8 ms·

In retrospect it was extremely arrogant of us 90's nerds to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how t

by gary_0 2y ago

In retrospect it was extremely arrogant of us 90's nerds to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends, and overwhelm the incumbent minority. Once you could use a sleek, trendy iPhone instead of a clunky desktop computer to get online, the writing was on the wall. Technology changes, people don't.

mixmastamyk 2y ago
Yes, though I'd characterize it as more naive than arrogant.
- gary_0 2y ago
  Yes, 90's me was definitely naive, and 00's me too. The "do no evil" years.
- hinkley 2y ago
  I think back to all of those people talking breathlessly of really free speech and me nodding along just as convinced. Yikes. I think the bloom came off the flower for me when I participated in the design discussions for Freenet, and I started actually looking at what people were uploading.
cjbgkagh 2y ago
I don’t think it was about stupidity it was about desire, they would not want to come here because it’s just talking to other nerds on bbs. But bandwidth increased and porn and flash games opened the floodgates. I guess the mistake was that nerds assumed there were more people like them, or that introducing people into their world would change the people and not have the people change the environment.
- AlphaEsponjosus 2y ago
  I do not think that porn and flash games were the reason the internet became trendy and stupid. I blame social media, like tuenti, facebook, fotolog, hi5, even myspace. The thing with stupid people overcoming the internet was not corporations investing on publicity nor searching engines selling the rankibgs of searching results. What made stupidity feel safe on internet and become trending, were the spaces that allowed those people to gather, to be in "the same place" with no one there to judge, correct them and laugh at them for being ignorants. This gave them the wrong idea that they were relevant in a sense were despite knowing nothing about anything, their opinion was valid and deserved respect, as much as the opinions from experts.
  - cjbgkagh 2y ago
    I’m old enough to have been there, the internet became popular long before modern social media became a thing. Think Geocities -> MySpace —> Facebook etc. Also modern search manipulation optimized on engagement had a particular moment when both Facebook and Twitter went from showing you a defined set of things to their selected subset of things.
hinkley 2y ago
Well we made it “idiot proof” didn’t we, and all the idiots came. We need a sort of Dark Web with low crime, and mostly that’s things like HN and people running private Slack instances.
- ErikAugust 2y ago
  I was thinking about a Twitter clone where your account goes through an approval process where you provide a short essay and your Hacker News username. Client has no tracking, and uses no JavaScript.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    Lemmy has a few like that. But it uses Javascript, heavily. (Or is it wasm? I never looked.)
    - hinkley 2y ago
      I still think someone should make a job application for FE developers that doesn’t work and you have to edit the page source to submit your resume. Put a comment in the source to say you did it on purpose so you don’t scare them off immediately.
  - vunderba 2y ago
    This is the rough social media equivalent of Mensa - not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
- jmclnx 2y ago
  In a way it kind of exists, you have Gopher and Gemini. The main links I know of. gopher://sdf.org gemini://sdf.org and gemini://gem.sdf.org I already moved my personal WEB Site there, and there is interesting content there. Maybe "we" should migrate there and leave the LOL cats to the WEB :)
  - hinkley 2y ago
    I don’t believe the Dead Internet theory, but I can see how people got there.
flymaipie 2y ago
So the Lord God banished them from the Garden of Fidonet... Woe unto them, for they have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind. Their troubles shall multiply as bugs and glitches in their software.
AIorNot 2y ago
Well the other issue is that many of 90s nerds turned out to be just as fascistic and bullying and horribly un-empathic themselves -just look at Musk as an example. I mean not having social skills, not identifying with women or not treating them as fellow human beings, not having empathy for non-tech users etc, being obsessed with technology, sometimes at the expense of their humanity. I'm not excusing myself btw here either.. but as I get older I see our own community can be as toxic as any other, what I mean is I'm not laying the blame on outsiders but our own-selves. Power and Money corrupts anyone. Sure I loved pcs, and programming, got bullied as a youth and I wasn't into sports but that doesn't make me any more or less likely to want to 'Make the world a better place' with tech. Honestly 'Silicon Valley' the tv show, took out much of the wind and visionary magic that the real Silicon Valley was viewed as over 10 years ago. And subsequent actions of the real valley have not proven it false but a resounding and biting commentary on the culture These days we have Tech Bro culture, immense tech layoffs, offshoring of work, Doomscrolling and tech which splinters humanity instead of binding it, consigns people to contract menial work at the whim of an algorithm and uses AI to generate art and music while human artists get locked out proper reward for their efforts .. I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil
- baggy_trough 2y ago
  Elon Musk is an example of a fascist? That is outrageous nonsense.
