4 ms·

As the last generation that remembers what life was like before the internet, we need to ask ourselves - is the world we built better than the one we were born

by crims0n 9mo ago

As the last generation that remembers what life was like before the internet, we need to ask ourselves - is the world we built better than the one we were born into? The older I get, the less convinced I am. It's not just nostalgia, as affirmed by Gen Zs rejection of the digital world.

anonymous908213 9mo ago
I don't think this is a very difficult question to answer. The internet of the year 2000 made the world a better place. The internet of the year 2025 makes the world a much, much worse place. We now live in an era where not only governments but every private business willing to pay a data broker has access to unlimited data for roughly every individual in a population, including their age, gender, occupation, hobbies, friends, political positions, sleep schedule, every phone call they've ever made, every website they've ever visited, every location they've ever taken their phone, every thing they've ever purchased. This information is currently used to shape the course of politics by manipulating what every individual sees, and will undoubtedly be used for unthinkable crimes against humanity in the coming years.
- quietsegfault 9mo ago
  I'm not sure that's the /internet/'s fault, but the humanities inability to anticipate what we can do with the technology and our inability to regulate the technology to prevent harms.
  - georgemcbay 9mo ago
    > humanities inability to anticipate what we can do with the technology I think it is more a problem of not caring (especially when not caring will result in social and/or economic reward) rather than not anticipating. For any technology that is created you can and should anticipate that it will be, literally, weaponized since there are hundreds of thousands of years of precedent for this happening.
  - immibis 9mo ago
    We - technologists - mocked the humanities for decades for being useless. Now look where we got without them.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
      > We - technologists - mocked the humanities for decades for being useless. Now look where we got without them. A lot of programmers were very critical how in particular since the release of the iPhone people suddenly accepted the golden cage against which programmers before very aggressively fought. So the issue is rather that people did not listen to these old-school programmers, (as usual) mocked these as nerds, and instead listened to "hipsters" and marketers. One can discuss a lot how useful humanities are, but what brought us in the current situation is rather that the masses did not listen to the old-school programmers.
    - quietsegfault 9mo ago
      Ha ha - I meant "humanity's", not "the humanities". Stupid autocorrect! I blame the internet.
- SoftTalker 9mo ago
  > The internet of the year 2000 made the world a better place How so? Because we could send mail instantly instead of using a stamp and envelope? Because we could buy stuff without leaving the house? Because we could read/listen to/watch stuff without paying the people who created it?
  - anonymous908213 9mo ago
    For many reasons, but if I had to pick one for brevity: because there was unprecedented access to educational information, allowing anyone to learn about the world and develop skills that would typically have required a university education. Of course, even that has been corrupted, and now while the information still exists it is drowned out by orders of magnitude more misinformation. That's not to say that the internet in 2000 was without flaws, but I do think on net it was beneficial to humanity.
  - 1bpp 9mo ago
    Yes. The current generation of creatives could not exist as it is without free information and pirated professional software.
  - torben-friis 9mo ago
    >Because we could read/listen to/watch stuff without paying the people who created it? I can tell you I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am without this, yes. First because I (/my parents) didn’t have the money, second because of pure geographical access. I saw movies and shows from countries that would never sell near me, read books that would never be in my country’s libraries, took courses straight from scientists and engineers rather than a thrice translated work… The barrier of entry was also useful, curiosity is much better fed when you can download a medicine textbook just to check rather than venturing into the library of a university you’re not part of. That is the one thing the internet did right, spreading culture. It was over when they took boredom from us, that was the big evil.
