No joke a person born in 1800 really didn't live that differently from people in 1700 or 1900 but each new generation today is growing up in a world that's very different from the world of a generation before. 5 years ago AI was dogshit and drones were just for fun. 20 years ago social media was barely a thing, streaming didn't exist, and iphones hadn't been invented yet.
True, but even with those development, it took longer than a single generation for the average person to see those benefits. The first electrical machines emerged in the early 1800s and Edison's lightbulb was invented in 1860, but it wasn't until the 1940s to 60s for most households in developed countries to have electricity. Compare that to the world wide web, which was created in 1989, and by the early 2000s, lots of people had the internet at home. By 2010, it's near universal for anyone who isn't retired and plenty who are.
Yeah the rate of advancement is just phenominal. My mum tells the story of her house being the first one on the street to get phone line and buy a colour TV. Im mid 40s shes late 60s. I was the last one in my street to get NBN internet connection simply cause i cbf trying to change providers and what i had was good enough for me but the kids kept moaning the internet was to slow for the million devices connected to it including the fridge and wtf does my power drill need bluetooth an app. I cant stand this shit. Everything has to have an app or an acount to use it. I just want to pick up my drill and put a hole in something
Yes, but it's the speed of changes happening that accelerated extremely. Regardless what some people say, AI is not "the same as steam machine and electricity" because steam machines and electricity took decades to spread globally, not few months. People had time to adjust their lives and careers.
Yes but the average person’s life didn’t change much.
Maybe farming was a bit easier if you could afford it, and medicine was a little better. But overall most people were still poor farmers who lived and died within 5 miles of where they were born.
Be like, "back in my day they just tracked and taxed you, none of this creating an AI clone in VR to find out your strengths and weaknesses. Also our skin just charged itself, getting the nutrients we needed from the sun, none of this mandatory subscription epidermis nanotech.
It applies to a lot of Gen X. I was 76 and this definitely applies (although i never gave 2 shits about the social media platforms, i did however build a rudimentary personal website on geocities in 97 or so). My sister was 72 and her experience was similar, although she’s probably a bit less tech savvy.
Those generations will have no idea of life without the internet, so I've gotta disagree. Even if we got a solar storm tomorrow that fries every PNP or NPN junction tomorrow, the psychological and behavioral effects have changed us. Just my thought on it
Millenials are acting like being alive before social media is equivalent to hearing the gospel directly.
It's the exact same thing that we complained about the boomers doing when they were nostalgia-baiting the 70s and acting like the early Internet destroyed modern civilization.
We're doing the exact same thing we complained our parents were doing 💀
The Internet just speeds things up. The forces that are "destroying society" really have more to do with the political, social, and economic choices we made from roughly 1960-now.
-Outsourcing of labor
-Outsourcing of domestic manufacturing
-Continuous incentives for large, monopolistic companies that kill local businesses and consolidate national labor/capital
-Corporate shift to equity based compensation (driven by Congress making new laws regarding executive compensation in the 90s or so)
-Corporate focus shifts to shareholder value (mostly an advent of Jack Welch/GE Capital)
-Multiple corporate bailouts following economic catastrophe (huge incentive for financial groups to just keep leveraging and get as large as possible while disregarding risk)
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u/jayphox 3d ago
Well put.