Then came 9/11. It’s the single point in history where just about everything to do with American society can be defined to be before and after.
Doesn’t matter what you think about the event and it’s authenticity as described, the fact of the matter is that America as a country has been locked in this sort of country wide PTSD since and have changed completely. Along with it went peace, calmness, secularism, egalitarianism and altruism. We’re constantly the hunted now, the ones who need security, everything needs to be dumbed down, so called common sense rules and it better be mine common sense and not yours. And on and on it goes. We’re operating like a demented, schizophrenic who has woken up from a nightmare every day of their lives and have lost the fact they are living in their head instead of in the real world.
The rising pessimism and negativity since 2008/09 is a global phenomenon. I think it's wrong and very US-centric to attribute that to 9/11.
The 2008 financial crisis and the rise of social media has probably more to do with the rise of millennial pessimism and negativity.
People nowadays complain that gay pride parades have gotten too corporate, but especially by companies that are willing to exploit people in other ways. But this is simply the playbook Google pioneered, to take good will around certain social issues and use it as a decoy while you pick people’s pockets and put your boot on their face. I don’t think we can understate the extent to which good causes have been infiltrated by bad corporate actors and how much that had undermined our trust in our communities.
At least that's what I got from it as an "elder millennial" (born in the very early 1980s).
During the Red Scare, loyalty review boards were instituted and civil servants insufficiently 'American' were sacked in the thousands.
The loyalty boards and Hollywood blacklisting were definitely a change is society, but it was so slow moving that I wouldn't compare it to a shift like 9/11.
The world wasn't really different before and after something like the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, even though that is what would be a likely event you'd associate with the Red Scare.
When I think of 20th century cultural events that had an shift in society, I think more of the Cuban missile crisis, the Challenger disaster, the fall of the Berlin wall, etc... shorter events (not necessarily instantaneous, but well defined times) where you could define shifts in culture to before/after.
One caveat.
It's safety first, unless they decide to go to war to ensure continued access to cheap commodities (Iraq) or to play weird sociopath power games (Vietnam).
It's going to be kind of rich when they ask people from podunk towns in "flyover country" to go fight their next war, after years of ridiculing them and decimating their local economies.
While the financial crisis might be more of a root of all problems in Millenial and generations that followed minds it’s not where it all started (I am a Millenial)
Also don’t forget 2008 was the year of the iPhone. The year we started inching towards being an always on society.
> American
Yes, except the world is large and frankly in most parts of the world 9/11 doesn't factor very large in memory. As such, I doubt it was the single most important factor in changing this feeling of world peace which again, definitely didn't exist outside of the US. All you need to think about to see that is look at why 9/11 happened and think of all the murdered people those folks must have seen to get that angry.
Come now don't be naïve: those same folk get just as rabidly homicidal over a silly little cartoon.
Some societies are just not compatible with legal systems that a) limits the use of force to the government alone, b) place the rules and rights of men above religions.
Never the two shall meet.
Do a random search in Google (DDG, or Bing) of ANY term at all, and you will see that the full first page links to pages that wrote whatever content for a profit (either by selling ads, or by a paywall, etc).
Long lost are sites like Xoom, Geocities or similar where people wrote about their knowledge just for the sake of it. Long gone are the "web rings" that took you into cliques of people wanting to share knowledge of some specific subject.
Nowadays the closest you can get to that sort of information is in forums like this or reddit (and this last is questionable). That's why adding "site:reddit.com" when searching for some opinion is becoming more useful compared to pure serach engine results.
Interesting small mention. Is it common in America to disbelieve in the mainstream history of 9/11? I’m just getting glimpses from the new world via the internet and have no ear to the ground there
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polls_about_9/11_con...
Population wise, that was the case for a number of years after 9/11. In terms of government policy, it's still the case. But in terms of the former, it's fading away as more time passes. People who were born in 2001 are or will turn 20 this year. Just like events like the attack on pearl harbor and the Cuban missle crises, 9/11 will also become an event that's just known by reading history rather than a first hand experience.
Think you might need to qualify that. The mid-90s saw the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides.
If you look at what was life like. What people cared about. What songs sang about. What households looked like. War was as far a concept from the average American.
Sure we had the gulf war early 90s. We had Bosnia during Clinton years. But most Americans were more concerned with becoming stock traders from home, saving willy and the earth and how Clinton’s cigars were used.
Americans bombers dropping bombs by the ton to the backdrop of western advancement has almost become an expectation in our campaign of spreading our brand of democracy and its freedoms or else.
Oppose them or support them, it was literally American bombing campaigns that stopped the Bosnian genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.
Feels like there was something more that led America to Bosnia, and it wasn't just our benevolence and saving the world from itself.