    - anthk 9mo ago
      Ditto here in Spain. If you were able to watch Northern Exposure or The X Files with the Spanish dub in the 90's with a normal TV schedule (read: with human schedules, you need to sleep), I would ask you a unicorn just in case, because I woudn't believe you. After 2003 with Emule and BT? Damn it, I've got whole NE series over torrent and I regret nil. My public TV already paid the US TV producer with money from our taxes, so in the end it's a draw. Programming books? Your elder brother/sister it's doing CS at some uni, right? Then, good luck paying $50 on big book stores from malls. Entry courses you mean? Pay ~$50 a month for a private school and try enjoying Visual C++ 98. Linux? That's was for CS engineers and PC freaks right? Nowadays you can learn damn Calculus on your own and install Maxima from any distro with online guides and tutorials. I had to learn Calculus from my own (I was some HS dropout) early Debian DVD's which had a PDF on Mathematics and from that I tried to understand every exercise and equation under Maxima. No upgrades, no updates, no tutoring. Hard mode my default for everything. Your TV tuner didn't work? Messing with Linux kernel modules like crazy and even editing the source code to fake the tuner and PLL and watch something in XawTV.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- Terr_ 9mo ago
  Feels of 1995: "A personal computer and an internet connection are democratically-cheap pieces of capital-equipment than you can use to accomplish the goals that matter to you! Vast new realms of agency and autonomy! If you don't like it, make your own!" Feels of 2025: "The device in your pocket is a way for companies to make you see the things they want you to see and nothing else you dirty criminal. You can talk to your friends but if your GPS trace is interrupted your account will be suspended. If you don't like it, sucks to be you."
- idiotsecant 9mo ago
  The internet of 2025 isn't the same thing at all. The early internet was a toy - a place for deviants and weirdos to do weird deviant things (and it was glorious). The rest of humanity found it and turned it into a mirror of the real world. That doesn't make it bad, in some ways it makes it better, in some ways worse, just definitely different.
  - anthk 9mo ago
    Early internet was just a world of academics, scientists, engineers and maybe on the very early web and IRC, journalists.
huhkerrf 9mo ago
There has been a lot of bad things about the technology of the past 30 years, but I refuse to say that things were fantastic pre-Internet. The fact that I can listen to any music I want for less than it cost me to buy a CD in 1995, not even adjusted for inflation, is amazing. The massive CD book I carried around is definitely nostalgia. Or, I can think of something, and find the answer quickly. I can make friends with people (or argue with them) across continents. Still, there are things that I do miss that were objectively "worse." Like there only being a few dozen channels, and cable TV being less important, so you knew everyone was watching the same thing. There seemed to be more of a shared culture.
- pjc50 9mo ago
  > I can make friends with people (or argue with them) across continents I really feel that internet socialization has gone from a means to make friends to a means to make enemies. Often to reinforce an ingroup, but that's not the same as friendship.
AuthAuth 9mo ago
There is no "GenZ rejection of the digital world" thats a marketing narrative. Gen Z is overwhelmingly online and the handful that do reject it are no more than a rounding error.
- tomth 9mo ago
  Using it because you're practically forced to use it, is not the same as not rejecting it intellectually. While that's probably still a minority, it definitely seems larger than just a rounding error to me. I've seen, though rare, other people with dumbphones, for example. And more people who would like to have one.
  - AuthAuth 9mo ago
