Technology

As easy as it is to hold contempt for boomers, the hippie counterculture did have a massive impact.

Resonates with my personal critique of my generation (millennial) ... however "unlucky" we are to suffer the transition out of the post-war period and "suffer" the boomers ... we're a relatively ineffectual and entitled bunch TBH, however much that is our fault or our circumstances.

We're the generation that have gone ahead and made a bunch of life decisions because it was what we were "supposed" to do. We're the generation that trusted and to some extent still trusts the system, and, expects there to be a system that is trust worthy ... which aren't bad virtues or expectations, but certainly helps explain how a generation can share a ubiquitous dissatisfaction with how the world ends up working and the future we're heading toward but still struggle to work up the motivation to get up and do something about it. In a way, we've been betrayed by our elders and we don't know what to do about it and how sad we and empty we feel about it.

And simultaneously, we're the generation that's as plugged in to consuming and responding to the input of big giant systems as ever. (Over-)Education^[I've got nothing against education per se, but I feel that a lot of education is rather shallow, manufactured and focused on "certification" rather than useful and meaningful understandings, ideas and skills.], TV, Internet, social media, 24hr news, globalisation. Our attention spans are short, our concerns our ephemeral or fed to us by the mainstream, and we feel smaller and smaller against the great tide of content and input over which have no control and in which even less stakes. We're the "stay in your lane" and doom-scroll generation ... which makes us ill-prepared and ill-suited for changing the kind of systems we rely on. When something feels too big or too hard, we're more likely to sit alone, pick up our phones and doom-scroll for some dopamine than we are to look around to our peers sitting next to us for support and dig in together.

And to bring this back to the fediverse ... many on here celebrate how it feels like the old internet that the remember (old twitter or usenet). I've always personally found that problematic.

On a basic level, nostalgia can be dangerous in its indifference to the present ... old twitter and usenet and the old internet are kinda dead and the fediverse should lean in to being its own thing, however much that borrows from what once was.

More specifically, social media for the younger generation is a different thing ... they didn't use the internet in the 90s and never will. Some of them have only seen twitter, youtube and tiktok and can't help but compare anything like the fediverse, however much they might be interested in its ideas, to the social media they know.

So for me, us millennials, I think we're kind of broken, and heading into the physical age where we're custodians of our experience and the lessons that ought to have been learnt from it, and no longer "the generation" that the world should care about and be making social media platforms for.

We should be making an internet for the younger generations, one that is better than what our X-gen/Boomer capitalist seniors gave them and gives them a chance to understand and use the knowledge sharing, exploration and independence the technology can provide.