8 ms·

Why Generation X will save the web

78 points by ecliptik 5y ago

jart 5y ago
I can't wait for the new generation of lawyers to save us from the old generation of lawyers that set our policies without knowing much about how technology works. Doesn't congress have like 5 people out of 500 with an engineering background? If you want to save us, give us representation.
- rhooke 5y ago
  What makes you think that will happen? A lot of young people I know seem to understand just as little about computers as the older ones, on average. Younger people use technology a lot, but what is being used tends to require much less understanding of any of the underlying tech. The level of abstraction is a lot higher now.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    So true. They laugh at me 'cuz I know nothing about the latest app. I laugh at them because they have no idea how their computer works. How many times do I advise: "Just unplug it and plug it back in." P.S. for non-digital electronics, the cold reset doesn't work. P.P.S. My skill at writing programs took an enormous discontinuous leap forward when I learned how transistors worked, how to wire up a transistor to make a flip flop, and how to hook up flip flops to make registers, adders, etc.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic is generally used to talk about how it works for a less developed civilization meeting a more developed one, but perhaps it also pertains to the non technicians in the magic civilization. At a certain point of specialization and advancement it no longer seems productive use of your time to try to understand it, leading to large portions of the population who view the technicians holding things together as inscrutable magicians.
  - jart 5y ago
    It'll happen incrementally. Each time the lawyer ruling class does something bad, like build a website that doesn't work, they'll need to give us a little more power in order to save them. Then after a long enough timeline, we'll win, and legal code will be executable.
    - elliekelly 5y ago
      I’m not sure it’ll work out this way because a lawyer can become a coder much easier than a coder can become a lawyer. Then again, lawyers are notoriously allergic to all-things-technology, so who knows.
    - oblio 5y ago
      > Then after a long enough timeline, we'll win, and legal code will be executable. Awesome, I was looking forward to Kafka running on EC2 instances.
      - oblio 5y ago
        And I meant Kafka as in Kafkaesque, not Apache Kafka.
- voidfunc 5y ago
  What % of the population is engineers? 1% representation doesn’t feel that off.
  - jart 5y ago
    Not if you consider that 66% of the people who sit in congress are lawyers and they're only 0.36% of the population.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      But a decent part of congress' job is around laws ( writing or sponsoring them, arguing for/against them, etc.) it makes sense that lawyers are overrepresented.
      - elliekelly 5y ago
        It would make sense that Congress hires a lot of lawyers but since Congress is supposed to represent the people I don’t think having one profession so heavily over-represented is beneficial. And I say that as a member of the heavily-over-represented profession.
breck 5y ago
#LibreIdeas #AbolishCopyrights #AbolishPatents #AbolishIntellectualSlavery
hkt 5y ago
> All of those formative experiences give us (cough) fortysomethings a perspective on the internet which the boomers who birthed us lack, and which the millenials who followed us will never know. I'm a millennial and definitely experienced most of this. Maybe not the magazines and payphones, but still. Even so, I appreciate the open web sentiment even if the generational patter is unhelpful..
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
stoolpigeon 5y ago
In general I'm not crazy about stuff that is based around praising one's self. I get a lot of marketing on facebook that assumes I want to buy t-shirts that brag about how awesome I am because of the different groups I belong to - including my age, gen-x, etc. I find it to be off putting. That said - I see the author's point about how we grew up with a sense of the wide open possibility. There is a feeling I had as a teen that this new world of computing made anything possible. I had posters of EA devs up on my walls and my friends and I wrote our own games that we played. As things moved along and dev tools got expensive I lost some of that optimism until I ran into FOSS in the early 00s. That reignited the whole thing for me. But I think it will be a constant battle against many forces to keep open platforms, tools and networks. At the same time I think regulation has to be a part of it. It's a balancing act like so much of life. I think the key is finding how it impacts the majority of people and helping them understand why it matters to them. They may not understand technical or philosophical arguments - they need to see the real impact on their daily lives.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jayd16 5y ago
Kind of an odd take. Either Millennials grew up with the old good web and invented the new bad web or they grew up with the new bad web and didn't invent it. Either way, the arguments kind of fall apart. Zuck is a Millennial but the rest of web 2.0 is run by GenXers, no? Well anyway, generational blame is pretty useless. Lets just try to fix stuff.
- brabel 5y ago
  You misunderstood the point the author is making. She is not saying Millenials or GenXers created the Internet as it is now. She is saying that the Internet used to be open and somehow became dominated by a handful of giant companies. No one invented it, it just happened because no one was paying too much attention. Whether the companies that became dominant were founded by younger or older people is irrelevant to the argument. The main point I took away from this article is that the younger people today, Millenials if you will, are not used to an open internet, so they see the internet as a closed gate community, a divisive force. A completely different view of the Internet than the previous generation had. And as the younger people are the ones with the most energy to fight against what they perceive as injustices, they tend to actually dominate policy making even if indirectly, and what they see as the enemy is things like encryption and even privacy, which the previous generation saw as essential for a free Internet. I agree completely with that, but I am not optimistic as the author is that GenXers will at some point get their act together and make the internet more open again. I believe what will happen is that the Internet will continue being this divisive force until legislation (pushed by younger people who don't know better) is introduced to curtail freedom of expression and remove all privacy in the name of justice. That will be a very different Internet and not in a good way.