There was a lot of pressure to "do something" in the Balkans, and the military wasn't averse to showing off its goods, so something was done. Imagine the media pressure with Yemen x1000. That was Bosnia and Kosovo (probably mostly because it was in Europe).
Also, US military has intervened militarily in Syria, many times, and even with troops on the ground. Did you miss it?
The Uyghurs are a poor analogy, because despite the intense oppression they're under, they're not being mass-murdered. And a humanitarian intervention in China due to Uyghur situation is just not in the cards, because realism.
So sure, Bosnia+Kosovo interventions weren't just "benevolence". It was a convergance of factors (power dynamics, US President open to idea, media+public pressure, limiting intervention to air campaign, etc). But it wasn't an oil pipeline or some ridiculous conspiracy, either, like I sometimes hear.
Once most people discovered their well thought-out blogpost got only 100 page views while a meme with a cat got 10 million, many just gave up. But what's missing in those numbers is, of those 100 page views, perhaps 10 were people you actually respect, have influence in your field, were actually using your Open Source project etc.
By optimising metric like page views we lost sight of the genuine impact we might have had with good writing.
You can read statements/watch videos by Chamath Palihapitiya or Sean Parker admitting to this being an explicit strategy at Facebook. "Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport is also a nice book that covers some of the same ground.
If you ask me, our current way of managing society is a failure. You have large, well-coordinated organizations basically selling cocaine (fast food, youtube, social media, cigarettes) on end, but the other end (consumers) are necessarily less coordinated and informed because they don't operate within an organizational hierarchy with centralized decision making, shared knowledge and people dedicating 8 hours a day to maintaining those systems. Theoretically, companies live and die by how much value they create for their their customers. Practically, many companies resemble organized militia waging asymmetric warfare on unorganized masses in an increasingly zero-sum world.
I think we need to focus a lot on organizing as people outside of the structure of a for-profit corporation. Theoretically the government plays this role but it's not enough.
(inb4 omg you hate capitalism stupid commie)
I don't understand this part - what do you mean by that? Why would the world be increasingly zero-sum?
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
[2] https://investmentmonitor.ai/global/the-urgent-case-for-stak...
Another might be called moral clarity. Unfortunately, it's usually an illusion. We have much more experience with technologies invented under optimistic assumptions turning out to be a moral gray area at best, when you look at how they're used.
I found this paper interesting:
The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-fn.pdf
That is why most people like movies made by Quentin Tarantino and not by Andrei Tarkovsky.
I don't like when someone puts memes in each paragraph but at the same time I don't like to read "guru on a high horse" that comes like he is a smart ass because he pretends to be professional and all that.
> I don't like when someone puts memes in each paragraph but at the same time I don't like to read "guru on a high horse" that comes like he is a smart ass because he pretends to be professional and all that.
That's fair, I don't like this style too. Which is why I like to describe what I like as "plain English". I'd say the characteristic is that the content is mostly information, and not signalling or entertainment.
Don’t old people who sit in front of the news get a similar rush?
On the other hand, part of the candies is to reassure your audience and try to bring them to you with something else than your content. That part applies to everyone, regardless of their age. For example, if you do a blog post on a programming technique, you could try to brand it (and yourself) as "software craftsmanship", insert a few references to people in that space, add a few paragraphs talking mostly about this ideology and not the content. Or you could use a lot of examples, references and jokes from something cultural (the current popular thing on netflix for example). These "candies" aren't targeted at people with short attention span.
I hope you will forgive me for saying this but every generation leverages criticism on preceding generations for some perceived flaw. When you look back at other similar criticisms it generally can be seen as very overblown. I think in this case it's fair to say that this is not something that must be done to them, it's just something that is done to them. When you get used to something, that's what you like - it's not an intrinsic trait like you're making it seem.
Commodari E, Guarnera M. Attention and aging. Aging Clin Exp Res. 2008 Dec;20(6):578-84. doi: 10.1007/BF03324887. PMID: 19179843.
Honestly, I know it's popular to cast these things as 'Gen Z, kids these days don't know how it used to be'....but I know this 51 year old guy doesn't have near the attention span reading that he used to.
Now it's all about that SaaS money.I don't mind the money part, but sadly, tech has become a gold mine for predators who smell the money and are out for blood.
'Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine'[1] another HN favorite comes to my mind. It was originally written for Physics Today magazine.
I don't think it's limited to only long form content, Even today printed news papers which have been in existence for >=~100 years does have better quality of writing than online content(even from the same news media) due to some resemblance of their editorial practices.
But all those printed newspapers are on the verge of bankruptcy or already dead. Their online counterpart is now only concerned with how many articles can be published/hour, There's not even proof reading because of this as they have to please Google, Facebook, Apple for those screen time.