    I think that people often say they want things they dont actually want. Like living in the woods and we can only look at their actions to judge their actual desire. We know people dont want to live in the woods because when they have the money and freedom to choose ot live in the woods they buy an apartment. Its even easier with dropping social media because the cost is actually so low and yet people still dont even attempt to.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
venndeezl 9mo ago
We built? You mean innumerate and STEM ignorant politicians manipulated by tech bros high on their own supply financially engineered into existence? Poverty wages everywhere except tech jobs was intentional. Ignoring the externalities like reliance on sweatshop labor and sacrificing diverse skills development was intentional. Little different than what they are doing with the ICE hiring bonus. They got employees to go where they wanted; not operating from a diverse playbook: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-of-workers-is-a-big-factor-in-fed-policy.html https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o... Offshoring the late 90s and 00s was 100% meant to protect Intel, copyright; this isn't anything we did. Broad strokes were gamed out 2 decades ago. The elder politicians don't want Americans in a position to win. They didn't want the risk of open compute production thriving in America; back in the 00s Napster made the threat to their IP and copyright schemes obvious. They want political serfdom, fealty to elders delusion about themselves. We did little but follow orders because what choice did we have? I am not owning this circus.
- tac19 9mo ago
  If you think there is ever any other outcome for a democracy, you are part owner in what we built. Corruption and capture are inevitable, and blaming the particular politicians in power today, misses the point. They're only in power because at every step along the way, we the people happily swallowed beautiful lies in exchange for the "freebies" that trickled down to us. If you imagine we just got unlucky with the _wrong_ people in power, you haven't yet learned the real lesson, and are doomed to support the entire thing continuing, or being reborn in new form.
  - venndeezl 9mo ago
    You're putting words in my mouth. I never said anything about unlucky. I said broad strokes were intentional. Does that sound like I view it as something akin to gods will? Am almost 50. Was in the room being told I had to help offshore others jobs. That's why I claim this was no accident. I like how you make it a character problem of the masses! How dare they not know things intentionally kept from them! How dare they select the subset of dumb options. Media intentionally kept people like Chomsky and others off the airwaves to keep control of the narrative, but damn gen pop! They should have known! You going to sell me on Intelligent Design next? "Us"? Don't lump me into this. I’ve been mocking tech bros and software startups the whole time. Low skilled, know nothing work. I started in EE. I look forward to AI that organizes machine states without software engineer middle men inserting their preferences on me.
jl6 9mo ago
To answer this question honestly, you have to ask: if you could time travel back to live in, say, 1990, would you? You don't get to just dial the internet back to 1990, you have to dial the rest of the world back too. The world is a package deal. I think a lot of people would be tempted by the nostalgia, but would quickly realize how much they'd be giving up.
- atherton94027 9mo ago
  What would they be giving up? DoorDash? By most aspects the world of 1990 didn't change that much from today's world, with the exception of having computers in our pockets and some advances in medicine.
  - doubled112 9mo ago
    I think you can go back further I used to work with a guy who would tell me that, except email, life didn’t really change since the 80s. All we did was stick a screen onto everything, whether we needed to or not. I was only born in the 90s but I mostly agree that far back.
    - owisd 9mo ago
      > I think you can go back further Reminds me of a line by John Maynard Keynes from 1919 about life before WW1 — “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep”
- immibis 9mo ago
  It's hard to commit to saying yes but it's also hard to commit to saying no.
- toast0 9mo ago