  - jart 5y ago
    The old open web still exists. Just because a larger percentage of people prefer the order of walled gardens doesn't mean the web is now closed. I'm sure the lawyers would love for us to believe that and have us normal tech people turn and rage against our most successful members. It's divide and conquer. Most tech company resources go to litigation and legal fees rather than research and development. They get all the money and they're given the power to read our private emails too, so they can take more money if anything we say using a computer could be portrayed in a negative light. That's the closed internet.
codetrotter 5y ago
To say that millennials only know the internet as Facebook and MySpace etc, is not a good characterization of reality IMO. I was born in 1990. Facebook is not my Internet. When I grew up the Internet was a very fascinating place. Flash games, web forums, chat rooms, peer to peer file sharing of mp3 files and movies. A friend of mine had an older brother who used to give him home burned CDs with software, anime, games and other files, that the older brother had obtained via Suprnova.org and other torrent tracker sites. And me and my friends also downloaded and shared files using BearShare, LimeWire and KaZaA Lite. So no, I can not agree with the overly simplistic characterization of millennials as thinking that Facebook is the Internet.
- armada651 5y ago
  I was also born in 1990 and I feel like I also experienced some of the things she ascribes to gen X. In the end generational boundaries are always going to result in overly simplistic characterizations. However in the context of the article it's probably helpful to see millennials as a transitional generation. The tech-literate millennials definitely still shared the tail-end of the internet that gen X was familiar with. However there is also a big part of our generation that only really experienced the web through social media starting in their late teens or early twenties.
- fisheye13 5y ago
  I see we are from the same generation (born 1991) with the same memories on the internet. Though I might add, that younger generations have a wast different experience what the web and _beeing online_. Is for us beeing online was not a omnipresent. When you log off icq you are simply not available. Very different to Facebook messenger / WhatsApp imho. Not saying that we are not living in the same world today but the way to experience the web is different.
  - vagrantJin 5y ago
    I agreem its a very different experience. The web seemed less orderly and not as curated as it is today.
  - 5y ago
tegling 5y ago
Wouldn't a good start be to separate infrastructure providers and infrastructure users (services/content)? Seems like a weird situation to allow corps to own the infra and think that they will promote "fairness and openness" when competing with other actors using their infra. What would happen if e.g. Govs or non-profits provide e-mail, messaging, video conference and social media infrastructure guaranteeing a level field and privacy-upholding policy (by regulation)?
zmix 5y ago
Is it just me who could go up the wall, when people mix up "Boomers" and "68'ers"? 2008 was the Boomers and the Genx'ers. It was these two Generations who created today's mess, when shelling out 70% more money for a white cotton T-Shirt, just because a man named "Giorgio Armani" has branded it.
johbjo 5y ago
The "founders" were GenXers and older but the internet or "cyberspace" was so tiny then that there are as many clueless GenX now as from any other generation.
mftb 5y ago
I'm just about this person's age and my career has pretty much been entwined with the web since the very beginning (I started right around '93). I don't necessarily see it the way this person does. I don't think op groks how many more people are on-line now (including the web), how much it has grown, in multiple dimensions. I feel like we had our time to exert an outsize influence on it, and we did what we did, for good or ill.
pram 5y ago
Discord brought back a lot of "open web" feelings for me tbh. It's really like the AOL/IRC experience. Small communities of like minded people really hits the sweet spot. The intimate and memorable communities and experiences are out there still, you just have to go looking for them. Isn't that in the spirit of the old web, anyway?
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  I see what you mean, but I cannot trust a closed platform. For instance : before Discord there was Skype... until Microsoft bought it and ran it into the ground.
- RGamma 5y ago
  Even better would be self-hosting capability as an addon. The longest living and most "alive-feeling" multiplayer gaming communities form around games with moddable, dedicated servers.
Tade0 5y ago
I've seen a mention of privilege. I'm 32, grew up in a non-western country and my experience with the internet was much like the author's, because well, DSL was always mighty expensive around here.
danellis 5y ago
> We – the GenXers – think of the internet as the open web It's more than that. We think of the Internet as something separate from the Web.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
I'm Generation X, what do I need to do? On that topic I found "The Fourth Turning" very interesting - although I do not subscribe to the conlusions of that book.
wrnr 5y ago
I hear too much that the web is broken. My first experience with the web using MSN Explorer to create a Zelda fan site by copying gifs and html from other Zelda fan sites. MSN was a walled of version of the web by microsoft where you could create your own webportal. If people are curious then they will explore and find new things. Too many people want to "fix" the internet, wining about monopolies, stuf like that. Feels like old people being nostalgic about the world moving on, while I know 12 year doing amazing stuff.
frobozz 5y ago