I've noticed when I give interviews to online news the writer often has to work with their web-admin to fix errors in my statements after publishing(when it's different from what I actually said)and often it takes several hours if it even happens. Where as in printed news papers had the habit of error correction in the next issue.
[1] https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machin...
"HTML 1" wasn't really a standard anyway and I don't remember what html2 actually brought - I remember not every browser in the mid 90s did tables, client side image maps etc but they were later additions to html2.
Javascript (which came in with html 3.2) was far more of a step change than html2
HTML doesn't have to be the only web transport. Build your browser and make your own protocol. IPFS is doing just fine.
HTML4 was the last true free-release from any corporate grab. And it has everything youll ever need. However it just sits there forgotten taken by the glory of HTML5.
There's good and bad in this, but it does clearly change things. When there's that much money on the line, ironically the stakes become higher and there's less genuine creativity and risk taking. The flip side is of course true -- too little money is a problem (I mean, I'm not about to trade my SWE gig for working in an Amazon warehouse as a means of spurring personal creativity), but given enough money past a certain baseline, things do change. There's a sweet spot at "enough money that people can feel free to be creative and take risks" and "so much money people are scared to take too many risks".
If a culture is popular, it tends to saturate. The old internet simply couldn't compete with the new one.
I'd add Columbine as another event, which occurred in 1999 [1]. That seemed to have a lasting affect on that cohort, which was also the group that got hit hard in the 2008 downturn.
But maybe a better line is the rise of Facebook, which shifted the story from the promise of tech to the promise of social connections.
Of course, technology will never be able to safe us, and the human condition is what it is. So, really, while a small passionate group seemed excited back in the mid 90s, it was always false gold.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
The modern internet is almost entirely clashes of abstract concepts. It also shows up in the slight breakdown on the internet of basic, verifiable facts. Nobody is relying on real-world stimulus to form opinions. It is a bit draining to keep up with.
That and there is less optimism because it is clear how slowly the world changes. Consider the "The government has a track record that does not inspire confidence..." paragraph. Written 30 years ago, part of it could credibly be talking about Assange, have names swapped for Trump, etc. At some point intelligent people are going to get jaded pretending that this is new based on the overwhelming evidence that the internet gives us access to.
I think it mostly comes down to that.
People rightfully realised that perhaps government should not have absolute and total control of the monetary supply and financial system. That a 'Plan B' may be in order.
Unfortunately, today it's 90% people trying to get rich quick.
And that is, unsurprisingly (and quite banally), used by many detractors to dismiss it all while handwaving away:
> Bitcoin was born in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the occupy wall street movement.[1] Events where, giant banks and institutions received trillions of dollars in unprecedented bail outs while 'main street' suffered with record unemployment, foreclosures, and destruction of small businesses.
> People rightfully realised that perhaps government should not have absolute and total control of the monetary supply and financial system.
Like people still hand wave away all the metadata and other work-arounds to compromising popular crypto systems that are highly touted because they are popular/convenient/etc or all the "get rich quick" mentality/motivations that exist outside of cryptocurrencies and have always existed…
There is a stronger argument against crypto: the main use case (outside speculation) seems to be illegal activities. If what you are doing is legal, why not use government currency? If what you are doing is illegal, crypto is great. A currency outside the control of the government (police) is almost by definition made for illegal activities.
In some countries, illegal activities are morally correct, though. Crypto helps here.
But crypto has enabled entirely new types of crimes that did not exist before: ransomware.
I have not completely for or against crypto. I am responding to your comment that people are dismissing because it seems like speculation only. I don't think that is true and that there are better reasons for dismissal?
> …giant banks and institutions received trillions of dollars in unprecedented bail outs [1] while 'main street' suffered with record unemployment, foreclosures, and destruction of small businesses.
> People rightfully realized that perhaps government should not have absolute and total control of the monetary supply and financial system.
Is defined as illegal in of itself by a government, then sure, there's no argument against dismissing it as illegal. Just like PGP falling under being illegal (from another comment) because it could exist as:
> digital copies of the binaries and source code were prohibited for export as a munition
There's no successful argument one can make against such illegality to said government. And I wouldn't bother, such people will never acquiesce if they haven't felt the lack of sufficient recourse to [1] (because they quite possibly may gain a lot of benefits by being indirectly or directly involved in [1])
Luckily, reality isn't so rigid as to what people (or even other traditional governments abroad) will actually accept (then and now) and have sovereignty over deciding what they want for themselves and side stepping based on what can actually be enforced in totality in practice regardless of what any given institutionalized jurisdiction may think of it.
2. There are plenty of things that are federally illegal but many consider to be morally legal. Examples include, for example, weed dispensaries operating in states that have legislated cannabis.
3. What happens if a future government makes funding of ETE encrypted software, without CSAM scanning, illegal?