  I think there's a lot of people where 1990 social norms and pressure caused existential distress; or they lived in a repressive regime then and not now, etc. So I wouldn't wish to have those things back for those people. There's also a lot of health advances that I wouldn't want to turn back either. But the internet and technology in general was so much more fun and exciting back then than it is now, IMHO. I'm sure some of my feelings there is nostalgia and youth or lack thereof, but a circa 1995 Socket 7 desktop motherboard could take cpus from Intel, AMD, Cyrix, IDT, and some others, and then there were all the non-pc options; that's a lot of competition and fun. Video game consoles were meaningfully different than each other, instead of the massively consolidated situation we have now. Arcade machines were more capable beyond just having large screens and specialized input devices. I didn't get on the Internet until ~ 95, but at least for several years after that, it was a community of choice, rather than a place everyone had to assemble. That made interaction special in a lot of ways that are hard to reproduce now. There's some communities of choice on the internet, but they don't have the same kind of broad reach where you got all sorts of people where they would appear because computing was fun or helpful but they often had other things going on too, but most people didn't appear because they could avoid computing. The mixing function was pretty cool, but it's hard to replicate when forums tend to be all encompassing and there's too many people to really converse or are so narrow that everyone is too much alike. I could certainly live with larger bid/ask spreads and fractional rather than decimal stock pricing as well as no odd lots and T+3? settlement. Current situation is better, but it's really not a huge deal. I can wait for slow shipping, and call people on the phone to make special orders...
ferguess_k 9mo ago
For me the late 80s - early 2000s was the peak. But I guess every generation has their own peak and I totally respect that. That said, the later generations probably are going to have a more shitty life, because of economic downturn since 2008. I can't even imagine what kind of life my son (5Y) is going to live through whence the cyberpunk world falls.
mawadev 9mo ago
I went online first time in 2010/2011 and I have to say, I wish I didn't. I remember the world before the internet and ever since it started, life became a massive blur...
6510 9mo ago
We've ruined everything just like all other generations, specially programmers. But it doesn't matter as those who follow us don't know any better. It's like we are walking though a forest and you suddenly ask if this tree is better than the one 10 minutes ago. We use to talk a lot, now we talk to the young ones and each of their sentences seems designed to end the conversation. When they are older the next generation will be glad they don't know how to talk either. Not so long ago everyone also knew how to sing and make music. Each porch its own songs. Then came screaming radio boxes which was wonderful and everyone sang along.. for a while. They gradually turned into door to door sales men only you couldn't slap the door in their face anymore.
- aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
  > We've ruined everything just like all other generations, specially programmers. Rather: programmers did warn very vehemently of the situation (and were particularly worried that with the release of the iPhone people accepted the golden cage). The problem was rather that people did not listen to these "nerds" (or at least did not act on their strong recommendations), but rather listened to "hipsters" and marketers.
  - 6510 9mo ago
    The war isn't over tho. Warning people is the domain of influences, hipsters, propagandists and marketeers. Programmers cant really compete there but money does talk in the domain. Our world is such that if we want something we have to pay for it. What we can do however is write code. Solving it in code makes the problem orders of magnitude more complicated to solve but [say] an Iphone is now merely a decent camera with great software enhancement. When I switched to Android, transferring the apps and data worked gloriously. While it might not be real progress the new HarmonyOS is still running most android apps. Every year or so I realize I was conditioned to accept something obviously absurd if only superficially examined. (which I didn't do up to that point) The warnings might not have the desired effect, it is hard to unsee the obvious so they do contribute. Keep fighting!