This looks like a long-winded version of those boomer memes about how they used to return glass bottles to the shop and buy groceries on the high street, mocking the supposedly eco-aware younger generation who buy single-use plastics and drive to an out-of-town supermarket. By the time GenX grew up, the boomers in charge had stopped selling drinks in refundable glass bottles and had shut down all the high street grocers etc. It was GenX and Xennials who did this to the web and then started blaming younger folk for not having their own hand-coded Geocities page on a webring.
ilaksh 5y ago
Some people are missing her point. Many young people in politics have been misled and are actively fighting against privacy, encryption, and freedom of expression. I personally believe that things will get worse before they get better. The momentum is on the side of the young people. The western world is already moving closer to the Chinese model -- that's been in progress for years. Eventually there will be a backlash. And I think open distributed protocols, such as content-centric networking, will play a part. But unfortunately, I would not be very surprised if the younger generation had to learn the hard way about the importance of things like freedom of expression. And as the author says, they are in the driver seat, in some ways, and we will all be dragged along for the lesson again. Ultimately, there is a cultural imbalance that will need to be adjusted. But the adjustment is not what young people think it is. There is no truth fairy that can wave a wand and make all the bad facts go away. And appointing truth fairies will be deadly. The culture has a tendency to enthusiastically distort facts to support one extreme political perspective or another. The answer is not censorship. The answer is to change the culture so that tendency which is practiced by all sides is no longer tolerated. It's a subtle and difficult thing that humans may never get right. But there is a difference between open, nuanced and honest debate and the hysterical polarized rhetoric that is typical, and a difference between nuance/integrity and censorship. To me both the east and the west have taken extreme cultural stances that are missing that subtlety.
pgtan 5y ago
well, Coupland preserved even that aspect of our gen in "Microservs" and "JPod".
nathias 5y ago
a generation never did anything
jmull 5y ago
The commonalities between a set of people born in a certain 15-20 year period are so diffuse and weak, generational analysis is pointless. It makes some sense to bring up in a TV advertising perspective context, where the first thing you can target is a general age group. If you try to break the world down this way, you just end up with a vague, soft, pile of BS.
- benjaminjosephw 5y ago
  Generational talk is usually just a way for older people to talk trash about younger people as well as to help them figure out how to sell more stuff to them. That's not the whole story though. The world has changed significantly in the last 15-20 years. Technology and Globalization have reshaped so much that it is meaningful to talk about people raised in this new context in a ways that's more than just marketing BS. Maybe the generational framing is not ideal but there's definitely some value in talking about people born within this particular era because it's so incredibly different from the eras before it in many complex and deeply interconnected ways.
magicroot75 5y ago
Scrap the generational titles for our purposes here. It makes more sense to apply what say shes talking about to people born between 1978 and 1994. Older than that, and you're not really in the internet age. Younger and you think of the corporatized internet.
alephu5 5y ago
I'm a millennial and remember the Geocities days, however in my opinion the internet is more open than ever. Anyone can get a cheap VPS, raspberry Pi, or a plethora of other hosting options and publish what they want. We have so many incredible open-source and free libraries & tools for building these things, and getting them out into the world. This is really a cultural problem, not a technical or political one. And given how cyclical culture seems to be, I have little doubt that in a few years we'll swing back to a rich federation of independent services and content.
Semiapies 5y ago
I think the author is wildly confusing her tech background with her age group. Gen Xers outside of tech don't see the internet much differently from younger people.
austinshea 5y ago
This article is not about why Gen X will do anything. It’s about why Gen Xers think they are well suited to do something that no organized group is planning, or executing, on. Very self congratulatory, and absolutely no meaningful call to action.
banbanbang 5y ago
Don’t understand these generalizations regarding generations. Makes no sense. I met plenty of open minded “boomers” as well as closed minded millennials. Needless to say, everyone is built and wired different. Every generation has its share of scums but humanity moves forward. Technology moves forward. The world moves forward. All toward equilibrium.
nobodyandproud 5y ago
The author doesn’t consider that some of the “Gen-X” PoV was out of naivete. I’m using Gen-X out of convenience, as HN has peolple of all ages that remember the good old days. Software engineers never united or created any meaningful professional organization, so it let the organizations with the most money create platforms. To SW engineers, “union” or “trade org” was a dirty word even back in the late 90s (I remember vividly arguing on forums even then). Today, it’s the FAANG companies that dictate things these days, which unfortunately includes the worst of the worst. Gen-X was also naive, because it never considered that the internet would become so ingrained or essential so quickly; indeed, it was more incremental until the iPhone and Android. Therefore it also never seriously considered bad actors manipulating walled gardens and creating echo chambers, as an open internet meant that ideas (including bad ones) would flow BOTH ways. Finally, it never gave any credible thought to what a a highly accessible internet would do for local/regional/national journalists. This above all else I feel hurts us the most, because it lets bad actors get away with so much. So if there’s one thing I feel we must solve first, it’s to help revive the journalism field; and I feel ongoing help from software engineers (as a whole) is a must.
Proven 5y ago
I don't think he author understands much about the Internet. She fails to identify the nature of the problem. I strongly suspect she doesn't know how to solve it either.

