I think zoomers are generally great, but they really underestimated how much of a Wild West the Internet was back in the day, when everybody has their own Angelfire or Geocities website with bad HTML and clipart gifs and people blogged on their LiveJournal and wrote bad fan fictions on forums and all that.
You just kinda learned to be tech savvy for things like “Don’t open random links” and “don’t believe everything you read on the Internet” through trial by fire or having to explain why you broke the computer, and it’s not exactly a skill that you forget. So it’s kinda weird for them to assume that they are better at tech just because they are younger.
I do like this place, gives me nostalgia of the Wild West of these early days. Needs more bad fanfictions here though.
Before itunes really caught on and ages before something like spotify would rise up, millenials cut their teeth on kazaa, limewire and a host of other p2p services trying to get digital copies of our music and movies. Is this really just a low quality pirate rip or is a virus laden exe? ONE WAY TO FIND OUT!
Pamela Anderson nude or horrifying decapitation? Time to roll the dice!
There are even fewer of us that remember the totally text based forums and IRC that was in many ways the innocent Garden of Eden era, before Eternal September happened. I was very much a child, so I’m not really nostalgic about that era of the net, since it was far more of an echo chamber in many ways back then, but it was “safe” and “innocent” back then. You had to verify sources even more, since the majority of sources weren’t available online, but the vast majority of people using it were not only fluent in at least one human language, they were also fluent in multiple programming languages, Assembly being far more popular than than it is now. This is when you could trust any link. The false actors hadn’t managed to infiltrate the protected Geek Sphere, quite yet.
Then CompuServe happened, and it was no longer a refuge for us computer geeks, all of a sudden there were business people looking at our ideas. They didn’t like them much at all, to say the least. AOL followed and further saturated the net with people who had no idea what they could do with it. This is when us netizens started warning to check the link address before you clicked. Back then, you could easily keep a database list of the false actor domains.
Then the late 90s and mostly 2000 happened. That’s the Wild West you’re talking about. All of a sudden, you HAD to have antivirus programs, you needed many programs such as adblockers that wouldn’t exist for another few years, IRC and Use.net had been piracy hubs, but all of a sudden Napster and Bearshare made those archaic forums unnecessary. Metallica did their thing, accidentally creating a bunch of Metallica fans that would never buy anything by Metallica, but they had access to their entire discography. Hell discography downloads became a thing about this time. Don’t download the entire discography of The Kinks. That shit contains literally 40 to 120 gigs of MP3s across 40(?) albums, depending on compression quality.
I’m a Xennial being born in 1980 and on the net as early as late 1986, early 1987, my father was in the industry and literally helped code parts of UNIX, while he was in The Navy in the early 1970s. I’ve been shown evidence that we were the first household in a multi-state area, thanks to the meticulous data keeping of The Baby Bell that we were part of, that had two dedicated phone lines far earlier than anyone else except my father’s colleagues, all of whom lived multiple states away from us since my father has been remote working as much as he can since SSH was adopted as standard in UNIX. He rejects all technology that he can. He claims that it is all based on extremely faulty programming, and we can’t trust it.
There have been several periods as the net gets bigger, and I don’t doubt that we will look at right now as a “special time” in the future. I’m not sure if that will be because we finally found the limits of LLMs or if it’s because the net will evolve into something that is closer to the spirit of “a place to find the truth through facts,” which is what it started as.
Living through an event isnt the same thing as being knowledgeable about it. eg. There are plenty of 911 truthers that were around when 911 happened.
And they think everyone just ate the WMDs in Iraq thing. No, I was there at the protests. Many of us knew it was a bullshit excuse.
The only thing Iraq and Al Qaeda had in common was the Q. We knew that then.
Many of us knew it was a bullshit excuse.
This fucken clown.
And it was obvious that they’d already decided to invade Iraq long before Powell’s infamous UN presentation.
His career really got started with covering up the May Lai massacre and got worse from there.
Kinda like comparing my grandfathers journal from when he lived in the USSR to what hexbears say.
Apparently he wrote this journal as propaganda before hiding it away at the bottom of his trunk.
Happens to me with Venezuela. I lived there before and through/ during the glorious revolución bolivariana and here come the champagne leftists from 8 thousands kilometers away to tell me that it wasn’t real socialism, that apparently I am a CIA agent (where my money at?), that I didn’t got held at gunpoint many times in my life there for attempting to escape the country as many others and that the government didn’t murder my family members haha. Yeah it’s not funny at all
Being the victim of American propaganda does not make you an employee CIA agent. But the fact is that America is fundamentally responsible for most of the problems in Venezuela, both via CIA meddling, and letting our capitalists decimate their economy for their own personal gain. Its the same story across almost all of South America. Sometimes it’s staging coups on their elected leaders, sometimes it’s leveraging the power of a fruit company in order to rewrite their laws to be favorable towards said fruit company.
I joined the US military literally a month before 9/11 happened. The day I felt really old was the day we started getting new enlistees who weren’t even born during 9/11. One of them told me they didn’t understand why “ancient US history” was so important in our modern military climate.
This January, Biden officially declared an end to the “War on Terror” that Bush Jr. started, which was a response to 9/11. The way our military operates today is mostly thanks to America’s response to 9/11; we evolved so much in the past 2 decades to keep up with a dangerous new decentralized threat to our nation. It’s kind of a big deal.
While that response is probably very relevant to current US military doctrine, I feel compelled to mention that the “threat” was very centralized in Saudi Arabia, and that while its sad that many innocents died in 9/11, at no point during the last 22 years was an actual credible threat to america. W’s lies and subsequent invasion of Iraq no doubt shaped the US military into the fedex-on-steroids that is is today’s as well as destabilized the entire middle east (and maimed and killed countless people on both sides), but ultimately they were just that - lies. None of the countries the US has fought in since 2001 have ever been an actual threat to the nation.