by crims0n 9mo ago

anonymous908213 9mo ago

I don't think this is a very difficult question to answer. The internet of the year 2000 made the world a better place. The internet of the year 2025 makes the world a much, much worse place. We now live in an era where not only governments but every private business willing to pay a data broker has access to unlimited data for roughly every individual in a population, including their age, gender, occupation, hobbies, friends, political positions, sleep schedule, every phone call they've ever made, every website they've ever visited, every location they've ever taken their phone, every thing they've ever purchased. This information is currently used to shape the course of politics by manipulating what every individual sees, and will undoubtedly be used for unthinkable crimes against humanity in the coming years.

quietsegfault 9mo ago
I'm not sure that's the /internet/'s fault, but the humanities inability to anticipate what we can do with the technology and our inability to regulate the technology to prevent harms.
- georgemcbay 9mo ago
  > humanities inability to anticipate what we can do with the technology I think it is more a problem of not caring (especially when not caring will result in social and/or economic reward) rather than not anticipating. For any technology that is created you can and should anticipate that it will be, literally, weaponized since there are hundreds of thousands of years of precedent for this happening.
- immibis 9mo ago
  We - technologists - mocked the humanities for decades for being useless. Now look where we got without them.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
    > We - technologists - mocked the humanities for decades for being useless. Now look where we got without them. A lot of programmers were very critical how in particular since the release of the iPhone people suddenly accepted the golden cage against which programmers before very aggressively fought. So the issue is rather that people did not listen to these old-school programmers, (as usual) mocked these as nerds, and instead listened to "hipsters" and marketers. One can discuss a lot how useful humanities are, but what brought us in the current situation is rather that the masses did not listen to the old-school programmers.
  - quietsegfault 9mo ago
    Ha ha - I meant "humanity's", not "the humanities". Stupid autocorrect! I blame the internet.
SoftTalker 9mo ago
> The internet of the year 2000 made the world a better place How so? Because we could send mail instantly instead of using a stamp and envelope? Because we could buy stuff without leaving the house? Because we could read/listen to/watch stuff without paying the people who created it?
- anonymous908213 9mo ago
  For many reasons, but if I had to pick one for brevity: because there was unprecedented access to educational information, allowing anyone to learn about the world and develop skills that would typically have required a university education. Of course, even that has been corrupted, and now while the information still exists it is drowned out by orders of magnitude more misinformation. That's not to say that the internet in 2000 was without flaws, but I do think on net it was beneficial to humanity.
- 1bpp 9mo ago
  Yes. The current generation of creatives could not exist as it is without free information and pirated professional software.
- torben-friis 9mo ago
  >Because we could read/listen to/watch stuff without paying the people who created it? I can tell you I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am without this, yes. First because I (/my parents) didn’t have the money, second because of pure geographical access. I saw movies and shows from countries that would never sell near me, read books that would never be in my country’s libraries, took courses straight from scientists and engineers rather than a thrice translated work… The barrier of entry was also useful, curiosity is much better fed when you can download a medicine textbook just to check rather than venturing into the library of a university you’re not part of. That is the one thing the internet did right, spreading culture. It was over when they took boredom from us, that was the big evil.
  - anthk 9mo ago
    Ditto here in Spain. If you were able to watch Northern Exposure or The X Files with the Spanish dub in the 90's with a normal TV schedule (read: with human schedules, you need to sleep), I would ask you a unicorn just in case, because I woudn't believe you. After 2003 with Emule and BT? Damn it, I've got whole NE series over torrent and I regret nil. My public TV already paid the US TV producer with money from our taxes, so in the end it's a draw. Programming books? Your elder brother/sister it's doing CS at some uni, right? Then, good luck paying $50 on big book stores from malls. Entry courses you mean? Pay ~$50 a month for a private school and try enjoying Visual C++ 98. Linux? That's was for CS engineers and PC freaks right? Nowadays you can learn damn Calculus on your own and install Maxima from any distro with online guides and tutorials. I had to learn Calculus from my own (I was some HS dropout) early Debian DVD's which had a PDF on Mathematics and from that I tried to understand every exercise and equation under Maxima. No upgrades, no updates, no tutoring. Hard mode my default for everything. Your TV tuner didn't work? Messing with Linux kernel modules like crazy and even editing the source code to fake the tuner and PLL and watch something in XawTV.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Terr_ 9mo ago
Feels of 1995: "A personal computer and an internet connection are democratically-cheap pieces of capital-equipment than you can use to accomplish the goals that matter to you! Vast new realms of agency and autonomy! If you don't like it, make your own!" Feels of 2025: "The device in your pocket is a way for companies to make you see the things they want you to see and nothing else you dirty criminal. You can talk to your friends but if your GPS trace is interrupted your account will be suspended. If you don't like it, sucks to be you."
idiotsecant 9mo ago
The internet of 2025 isn't the same thing at all. The early internet was a toy - a place for deviants and weirdos to do weird deviant things (and it was glorious). The rest of humanity found it and turned it into a mirror of the real world. That doesn't make it bad, in some ways it makes it better, in some ways worse, just definitely different.
- anthk 9mo ago
  Early internet was just a world of academics, scientists, engineers and maybe on the very early web and IRC, journalists.

huhkerrf 9mo ago

There has been a lot of bad things about the technology of the past 30 years, but I refuse to say that things were fantastic pre-Internet. The fact that I can listen to any music I want for less than it cost me to buy a CD in 1995, not even adjusted for inflation, is amazing. The massive CD book I carried around is definitely nostalgia. Or, I can think of something, and find the answer quickly. I can make friends with people (or argue with them) across continents. Still, there are things that I do miss that were objectively "worse." Like there only being a few dozen channels, and cable TV being less important, so you knew everyone was watching the same thing. There seemed to be more of a shared culture.

pjc50 9mo ago
> I can make friends with people (or argue with them) across continents I really feel that internet socialization has gone from a means to make friends to a means to make enemies. Often to reinforce an ingroup, but that's not the same as friendship.