78 points by ecliptik 5y ago

jart 5y ago

I can't wait for the new generation of lawyers to save us from the old generation of lawyers that set our policies without knowing much about how technology works. Doesn't congress have like 5 people out of 500 with an engineering background? If you want to save us, give us representation.

rhooke 5y ago
What makes you think that will happen? A lot of young people I know seem to understand just as little about computers as the older ones, on average. Younger people use technology a lot, but what is being used tends to require much less understanding of any of the underlying tech. The level of abstraction is a lot higher now.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  So true. They laugh at me 'cuz I know nothing about the latest app. I laugh at them because they have no idea how their computer works. How many times do I advise: "Just unplug it and plug it back in." P.S. for non-digital electronics, the cold reset doesn't work. P.P.S. My skill at writing programs took an enormous discontinuous leap forward when I learned how transistors worked, how to wire up a transistor to make a flip flop, and how to hook up flip flops to make registers, adders, etc.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic is generally used to talk about how it works for a less developed civilization meeting a more developed one, but perhaps it also pertains to the non technicians in the magic civilization. At a certain point of specialization and advancement it no longer seems productive use of your time to try to understand it, leading to large portions of the population who view the technicians holding things together as inscrutable magicians.
- jart 5y ago
  It'll happen incrementally. Each time the lawyer ruling class does something bad, like build a website that doesn't work, they'll need to give us a little more power in order to save them. Then after a long enough timeline, we'll win, and legal code will be executable.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    I’m not sure it’ll work out this way because a lawyer can become a coder much easier than a coder can become a lawyer. Then again, lawyers are notoriously allergic to all-things-technology, so who knows.
  - oblio 5y ago
    > Then after a long enough timeline, we'll win, and legal code will be executable. Awesome, I was looking forward to Kafka running on EC2 instances.
    - oblio 5y ago
      And I meant Kafka as in Kafkaesque, not Apache Kafka.
voidfunc 5y ago
What % of the population is engineers? 1% representation doesn’t feel that off.
- jart 5y ago
  Not if you consider that 66% of the people who sit in congress are lawyers and they're only 0.36% of the population.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    But a decent part of congress' job is around laws ( writing or sponsoring them, arguing for/against them, etc.) it makes sense that lawyers are overrepresented.
    - elliekelly 5y ago
      It would make sense that Congress hires a lot of lawyers but since Congress is supposed to represent the people I don’t think having one profession so heavily over-represented is beneficial. And I say that as a member of the heavily-over-represented profession.