  - petre 2y ago
    Just wait and see what he'll do to the federal workers, before he gets to screw up Mars for good. Maybe replace them with AI, since that's the current hype train. Think of full self driving but for government. https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/22/24303594/elon-musk-harassing-federal-workers-x https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/22/24303594/elon-musk-haras...
    - baggy_trough 2y ago
      Firing federal workers and going to Mars is what fascism is?
rezmason 2y ago
Nerds needed support in the nineties, and they need support today. Our error was in accepting the success and fame of a few representative nerds as evidence that nerds were overcoming these challenges collectively. We allowed in people who never faced the challenges nerds face to identify as nerds— why turn down a friend?— and they've now made society worse for everyone, in our name. In a single blow they've amplified anti-intellectualism and squandered the faith people thought they were investing in us. Related: http://nobodyscores.loosenutstudio.com/index.php?id=556 http://nobodyscores.loosenutstudio.com/index.php?id=556
- gary_0 2y ago
  The old Internet was definitely my support network, I met a lot of people I could relate to back then, totally different from "IRL people". The Internet is the opposite of that for me now. Where did all the weirdo super-introvert nerds go? Do they all feel as lonely as I do?
  - petre 2y ago
    Niche forums and gaming communities? HN? They've grown up, some have become braiwashed by corporate culture, some have wives, kids, dogs, cats, mortgages.
    - MarcelOlsz 2y ago
      The grand irony of remote work is I have way more time and money than I did back then, except the net is 'dead' now.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - antisthenes 2y ago
    > Where did all the weirdo super-introvert nerds go? Private discords, away from the normies.
jmclnx 2y ago
The fact is, it not the Internet that failed us, but education. Education quality in the US has declined a lot since the 60s. Now education is only used to create bio-robots, not people who can still think critically. In the 70s, we saw many people really believing in astrology, flat-earth and doing all they can to be stupid. There was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are society "heros". When I was in school (public), classes were divided into "Smart", "Average" and "remedial". That disappeared in the 70s because parents did not want their kid put into remedial classes. So what happened ? Many smart kids were bored out of their mind in class and the "cool" kids acted stupid to get attention. So many kids started following that coolness trend and ended up dumb by not learning anything. So here we are.
- WillAdams 2y ago
  A slightly different take on this was a school I attended in Mississippi --- classes were divided between academic and social --- academic classes (science, math, languages) were attended at one's ability level (w/ a four grade cap for students through 4th grade, so a 4th grader couldn't take higher than 8th grade classes), while social classes (homeroom, phys. ed., social studies) were taken at one's grade level. Some faculty members were accredited as faculty at a local college, so students could take college classes once they finished high school classes --- it was not uncommon for students to graduate from high school and also be awarded a four-year college degree. Apparently, the Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it an illegal educational system since it conferred an advantage on those students who were able to take advantage of it, without a matching compensation for those students who weren't.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    > it conferred an advantage on those students who were able to take advantage of it, without a matching compensation for those students who weren't. Waiting for them to go after the entire private school system. Any day now...
    - hagbard_c 2y ago
01100011 2y ago
Some nerds got it. See Richard Stallman. The GPL is based on the inherent badness of mankind and finding ways to protect against it. Some nerds were autocrats and sleazebags but they just needed to gain dominance for those traits to appear.
- alganet 2y ago
  In contrast, the four essential freedoms were based on the inherent goodness of mankind.
PrismCrystal 2y ago
Some of the most bullying behavior I have seen online is by nerds, sometimes nerds old enough to have come out of the 1990s internet. It’s not only that non-nerd bullies, too, got access to the internet, it is that modern society (both outside social factors, as well as internet-related developments like the rise of microblogging that doesn’t encourage nuance and rewards partisan performativity) can lead nerds to act harmfully.
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  In my opinion where this behavior really began to run rampant was with the popularization of quippy “dunk" quote-tweets (though this may have earlier precedent, perhaps on tumblr). It’s a deeply antisocial action that just about every internet connected demographic has come to partake in.
- Jensson 2y ago
  Bullies with social skills are much worse than those without.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Also the nerds bully in the most lazy and untalented ways. They think they "own" somebody by writing lol or lmao with their takes. Real bullies knew how to make it fun for everybody, so that even the person being bullied had to laugh at it. Nerd bullies are just anti-social and boring.
vjulian 2y ago
