I had one of the touch screen phones with the sliding keyboard and assumed that was the ultimate phone.
sliding keyboard and assumed that was the ultimate phone.
You assumed correctly. All I want in a phone is a pinephone version of the motorola droid with more modern components and amoled lol
I still think this. The phone I had with a full keyboard was the most usable phone I've ever had, I challenge anyone to beat me in a typing contest with one of those while using modern phones.
FX tec made one with modern hardware. It actually looks pretty nice because I had the old Motorola Droid phones and loved the keyboard
Hecka cool! I checked them out previously for their native LineageOS support, but cost stopped me. Should give 'em another check.
I had one of the touch screen phones with the sliding keyboard and assumed that was the ultimate phone.
That's still the ultimate phone. RIP in peace my Droid 4.
Life for each generation will be better than their parents' lives. It's just onward and upward from here, baby!
:doomjak:
China is gonna fall any day now
any day now...
I remember all that talk about the Internet breaking borders and democratizing the world. Has multitasking really faced pushback? I remember a lot of younger people bragging about how they would listen to youtube videos while watching a Netflix show and reading an article. It always sounded more like they processed everything by mentally skimming through the information they were getting.
A lot of tech hype for products that still don't exist. You'd hear a lot of people say they wouldn't need to learn a language because the technology to translate what you say as you speak is just around the corner. I've seen the attempts and they just make the conversation awkward.
The Obama years made a lot of liberals talk about how demographics were going to make Republican victory impossible.
Netflix was proof that digital distribution would kill cable and that we'd be watching Netflix shows without ever worrying about them turning into cable.
Bigotry would be nonexistent once Millennials grew up and became the majority. Still not holding my breath on that one.
You’d hear a lot of people say they wouldn’t need to learn a language because the technology to translate what you say as you speak is just around the corner. I’ve seen the attempts and they just make the conversation awkward.
A lot of the translation tools out there now are really good for signs and text online though. Like I can browse a Chinese website with incredible ease or take a pic of a sign and run it through a translator when I'm somewhere with a language I don't speak. Right now we're definitely in the gimmick phase of translating speech instantly, but I could very realistically see two people with translators up on their phones, speaking English or Chinese or something into it, and sending out a live text translation happening very soon, if not today already. Though if its already happening its probably a little gimmicky because most things still arent the best at recognizing different accents. You can definitely just open up a translator and ask them to type into it if you really need to.
I'm talking more about the seamlessness people want that I don't think is ever going to happen with the varieties of dialect and slang that gets made up. No translator is ever going to help me understand a Chilean.
It'll at best work great in situations like the UN or business meetings ,but I can't picture it working in a bar setting for example.
That makes sense, but I think some people will learn to modify their language to be simpler for the translation's benefit.
They were predicting the end of the Republican Party back in the Bill Clinton years. At least this time the libs learned better.
They also did it during Wilson, FDR, and LBJ. Dems get way too excited every time their guy lasts over four years.
I remember being so excited for VR tech in the 90's. I'd walk into Toys R Us and see the latest "VR" game. Looking back the graphics were pretty choppy but I thought it couldn't get any more realistic than that at the time.
I remember there was a decent (arguably healthy) fear of genetic engineering of humans. I think the movie Gatacca sums up those fears pretty.
Not like it was some pervasive fear, but it was there.
It's interesting to think about this because we do, right now, have the technology to edit humans by making changes to the germline (i.e any reproductive cell like eggs or sperm), but the world has more or less adopted a moratorium on it because it's ethically nightmarish and once that door is open it isn't going to close.
Exactly, shit's hard and that's why we don't have artificially large billionaire failsons yet
yeah this is a big one. There was an overwhelming 'vibe' about things like climate change, that we were gonna tech our way out. Honestly I think people are a lot more sober about technology now, as much as weird Musk Fans still exist, they dont even actually think the tech is coming.
Oh man remember when people were calling Al Gore hysterical for talking about climate change? I mean there's reasons not to like the guy but An Inconvenient Truth isn't one of them.
We won't see the effects of climate change until 2100... 2050... 2030... shit.
There would be no more actual wars between large established national state actors. Something, something, globalization... something, something, economies suffer during wars.
Email will be awesome! Instant messaging will be awesome! Turns out, I pretty much stopped using email as a way to communicate between human beings as soon as I was no longer physically around the people I emailed constantly during the 90's. I quit using instant messaging stuff at the same time. Now I've got like 20 email addresses that I just use if/when a website requires one to use it and exactly 1 email address that I only check when I'm actively trying to do something like apply for jobs.