breck 5y ago

#LibreIdeas #AbolishCopyrights #AbolishPatents #AbolishIntellectualSlavery

hkt 5y ago

> All of those formative experiences give us (cough) fortysomethings a perspective on the internet which the boomers who birthed us lack, and which the millenials who followed us will never know. I'm a millennial and definitely experienced most of this. Maybe not the magazines and payphones, but still. Even so, I appreciate the open web sentiment even if the generational patter is unhelpful..

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

stoolpigeon 5y ago

In general I'm not crazy about stuff that is based around praising one's self. I get a lot of marketing on facebook that assumes I want to buy t-shirts that brag about how awesome I am because of the different groups I belong to - including my age, gen-x, etc. I find it to be off putting. That said - I see the author's point about how we grew up with a sense of the wide open possibility. There is a feeling I had as a teen that this new world of computing made anything possible. I had posters of EA devs up on my walls and my friends and I wrote our own games that we played. As things moved along and dev tools got expensive I lost some of that optimism until I ran into FOSS in the early 00s. That reignited the whole thing for me. But I think it will be a constant battle against many forces to keep open platforms, tools and networks. At the same time I think regulation has to be a part of it. It's a balancing act like so much of life. I think the key is finding how it impacts the majority of people and helping them understand why it matters to them. They may not understand technical or philosophical arguments - they need to see the real impact on their daily lives.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jayd16 5y ago

Kind of an odd take. Either Millennials grew up with the old good web and invented the new bad web or they grew up with the new bad web and didn't invent it. Either way, the arguments kind of fall apart. Zuck is a Millennial but the rest of web 2.0 is run by GenXers, no? Well anyway, generational blame is pretty useless. Lets just try to fix stuff.

brabel 5y ago
You misunderstood the point the author is making. She is not saying Millenials or GenXers created the Internet as it is now. She is saying that the Internet used to be open and somehow became dominated by a handful of giant companies. No one invented it, it just happened because no one was paying too much attention. Whether the companies that became dominant were founded by younger or older people is irrelevant to the argument. The main point I took away from this article is that the younger people today, Millenials if you will, are not used to an open internet, so they see the internet as a closed gate community, a divisive force. A completely different view of the Internet than the previous generation had. And as the younger people are the ones with the most energy to fight against what they perceive as injustices, they tend to actually dominate policy making even if indirectly, and what they see as the enemy is things like encryption and even privacy, which the previous generation saw as essential for a free Internet. I agree completely with that, but I am not optimistic as the author is that GenXers will at some point get their act together and make the internet more open again. I believe what will happen is that the Internet will continue being this divisive force until legislation (pushed by younger people who don't know better) is introduced to curtail freedom of expression and remove all privacy in the name of justice. That will be a very different Internet and not in a good way.
- jart 5y ago
  The old open web still exists. Just because a larger percentage of people prefer the order of walled gardens doesn't mean the web is now closed. I'm sure the lawyers would love for us to believe that and have us normal tech people turn and rage against our most successful members. It's divide and conquer. Most tech company resources go to litigation and legal fees rather than research and development. They get all the money and they're given the power to read our private emails too, so they can take more money if anything we say using a computer could be portrayed in a negative light. That's the closed internet.

codetrotter 5y ago

To say that millennials only know the internet as Facebook and MySpace etc, is not a good characterization of reality IMO. I was born in 1990. Facebook is not my Internet. When I grew up the Internet was a very fascinating place. Flash games, web forums, chat rooms, peer to peer file sharing of mp3 files and movies. A friend of mine had an older brother who used to give him home burned CDs with software, anime, games and other files, that the older brother had obtained via Suprnova.org and other torrent tracker sites. And me and my friends also downloaded and shared files using BearShare, LimeWire and KaZaA Lite. So no, I can not agree with the overly simplistic characterization of millennials as thinking that Facebook is the Internet.