Is it that the nerds became the bullies and autocrats?
lukan 2y ago
"In retrospect it was extremely arrogant of us 90's nerds to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends" Or that nerds are not immune to become "bullies and autocrats and sleazebags" themself. I mean, why should love for technology, translate into consistent love for people? Because so many nerds were treated badly and should know better, how to behave, once in power? Sadly it is quite known, that people who suffered are likely to cause suffering as well, unless they really processed it all. So it is a good thing, that therapy looses its stigma. Because people can change as well.
- swed420 2y ago
  It is indeed a human flaw, and a futuristic society would be designed to take this into account instead of blindly relying on faith and acting surprised, repeatedly, when it fails. Capitalism increasingly incentivizes (and normalizes) deception as it struggles to squeeze the remaining profits, since the rest have trended toward zero as Marx warned they would. From this stems "enshitification" and other perverse incentives like influencer culture, etc. An ideal society of the future would allow all information to be freely available. All structures of organization would be transparent, and commonly agreed upon goals would take precedence above all else, instead of the goals dictated by the .01 or .001 percent. https://jacobin.com/2019/03/sam-gindin-socialist-planning-models https://jacobin.com/2019/03/sam-gindin-socialist-planning-mo...
  - lukan 2y ago
    "An ideal society of the future would allow all information to be freely available." Total surveillance? Or only all technical information? But transparency of all the organisations, so all the police information as well? So the murder suspects knows, where the police is looking for them? (Or won't there be a need for a police like organisations because murder is also somehow solved?) My point is, devil is in the details. And Marx is not someone I would go for inspiration. Marxist organisations are not so known for their transparency btw. Also, I really don't believe that the problem is a human flaw. I don't want to change humans. (It happens naturally anyway). But I do believe, that we can create better societies, that serves us better, the way we are. It is just hard, to create them from scratch for various reasons, but many people are trying and some quite succesful.
DarkNova6 2y ago
The internet we fell in love with doesn’t exist anymore. It was replaced by the walled garden of smartphone apps.
- smrtinsert 2y ago
  This is the biggest casualty.
- Razengan 2y ago
  Pfff. Ironically, the ""walled garden"" on iOS protects users better than the anything-goes wild west on web browsers, where sites can run any code they want, change anything under your feet, and snoop on your other "apps" at will.
  - DarkNova6 2y ago
    Sorry. I really can’t tell if this was sarcasm or not.
ozim 2y ago
It was extremely arrogant to think that money wouldn’t change nerds. Those nerds from 90s became autocrats and sleezbags of today. Well yeah nerds that did not get shitloads of money like Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezps did not turn into autocrats ;) but yeah money change people.
CPLX 2y ago
Your theory is that the nerds are the good guys in this story?
jshaqaw 2y ago
There was a subset of us “old” 90s nerds who failed to take certain elements among us who would be: 1. Enriched an empowered by having the right skillset at the right place and time to achieve fortunes (and by direct purchase) political power unrivaled since the Gilded Age and 2. Still traumatized by not being at the cool kids table in middle school, never emotionally progress past being 12 year old boys We didn’t need the bullies and autocrats to discover technology. They were among us the whole time. We just didn’t take them seriously.
Razengan 2y ago
> to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends This. There has always been a distinct classism in human society: one class has always been able to do certain things to the other class, but not the other way around. Right now the latest addition is mass surveillance and spying. Governments and corporations know everything about you but you can't really know anything about them except what they want you to know. Only through bloody revolutions did the classes ever change places if at all, or at least get shaken up and mixed a little, but there's never going to be a revolution again, because the might of arms on one side is the most disproportionate it has ever been.
m463 2y ago
Personally I think the iPhone was the turning point for much of the dystopian era. Technically, the iphone is very good and should have made things better. But what it actually did was to set an example of control over the user that propagated throughout all of computing. People no longer had control over their own device. People who bought an iPhone were unable to install their own software without permission from apple. And apple didn't give permission, destroying general computing. Additionally, apple DID give permission to app creators and advertisers to do things on the phone. More than the person who owned the phone could, in fact against their interests. We've never recovered.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
duckmysick 2y ago
Clunky desktop computers connected to the internet in the 90s were already an easy mode. It's a weird point in time to pull the ladder up. I wonder if the people in the 70s shared the same sentiment. I, for one, am glad the networks became easier and more accessible. I wouldn't be here otherwise.