AuthAuth 9mo ago

There is no "GenZ rejection of the digital world" thats a marketing narrative. Gen Z is overwhelmingly online and the handful that do reject it are no more than a rounding error.

tomth 9mo ago
Using it because you're practically forced to use it, is not the same as not rejecting it intellectually. While that's probably still a minority, it definitely seems larger than just a rounding error to me. I've seen, though rare, other people with dumbphones, for example. And more people who would like to have one.
- AuthAuth 9mo ago
  I think that people often say they want things they dont actually want. Like living in the woods and we can only look at their actions to judge their actual desire. We know people dont want to live in the woods because when they have the money and freedom to choose ot live in the woods they buy an apartment. Its even easier with dropping social media because the cost is actually so low and yet people still dont even attempt to.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

venndeezl 9mo ago

We built? You mean innumerate and STEM ignorant politicians manipulated by tech bros high on their own supply financially engineered into existence? Poverty wages everywhere except tech jobs was intentional. Ignoring the externalities like reliance on sweatshop labor and sacrificing diverse skills development was intentional. Little different than what they are doing with the ICE hiring bonus. They got employees to go where they wanted; not operating from a diverse playbook: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-of-workers-is-a-big-factor-in-fed-policy.html https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o... Offshoring the late 90s and 00s was 100% meant to protect Intel, copyright; this isn't anything we did. Broad strokes were gamed out 2 decades ago. The elder politicians don't want Americans in a position to win. They didn't want the risk of open compute production thriving in America; back in the 00s Napster made the threat to their IP and copyright schemes obvious. They want political serfdom, fealty to elders delusion about themselves. We did little but follow orders because what choice did we have? I am not owning this circus.

tac19 9mo ago
If you think there is ever any other outcome for a democracy, you are part owner in what we built. Corruption and capture are inevitable, and blaming the particular politicians in power today, misses the point. They're only in power because at every step along the way, we the people happily swallowed beautiful lies in exchange for the "freebies" that trickled down to us. If you imagine we just got unlucky with the _wrong_ people in power, you haven't yet learned the real lesson, and are doomed to support the entire thing continuing, or being reborn in new form.
- venndeezl 9mo ago
  You're putting words in my mouth. I never said anything about unlucky. I said broad strokes were intentional. Does that sound like I view it as something akin to gods will? Am almost 50. Was in the room being told I had to help offshore others jobs. That's why I claim this was no accident. I like how you make it a character problem of the masses! How dare they not know things intentionally kept from them! How dare they select the subset of dumb options. Media intentionally kept people like Chomsky and others off the airwaves to keep control of the narrative, but damn gen pop! They should have known! You going to sell me on Intelligent Design next? "Us"? Don't lump me into this. I’ve been mocking tech bros and software startups the whole time. Low skilled, know nothing work. I started in EE. I look forward to AI that organizes machine states without software engineer middle men inserting their preferences on me.

jl6 9mo ago

To answer this question honestly, you have to ask: if you could time travel back to live in, say, 1990, would you? You don't get to just dial the internet back to 1990, you have to dial the rest of the world back too. The world is a package deal. I think a lot of people would be tempted by the nostalgia, but would quickly realize how much they'd be giving up.