armada651 5y ago
I was also born in 1990 and I feel like I also experienced some of the things she ascribes to gen X. In the end generational boundaries are always going to result in overly simplistic characterizations. However in the context of the article it's probably helpful to see millennials as a transitional generation. The tech-literate millennials definitely still shared the tail-end of the internet that gen X was familiar with. However there is also a big part of our generation that only really experienced the web through social media starting in their late teens or early twenties.
fisheye13 5y ago
I see we are from the same generation (born 1991) with the same memories on the internet. Though I might add, that younger generations have a wast different experience what the web and _beeing online_. Is for us beeing online was not a omnipresent. When you log off icq you are simply not available. Very different to Facebook messenger / WhatsApp imho. Not saying that we are not living in the same world today but the way to experience the web is different.
- vagrantJin 5y ago
  I agreem its a very different experience. The web seemed less orderly and not as curated as it is today.
- 5y ago

tegling 5y ago

Wouldn't a good start be to separate infrastructure providers and infrastructure users (services/content)? Seems like a weird situation to allow corps to own the infra and think that they will promote "fairness and openness" when competing with other actors using their infra. What would happen if e.g. Govs or non-profits provide e-mail, messaging, video conference and social media infrastructure guaranteeing a level field and privacy-upholding policy (by regulation)?

zmix 5y ago

Is it just me who could go up the wall, when people mix up "Boomers" and "68'ers"? 2008 was the Boomers and the Genx'ers. It was these two Generations who created today's mess, when shelling out 70% more money for a white cotton T-Shirt, just because a man named "Giorgio Armani" has branded it.

johbjo 5y ago

The "founders" were GenXers and older but the internet or "cyberspace" was so tiny then that there are as many clueless GenX now as from any other generation.

mftb 5y ago

I'm just about this person's age and my career has pretty much been entwined with the web since the very beginning (I started right around '93). I don't necessarily see it the way this person does. I don't think op groks how many more people are on-line now (including the web), how much it has grown, in multiple dimensions. I feel like we had our time to exert an outsize influence on it, and we did what we did, for good or ill.

pram 5y ago

Discord brought back a lot of "open web" feelings for me tbh. It's really like the AOL/IRC experience. Small communities of like minded people really hits the sweet spot. The intimate and memorable communities and experiences are out there still, you just have to go looking for them. Isn't that in the spirit of the old web, anyway?

BlueTemplar 5y ago
I see what you mean, but I cannot trust a closed platform. For instance : before Discord there was Skype... until Microsoft bought it and ran it into the ground.
RGamma 5y ago
Even better would be self-hosting capability as an addon. The longest living and most "alive-feeling" multiplayer gaming communities form around games with moddable, dedicated servers.

Tade0 5y ago

I've seen a mention of privilege. I'm 32, grew up in a non-western country and my experience with the internet was much like the author's, because well, DSL was always mighty expensive around here.

danellis 5y ago

> We – the GenXers – think of the internet as the open web It's more than that. We think of the Internet as something separate from the Web.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

I'm Generation X, what do I need to do? On that topic I found "The Fourth Turning" very interesting - although I do not subscribe to the conlusions of that book.

wrnr 5y ago

I hear too much that the web is broken. My first experience with the web using MSN Explorer to create a Zelda fan site by copying gifs and html from other Zelda fan sites. MSN was a walled of version of the web by microsoft where you could create your own webportal. If people are curious then they will explore and find new things. Too many people want to "fix" the internet, wining about monopolies, stuf like that. Feels like old people being nostalgic about the world moving on, while I know 12 year doing amazing stuff.

frobozz 5y ago

This looks like a long-winded version of those boomer memes about how they used to return glass bottles to the shop and buy groceries on the high street, mocking the supposedly eco-aware younger generation who buy single-use plastics and drive to an out-of-town supermarket. By the time GenX grew up, the boomers in charge had stopped selling drinks in refundable glass bottles and had shut down all the high street grocers etc. It was GenX and Xennials who did this to the web and then started blaming younger folk for not having their own hand-coded Geocities page on a webring.

