The real brain melter was the societal culture shift.
I grew up witnessing "the end of history" with my own eyes. People were getting wiser and kinder year after year, decade after decade. It was like a feedback loop of positive changes, the only way was up.
Then 2010s hit and I'm still processing the 180 degrees shift. I read dozens of books about nazis, authoritarianism, societal memory, cults, fucking roman empire. But I still have cognitive dissonance every time I open news feed.
Crypto? Yes, I know what a pyrimid scheme is.
As an elder millennial, I respect gen z and alpha for coping with modern society. It may just be a fond remembrance, but things seemed much simpler then. Creative jobs weren't threatened by AI, the tech didn't exist for corporations to spy on people, the US.. well let's not get into that.
I at least got to experience a decent time in history and built up enough context where I understand what is going on in the world today. That of course leads to irreconcilable sadness with where things are going, but at least I got to experience a wild culture shift.
elders
1990
Listen here you little shit: you think you’re superior because you rebranded Ponzi schemes with AI merde?
Noone is expecting you to understand crypto, but I hear this about modern technology in general all the time and I just don't buy it. It's only brain-melting if you've spent your entire life being deeply incurious. There are 80-90 year olds who understand this shit just fine because they bothered to keep up.
I feel like its an advantage to know the analog way to do things in addition to the current norms. For example, navigating by paper map and direction of the sun, like some kind of land pirate.
SMH. Dear boy. We elders were taking it to the streets in the 60’s and 70’s—in huge numbers. We organized without social media, were willing to face danger and arrest, and got shit done. We were using DOS before you were probably even born (do you know what that is?). While many of us are, in fact, fading, there are legions of us with knowledge and experience you will never understand until YOU are an elder.
FUCK YOU! I understand crypto and STILL have a VHS tape I never returned. pfft. arrogant youth. now where do i push to send this to reddit?
When I was a kid, Commander Data from Star Trek TNG was the height of technological possibility. TNG was set in the 2300s.
It looks like hard drives are selling for about 20 bucks a terabyte now. Commander Data had a storage capacity of 100 petabytes.
So today, to buy hard drives equivalent to the capacity Commander Data would cost about $2 million. You would have to be very wealthy to afford that as an individual, but the cost will only get lower. It will still be quite awhile before a random laptop will have a Commander Data's worth of storage space. But you're talking decades, not centuries.
Though, this calculation is for the Data that appeared in the original TNG run. His more recent appearance in Star Trek Picard may be different, as his specifications there may canonically differ.
This calculation was only meant to detail the capacity of the original Commander Data, not the more recent Big Data.
I may be older but I know how to take a selfie without my phone in it.
Ah yes the people who ran their video games on DOS are being left behind.
Help son, how do I open this app?!? With my finger???
It hasn't been that hard in my experience. Ignore shifts in the social landscape until the yung'ins reach a consensus about it, and always remember that time just before the dotcom crash when a company got venture funding to deliver tuna subs by mail.
8th grade teacher got pissed at us on 9/11 because he thought we were laughing at the fact that a plane had hit the WTC. We were laughing because one of the girls didn't know what the WTC was. We turned on the TVs to see the second one get hit.
6th grade we had napster while some of us were still bringing in cases of floppies to play games that'd run on the computers
I feel both cuddled and attacked
If only the pace of technology was the only paradigm shift to have to worry about since the 80s/90s
Goddamn I'm not that elder! But also true
Is it really so hard to just stay somewhat connected to the world around you?
It's not like it was a rapid shift, this shit has been progressing for DECADES and some just refused to learn. I've talked to 30 yos who can't do anything beyond basic computer usage, and I've seen a 80 year old who was extremely with it and troubleshooting with me.
It's not an age problem, it's a lack of effort
i remember standing in line for dvds. we were hacking regionlocked discs before nft was just a scammer's wet dream. we were moulded by early modern technology.
I grew up using the (actual paper) card catalog in the library to find books and yes I predate VHS. However, I even understand crypto, but I think my definition may vary slightly from younger folks "understanding".
Crypto has no intrinsic value like gold, and as fiat currency isn't even backed by any nationstate. This means any appreciation is based upon the "greater fool" model. Its not an investment. Its a series of Ponzi schemes so repeated that the term "rug pull" is right at home in the crypto world. I'm old enough to see other Ponzi schemes and know how they end up.
The only real value that I can see for crypto is bypassing of national monetary controls. As in, you can buy crypto in your home country with your home country's currency, then travel to another country with just your coins (as hex values on paper if you want to go that far) and exchange those coins for fiat currency in the other country. This isn't unique to crypto though. You could do the same with buying rare Pokemon cards and transporting them with a slightly higher risk of seizure at one nation's border. There might even be less volatility in Pokemon cards than many crypto currencies.
So many trends are variations on things we've already seen before. Bernie Madoff would have been right at home with cypto.
This post makes my knees hurt
Who do you think built Crypto? The millennials were the ones building everything in the last 10-20 years. Be sorry for the boomers. They built the infrastructure we stand on but tech has completely changed since they left the workforce.
And at least when the chase check glitch fad went around we recognized it immediately as a felony. Gen Z jumped right on that grenade.
Most of the kids I know who have this attitude would also call IT if they accidentally opened the Command Prompt or BIOS.
Honestly?
It’s you guys that are missing out. You literally miss the perspective we have. Social media is completely optional. What the politicians do doesn’t affect you. Ignorance is bliss.
Us elders be here designing the shit that does crypto.
Wait… what happened to people born in 1989 that didn’t to those born in 1991???
Y'all don't understand. We had to learn you don't have to rewind DVDs before returning them. It was stressful.
I'm a xennial and I'd say I'm doing pretty good at keeping up, but I'm also a software dev so that probably skews things a bit.
Nah fuck em. They invented nuclear physics and they can't figure out a goddamned email? Skill issue.
Okay, as someone born in 1988, I am not an elder (but also I will accept you being kind to me please, thank you 🫠)
I wish that wasn't painfully true.
Wasn't expecting that to be associated with 1990
The other day, someone in one of the gaming communities posted a comparison of the progress of video games from mid-90s to mid-aughts, and a more recent decade. It was clearly meant to be slightly exaggerated since the the recent screenshots were all the same one from fortnite, but the point still stands.
I wouldn't trade my 90s childhood for anything in the world.
When I was growing up the “big scam” was chain mail and televangelists.
I remember being happy to watch whatever came on one of the four channels that your TV could pick up with a rabbit ear antenna.
Is so crazy to explain people I played games in an spectrum in 1987 back when many didn't knew what a "computer" was in my country cause like less than 10% of the people in my country. And now you put a helmet and you're inside the game!
Now people wait in line for Pokemon cards. 🤔
Get off my lawn!
1990 time for Guru
Bet this guy doesn't understand crypto himself... (And I wouldn't expect him to either if not for this post)
Uhh... I do both
Personally I love being part of the evolution of computers. I was born at a time where I could be part of "moderne" or rather "not too nerdy" phase of computers, and to see the whole evolution of electronics and so on. I don't envy the younger generations that kind of skipped to the "end part" (computers being "easy"). I know that a lot of things will still be developed and we are only seeing the first of AI stuff now and VR is also still a minor thing but could evolve into a much bigger thing. Electrification of cars is in full swing. Robots do more and more things by theselves (lawnmowers, vacuums, cars) because the "brain power" in the devices are pushed all the time, enabling more advanced sensors to be taken more advantage of.