by gary_0 2y ago

mixmastamyk 2y ago

Yes, though I'd characterize it as more naive than arrogant.

gary_0 2y ago
Yes, 90's me was definitely naive, and 00's me too. The "do no evil" years.
hinkley 2y ago
I think back to all of those people talking breathlessly of really free speech and me nodding along just as convinced. Yikes. I think the bloom came off the flower for me when I participated in the design discussions for Freenet, and I started actually looking at what people were uploading.

cjbgkagh 2y ago

I don’t think it was about stupidity it was about desire, they would not want to come here because it’s just talking to other nerds on bbs. But bandwidth increased and porn and flash games opened the floodgates. I guess the mistake was that nerds assumed there were more people like them, or that introducing people into their world would change the people and not have the people change the environment.

AlphaEsponjosus 2y ago
I do not think that porn and flash games were the reason the internet became trendy and stupid. I blame social media, like tuenti, facebook, fotolog, hi5, even myspace. The thing with stupid people overcoming the internet was not corporations investing on publicity nor searching engines selling the rankibgs of searching results. What made stupidity feel safe on internet and become trending, were the spaces that allowed those people to gather, to be in "the same place" with no one there to judge, correct them and laugh at them for being ignorants. This gave them the wrong idea that they were relevant in a sense were despite knowing nothing about anything, their opinion was valid and deserved respect, as much as the opinions from experts.
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  I’m old enough to have been there, the internet became popular long before modern social media became a thing. Think Geocities -> MySpace —> Facebook etc. Also modern search manipulation optimized on engagement had a particular moment when both Facebook and Twitter went from showing you a defined set of things to their selected subset of things.

hinkley 2y ago

Well we made it “idiot proof” didn’t we, and all the idiots came. We need a sort of Dark Web with low crime, and mostly that’s things like HN and people running private Slack instances.

ErikAugust 2y ago
I was thinking about a Twitter clone where your account goes through an approval process where you provide a short essay and your Hacker News username. Client has no tracking, and uses no JavaScript.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  Lemmy has a few like that. But it uses Javascript, heavily. (Or is it wasm? I never looked.)
  - hinkley 2y ago
    I still think someone should make a job application for FE developers that doesn’t work and you have to edit the page source to submit your resume. Put a comment in the source to say you did it on purpose so you don’t scare them off immediately.
- vunderba 2y ago
  This is the rough social media equivalent of Mensa - not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
jmclnx 2y ago
In a way it kind of exists, you have Gopher and Gemini. The main links I know of. gopher://sdf.org gemini://sdf.org and gemini://gem.sdf.org I already moved my personal WEB Site there, and there is interesting content there. Maybe "we" should migrate there and leave the LOL cats to the WEB :)
- hinkley 2y ago
  I don’t believe the Dead Internet theory, but I can see how people got there.

flymaipie 2y ago

So the Lord God banished them from the Garden of Fidonet... Woe unto them, for they have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind. Their troubles shall multiply as bugs and glitches in their software.

AIorNot 2y ago

Well the other issue is that many of 90s nerds turned out to be just as fascistic and bullying and horribly un-empathic themselves -just look at Musk as an example. I mean not having social skills, not identifying with women or not treating them as fellow human beings, not having empathy for non-tech users etc, being obsessed with technology, sometimes at the expense of their humanity. I'm not excusing myself btw here either.. but as I get older I see our own community can be as toxic as any other, what I mean is I'm not laying the blame on outsiders but our own-selves. Power and Money corrupts anyone. Sure I loved pcs, and programming, got bullied as a youth and I wasn't into sports but that doesn't make me any more or less likely to want to 'Make the world a better place' with tech. Honestly 'Silicon Valley' the tv show, took out much of the wind and visionary magic that the real Silicon Valley was viewed as over 10 years ago. And subsequent actions of the real valley have not proven it false but a resounding and biting commentary on the culture These days we have Tech Bro culture, immense tech layoffs, offshoring of work, Doomscrolling and tech which splinters humanity instead of binding it, consigns people to contract menial work at the whim of an algorithm and uses AI to generate art and music while human artists get locked out proper reward for their efforts .. I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil

baggy_trough 2y ago
Elon Musk is an example of a fascist? That is outrageous nonsense.
- petre 2y ago
  Just wait and see what he'll do to the federal workers, before he gets to screw up Mars for good. Maybe replace them with AI, since that's the current hype train. Think of full self driving but for government. https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/22/24303594/elon-musk-harassing-federal-workers-x https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/22/24303594/elon-musk-haras...
  - baggy_trough 2y ago
    Firing federal workers and going to Mars is what fascism is?