ilaksh 5y ago

Some people are missing her point. Many young people in politics have been misled and are actively fighting against privacy, encryption, and freedom of expression. I personally believe that things will get worse before they get better. The momentum is on the side of the young people. The western world is already moving closer to the Chinese model -- that's been in progress for years. Eventually there will be a backlash. And I think open distributed protocols, such as content-centric networking, will play a part. But unfortunately, I would not be very surprised if the younger generation had to learn the hard way about the importance of things like freedom of expression. And as the author says, they are in the driver seat, in some ways, and we will all be dragged along for the lesson again. Ultimately, there is a cultural imbalance that will need to be adjusted. But the adjustment is not what young people think it is. There is no truth fairy that can wave a wand and make all the bad facts go away. And appointing truth fairies will be deadly. The culture has a tendency to enthusiastically distort facts to support one extreme political perspective or another. The answer is not censorship. The answer is to change the culture so that tendency which is practiced by all sides is no longer tolerated. It's a subtle and difficult thing that humans may never get right. But there is a difference between open, nuanced and honest debate and the hysterical polarized rhetoric that is typical, and a difference between nuance/integrity and censorship. To me both the east and the west have taken extreme cultural stances that are missing that subtlety.

pgtan 5y ago

well, Coupland preserved even that aspect of our gen in "Microservs" and "JPod".

nathias 5y ago

a generation never did anything

jmull 5y ago

The commonalities between a set of people born in a certain 15-20 year period are so diffuse and weak, generational analysis is pointless. It makes some sense to bring up in a TV advertising perspective context, where the first thing you can target is a general age group. If you try to break the world down this way, you just end up with a vague, soft, pile of BS.

benjaminjosephw 5y ago
Generational talk is usually just a way for older people to talk trash about younger people as well as to help them figure out how to sell more stuff to them. That's not the whole story though. The world has changed significantly in the last 15-20 years. Technology and Globalization have reshaped so much that it is meaningful to talk about people raised in this new context in a ways that's more than just marketing BS. Maybe the generational framing is not ideal but there's definitely some value in talking about people born within this particular era because it's so incredibly different from the eras before it in many complex and deeply interconnected ways.

magicroot75 5y ago

Scrap the generational titles for our purposes here. It makes more sense to apply what say shes talking about to people born between 1978 and 1994. Older than that, and you're not really in the internet age. Younger and you think of the corporatized internet.

alephu5 5y ago

I'm a millennial and remember the Geocities days, however in my opinion the internet is more open than ever. Anyone can get a cheap VPS, raspberry Pi, or a plethora of other hosting options and publish what they want. We have so many incredible open-source and free libraries & tools for building these things, and getting them out into the world. This is really a cultural problem, not a technical or political one. And given how cyclical culture seems to be, I have little doubt that in a few years we'll swing back to a rich federation of independent services and content.

Semiapies 5y ago

I think the author is wildly confusing her tech background with her age group. Gen Xers outside of tech don't see the internet much differently from younger people.

austinshea 5y ago

This article is not about why Gen X will do anything. It’s about why Gen Xers think they are well suited to do something that no organized group is planning, or executing, on. Very self congratulatory, and absolutely no meaningful call to action.

banbanbang 5y ago

Don’t understand these generalizations regarding generations. Makes no sense. I met plenty of open minded “boomers” as well as closed minded millennials. Needless to say, everyone is built and wired different. Every generation has its share of scums but humanity moves forward. Technology moves forward. The world moves forward. All toward equilibrium.

nobodyandproud 5y ago

The author doesn’t consider that some of the “Gen-X” PoV was out of naivete. I’m using Gen-X out of convenience, as HN has peolple of all ages that remember the good old days. Software engineers never united or created any meaningful professional organization, so it let the organizations with the most money create platforms. To SW engineers, “union” or “trade org” was a dirty word even back in the late 90s (I remember vividly arguing on forums even then). Today, it’s the FAANG companies that dictate things these days, which unfortunately includes the worst of the worst. Gen-X was also naive, because it never considered that the internet would become so ingrained or essential so quickly; indeed, it was more incremental until the iPhone and Android. Therefore it also never seriously considered bad actors manipulating walled gardens and creating echo chambers, as an open internet meant that ideas (including bad ones) would flow BOTH ways. Finally, it never gave any credible thought to what a a highly accessible internet would do for local/regional/national journalists. This above all else I feel hurts us the most, because it lets bad actors get away with so much. So if there’s one thing I feel we must solve first, it’s to help revive the journalism field; and I feel ongoing help from software engineers (as a whole) is a must.

Proven 5y ago

I don't think he author understands much about the Internet. She fails to identify the nature of the problem. I strongly suspect she doesn't know how to solve it either.