The shift was 9/11 happening and everything that happened after.
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.
Before 1990?.. fuck you… I have kids born before 1990… elder my ass … I probably understand crypto better than you do…
I’m not bitter. Not at all.
Fuck, I’m considered an ELDER now?
Your elders refers to people older than you, not necessarily elderly people
Dispense your wisdom, o my elder. I’m just a nineties boy, what do I know of the world before ?
Fr. I just turned 40. Give me my senior discount card.
To be fair, us elders had grifts and money laundering too, so crypto is nothing functionally new.
No hate, but this is exactly proving the point of the meme. There’s so many new concepts and paradigms, each so complex and constantly evolving, that we need to rely on familiar comparisons that strip away the true identities of the subject. And I think this is true for pretty much every everyone in this information (bombardment) age, myself included.
People tend to forget that cryptocurrencies are based on cryptography, and were founded on the dream of building a decentralized system, built by the people, free from “big player” censorship and influence, in the wake of the 2008 crisis. If you are on the Fediverse, I guess you share that dream. But then the finance “bros” started coming in and badabing badabang now it’s another asset you trade through your bank like stocks or gold. Then came the NFTs and yes, somehow “crypto” evolved into being the prime speculation and scamming vector.
And the same goes on for every news topic. “Trump!” “Gaza!” “AI!” “Climate!”. Our brains try to reduce these mind-melting concepts hitting us all the time to simplified good/bad or us/them categorizations. And we’re left utterly unable to actually tackle and act upon anything at all.
I keep saying that humanity’s toys do evolve spectacularly while humans are still working on the same basic impulses they’ve been dealing with for millennia.
Trump is a petty conman who does everything in his power to consolidate as much power in himself as he possibly can so that he can funnel as much money to himself and his gang as he can. That’s not new. The environment he’s doing in may be more complex, or differently set up than in previous iterations, but the core is depressingly mundane.
Gaza is just people hating people and other people supporting different sides while all sides give each other more reasons to hate each other perpetually, some more war-crimey, some less so. Tragic, quagmired to hell and back, but not groundbreaking in and of itself.
As for AI, the framework is the usual capitalists trying to convince everybody that their new best revolutionary thing is a word sorting machine that can sort very, very many words now very fast. Trying to cash in on the hype is the eternal constant, the occasion this time is a very sophisticated chatbot/image generator based on all the materials the inventors could get away with stealing.
And climate stuff is just this generation of capitalists stripping the planet for parts while they can get away with it. The scale is bigger, but vulture capitalism is also not even remotely new.
Just like the principle of singular attributability of data via the blockchain is a fancy way of assigning stuff to one recipient. We’ve had approaches to this before. This time the blockchain’s ledger system is the big new anchor for the human element, which will invariably at first be either grifters or people who wanna bash in other people’s heads with it.
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.
Us elders be here designing the shit that does crypto.
Y’all don’t understand. We had to learn you don’t have to rewind DVDs before returning them. It was stressful.
I got to be alive before mobile phones and social media.
Worth it!
I am immeasurably grateful that the entirety of my youth is not on record.
Right? AFAIK there’s about 5 pictures of me between the ages of 8 and 25. A couple of those are driver’s licenses.
I seriously wonder how much brain damage I avoided by squeaking in my teenage years before the invention of smart phones.
Honestly I understand better now why old people complained about computers so much. We don’t even know what we lost.
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.
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.
Boomers didn’t build shit, they just pulled up ladders.
Don’t confuse the politicians with the makers. They literally invented the entire backbone of the Internet.
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?
OK, this one kind of hurt a bit. I can’t be the only one with a functioning VCR in the room with them right now…
The same room? Remember to take your meds
Nope.
I was born in 1983 and I’m old enough to remember having only 5 tv channels, vcr’s, and you couldn’t get on the internet if your mom was in the phone.
I can remember only having 3 TV channels, and they closed down sometime around midnight until the morning. You got the fuzzy black and white bits of CBR on the screen when they turned the signal off
When videos came out, only my richer friends had them and they were few and far between, we used to have an after school video club where we’d pay 10p to watch a film in the AV room (sat on a carpet of old piss stains)
The internet didn’t exist, and I saw my first computer while at secondary school in the late 80’s (I’m thinking BBC commodore or something, I can’t really remember)
I feel so fucking old right now lol
I remember getting up early and trying to watch TV, there would just be a high pitched sound and a photo of a girl and a puppet I think. There was an urban myth that the girl was slowly moving but no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t see it.
The TV was heavy and cube shaped, it hummed and had a picture that was grainy and flickered. It had an aerial and had to be tuned with a dial on the front, like a radio. The channels were tuned to buttons which clicked in, on the front of the TV.
We didn’t have a VHS for ages either. We had a local video rental shop (not blockbuster) and we’d go rent a couple of films every week, which was an event which we’d get excited about.
Later I was the only one who could work out how to do the timed record function on the VHS player, so I was in demand as that was the only way to do ‘catch up’ for most things on TV. You would just miss whatever it was you wanted to watch and not be able to do anything about it. :o
Sometimes they did put on replays of programs, even regular ones, but people were crazy about ‘their soaps’ or whatever program they liked and planned their lives around being at home to watch them.
As a kid we had four channels in the rural US. ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS had really good coverage and all shut down at midnight. Then a Fox station started up just close enough that I could pick it up clearly at night to watch Babylon 5!
It was happier times.
Reading this made my back and neck hurt lol.
I may be older but I know how to take a selfie without my phone in it.