atherton94027 9mo ago
What would they be giving up? DoorDash? By most aspects the world of 1990 didn't change that much from today's world, with the exception of having computers in our pockets and some advances in medicine.
- doubled112 9mo ago
  I think you can go back further I used to work with a guy who would tell me that, except email, life didn’t really change since the 80s. All we did was stick a screen onto everything, whether we needed to or not. I was only born in the 90s but I mostly agree that far back.
  - owisd 9mo ago
    > I think you can go back further Reminds me of a line by John Maynard Keynes from 1919 about life before WW1 — “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep”
immibis 9mo ago
It's hard to commit to saying yes but it's also hard to commit to saying no.
toast0 9mo ago
I think there's a lot of people where 1990 social norms and pressure caused existential distress; or they lived in a repressive regime then and not now, etc. So I wouldn't wish to have those things back for those people. There's also a lot of health advances that I wouldn't want to turn back either. But the internet and technology in general was so much more fun and exciting back then than it is now, IMHO. I'm sure some of my feelings there is nostalgia and youth or lack thereof, but a circa 1995 Socket 7 desktop motherboard could take cpus from Intel, AMD, Cyrix, IDT, and some others, and then there were all the non-pc options; that's a lot of competition and fun. Video game consoles were meaningfully different than each other, instead of the massively consolidated situation we have now. Arcade machines were more capable beyond just having large screens and specialized input devices. I didn't get on the Internet until ~ 95, but at least for several years after that, it was a community of choice, rather than a place everyone had to assemble. That made interaction special in a lot of ways that are hard to reproduce now. There's some communities of choice on the internet, but they don't have the same kind of broad reach where you got all sorts of people where they would appear because computing was fun or helpful but they often had other things going on too, but most people didn't appear because they could avoid computing. The mixing function was pretty cool, but it's hard to replicate when forums tend to be all encompassing and there's too many people to really converse or are so narrow that everyone is too much alike. I could certainly live with larger bid/ask spreads and fractional rather than decimal stock pricing as well as no odd lots and T+3? settlement. Current situation is better, but it's really not a huge deal. I can wait for slow shipping, and call people on the phone to make special orders...

ferguess_k 9mo ago

For me the late 80s - early 2000s was the peak. But I guess every generation has their own peak and I totally respect that. That said, the later generations probably are going to have a more shitty life, because of economic downturn since 2008. I can't even imagine what kind of life my son (5Y) is going to live through whence the cyberpunk world falls.

mawadev 9mo ago

I went online first time in 2010/2011 and I have to say, I wish I didn't. I remember the world before the internet and ever since it started, life became a massive blur...

6510 9mo ago

We've ruined everything just like all other generations, specially programmers. But it doesn't matter as those who follow us don't know any better. It's like we are walking though a forest and you suddenly ask if this tree is better than the one 10 minutes ago. We use to talk a lot, now we talk to the young ones and each of their sentences seems designed to end the conversation. When they are older the next generation will be glad they don't know how to talk either. Not so long ago everyone also knew how to sing and make music. Each porch its own songs. Then came screaming radio boxes which was wonderful and everyone sang along.. for a while. They gradually turned into door to door sales men only you couldn't slap the door in their face anymore.

aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
> We've ruined everything just like all other generations, specially programmers. Rather: programmers did warn very vehemently of the situation (and were particularly worried that with the release of the iPhone people accepted the golden cage). The problem was rather that people did not listen to these "nerds" (or at least did not act on their strong recommendations), but rather listened to "hipsters" and marketers.
- 6510 9mo ago
  The war isn't over tho. Warning people is the domain of influences, hipsters, propagandists and marketeers. Programmers cant really compete there but money does talk in the domain. Our world is such that if we want something we have to pay for it. What we can do however is write code. Solving it in code makes the problem orders of magnitude more complicated to solve but [say] an Iphone is now merely a decent camera with great software enhancement. When I switched to Android, transferring the apps and data worked gloriously. While it might not be real progress the new HarmonyOS is still running most android apps. Every year or so I realize I was conditioned to accept something obviously absurd if only superficially examined. (which I didn't do up to that point) The warnings might not have the desired effect, it is hard to unsee the obvious so they do contribute. Keep fighting!