rezmason 2y ago

Nerds needed support in the nineties, and they need support today. Our error was in accepting the success and fame of a few representative nerds as evidence that nerds were overcoming these challenges collectively. We allowed in people who never faced the challenges nerds face to identify as nerds— why turn down a friend?— and they've now made society worse for everyone, in our name. In a single blow they've amplified anti-intellectualism and squandered the faith people thought they were investing in us. Related: http://nobodyscores.loosenutstudio.com/index.php?id=556 http://nobodyscores.loosenutstudio.com/index.php?id=556

gary_0 2y ago
The old Internet was definitely my support network, I met a lot of people I could relate to back then, totally different from "IRL people". The Internet is the opposite of that for me now. Where did all the weirdo super-introvert nerds go? Do they all feel as lonely as I do?
- petre 2y ago
  Niche forums and gaming communities? HN? They've grown up, some have become braiwashed by corporate culture, some have wives, kids, dogs, cats, mortgages.
  - MarcelOlsz 2y ago
    The grand irony of remote work is I have way more time and money than I did back then, except the net is 'dead' now.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- antisthenes 2y ago
  > Where did all the weirdo super-introvert nerds go? Private discords, away from the normies.

jmclnx 2y ago

The fact is, it not the Internet that failed us, but education. Education quality in the US has declined a lot since the 60s. Now education is only used to create bio-robots, not people who can still think critically. In the 70s, we saw many people really believing in astrology, flat-earth and doing all they can to be stupid. There was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are society "heros". When I was in school (public), classes were divided into "Smart", "Average" and "remedial". That disappeared in the 70s because parents did not want their kid put into remedial classes. So what happened ? Many smart kids were bored out of their mind in class and the "cool" kids acted stupid to get attention. So many kids started following that coolness trend and ended up dumb by not learning anything. So here we are.

WillAdams 2y ago
A slightly different take on this was a school I attended in Mississippi --- classes were divided between academic and social --- academic classes (science, math, languages) were attended at one's ability level (w/ a four grade cap for students through 4th grade, so a 4th grader couldn't take higher than 8th grade classes), while social classes (homeroom, phys. ed., social studies) were taken at one's grade level. Some faculty members were accredited as faculty at a local college, so students could take college classes once they finished high school classes --- it was not uncommon for students to graduate from high school and also be awarded a four-year college degree. Apparently, the Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it an illegal educational system since it conferred an advantage on those students who were able to take advantage of it, without a matching compensation for those students who weren't.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  > it conferred an advantage on those students who were able to take advantage of it, without a matching compensation for those students who weren't. Waiting for them to go after the entire private school system. Any day now...
  - hagbard_c 2y ago

01100011 2y ago

Some nerds got it. See Richard Stallman. The GPL is based on the inherent badness of mankind and finding ways to protect against it. Some nerds were autocrats and sleazebags but they just needed to gain dominance for those traits to appear.

alganet 2y ago
In contrast, the four essential freedoms were based on the inherent goodness of mankind.

PrismCrystal 2y ago

Some of the most bullying behavior I have seen online is by nerds, sometimes nerds old enough to have come out of the 1990s internet. It’s not only that non-nerd bullies, too, got access to the internet, it is that modern society (both outside social factors, as well as internet-related developments like the rise of microblogging that doesn’t encourage nuance and rewards partisan performativity) can lead nerds to act harmfully.

cosmic_cheese 2y ago
In my opinion where this behavior really began to run rampant was with the popularization of quippy “dunk" quote-tweets (though this may have earlier precedent, perhaps on tumblr). It’s a deeply antisocial action that just about every internet connected demographic has come to partake in.
Jensson 2y ago
Bullies with social skills are much worse than those without.
carlosjobim 2y ago
Also the nerds bully in the most lazy and untalented ways. They think they "own" somebody by writing lol or lmao with their takes. Real bullies knew how to make it fun for everybody, so that even the person being bullied had to laugh at it. Nerd bullies are just anti-social and boring.

vjulian 2y ago

Is it that the nerds became the bullies and autocrats?

lukan 2y ago

"In retrospect it was extremely arrogant of us 90's nerds to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends" Or that nerds are not immune to become "bullies and autocrats and sleazebags" themself. I mean, why should love for technology, translate into consistent love for people? Because so many nerds were treated badly and should know better, how to behave, once in power? Sadly it is quite known, that people who suffered are likely to cause suffering as well, unless they really processed it all. So it is a good thing, that therapy looses its stigma. Because people can change as well.

swed420 2y ago
It is indeed a human flaw, and a futuristic society would be designed to take this into account instead of blindly relying on faith and acting surprised, repeatedly, when it fails. Capitalism increasingly incentivizes (and normalizes) deception as it struggles to squeeze the remaining profits, since the rest have trended toward zero as Marx warned they would. From this stems "enshitification" and other perverse incentives like influencer culture, etc. An ideal society of the future would allow all information to be freely available. All structures of organization would be transparent, and commonly agreed upon goals would take precedence above all else, instead of the goals dictated by the .01 or .001 percent. https://jacobin.com/2019/03/sam-gindin-socialist-planning-models https://jacobin.com/2019/03/sam-gindin-socialist-planning-mo...
- lukan 2y ago
  "An ideal society of the future would allow all information to be freely available." Total surveillance? Or only all technical information? But transparency of all the organisations, so all the police information as well? So the murder suspects knows, where the police is looking for them? (Or won't there be a need for a police like organisations because murder is also somehow solved?) My point is, devil is in the details. And Marx is not someone I would go for inspiration. Marxist organisations are not so known for their transparency btw. Also, I really don't believe that the problem is a human flaw. I don't want to change humans. (It happens naturally anyway). But I do believe, that we can create better societies, that serves us better, the way we are. It is just hard, to create them from scratch for various reasons, but many people are trying and some quite succesful.

DarkNova6 2y ago

The internet we fell in love with doesn’t exist anymore. It was replaced by the walled garden of smartphone apps.

smrtinsert 2y ago
This is the biggest casualty.
Razengan 2y ago
Pfff. Ironically, the ""walled garden"" on iOS protects users better than the anything-goes wild west on web browsers, where sites can run any code they want, change anything under your feet, and snoop on your other "apps" at will.
- DarkNova6 2y ago
  Sorry. I really can’t tell if this was sarcasm or not.

ozim 2y ago

It was extremely arrogant to think that money wouldn’t change nerds. Those nerds from 90s became autocrats and sleezbags of today. Well yeah nerds that did not get shitloads of money like Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezps did not turn into autocrats ;) but yeah money change people.

CPLX 2y ago

Your theory is that the nerds are the good guys in this story?

jshaqaw 2y ago

There was a subset of us “old” 90s nerds who failed to take certain elements among us who would be: 1. Enriched an empowered by having the right skillset at the right place and time to achieve fortunes (and by direct purchase) political power unrivaled since the Gilded Age and 2. Still traumatized by not being at the cool kids table in middle school, never emotionally progress past being 12 year old boys We didn’t need the bullies and autocrats to discover technology. They were among us the whole time. We just didn’t take them seriously.

Razengan 2y ago

> to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends This. There has always been a distinct classism in human society: one class has always been able to do certain things to the other class, but not the other way around. Right now the latest addition is mass surveillance and spying. Governments and corporations know everything about you but you can't really know anything about them except what they want you to know. Only through bloody revolutions did the classes ever change places if at all, or at least get shaken up and mixed a little, but there's never going to be a revolution again, because the might of arms on one side is the most disproportionate it has ever been.

m463 2y ago

Personally I think the iPhone was the turning point for much of the dystopian era. Technically, the iphone is very good and should have made things better. But what it actually did was to set an example of control over the user that propagated throughout all of computing. People no longer had control over their own device. People who bought an iPhone were unable to install their own software without permission from apple. And apple didn't give permission, destroying general computing. Additionally, apple DID give permission to app creators and advertisers to do things on the phone. More than the person who owned the phone could, in fact against their interests. We've never recovered.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

duckmysick 2y ago

Clunky desktop computers connected to the internet in the 90s were already an easy mode. It's a weird point in time to pull the ladder up. I wonder if the people in the 70s shared the same sentiment. I, for one, am glad the networks became easier and more accessible. I wouldn't be here otherwise.