See also: anyone who lived through the decline and fall of the USSR.

Presumably you’re referring to disillusioning a generation, right? I wonder if the masses had smartphones in 1992 if they would have withdrew to the internet rather than vodka. Genuine question - yours is an interesting connection because the circumstances of disillusionment are so different.

Online services have displaced at least:

  - the TV
  - the radio
  - board games
  - card games
  - video games
  - theaters
  - phones and faxes
  - the mail

Perhaps the above where the equivalent of vodka to some of you, but I wouldn't look at someone with their smartphone and think "wow, they're getting wasted !"

It replaced those things but that list doesn’t include the major time sinks, besides TV: social media, porn, doomscrolling. We already made fun of TV zombies, and at the worst it absolutely can remind me of a drunk or unstable person.

I understand how much people are emotionally reactive to these part of the net, and the cultural hatred some can have for "unproductive" time (does it match what you call "time sinks"?)

I still don't think they stand on the same foot as vodka.

I find it easy to drink in moderation because I only do it socially. One or two drinks at a dinner party has never cost me a day of work. But I have spent a whole morning in bed scrolling Instagram Reels instead of going in to work.

Passive consumption of short-form videos lacks that social feedback mechanism that keeps my behavior in check. It’s easy to stay up way later than I meant to and be wrecked the next day.

Consuming by yourself in a dark room is the default consumption mode for Reels/Shorts/TikTok, whereas in my social circles drinking alone is very unusual.

Would you say the same for people looking at the clouds passing by the window ?

Should we classify these clouds as worse than alcohol because they were looked at alone in a room instead of doing some other work ?

To get more personal, I had a CD player as my alarm in the morning, and a few times skipped worked because I couldn't get myself to stop the playing album. I didn't blame the CD.

That's also how I realized that job was well paying but otherwise really shitty.

I probably wouldn’t stay up 3-4 hours past my intended bedtime staring into space or watching clouds or listening to music. It’s just not stimulating enough. I wouldn’t stay up that late reading either, since once I get tired enough I can no longer do it effectively.

There is definitely something different about TikTok, or video games, compared to your examples.

> He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretence, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation.

(Wikipedia: HyperNormalisation#Etymology)

Agreed that Covid was disillusioning for young people, but uniquely so? The 2008 financial crisis, 9/11, and the GWoT would all like a word.

The only generation I can think of without a similar formative crisis (in the US at least) is Gen X. Does the death of Kurt Cobain count?

the financial crisis was just financial. 9/11 or war on terror was just behind a tv screen.

covid was actually something everyone felt personally - not just empathized with through media. I feel like I just started recovering mentally from the lockdowns - all my college years eaten up by them.

I mean, lock down absolutely was a disruption - but I know more than one or two young men that ended up in the desert after 9/11. Maybe we’ve also acclimated so much to the post-9/11 infrastructure of fear and surveillance that we assume this is how it always was?

i am just old enough to have experienced 9/11 when i was in elementary school. it was a similar change to society to how covid screwed everything

when i was a child, there was no security in airports. like literally NONE. you could walk in and buy a flight with physical cash. if you wanted an international flight, there was a metal detector like you might find in a night club

government ID and drivers licence did not have your photograph on it, and some state drivers licenses were printed on non-laminated card. there was also no functional internet surveillance (there were no good search algorithms or tools in the early internet, so the government couldnt search either).

but the real big change, which is kind of what everyone felt i think, is the whole world was celebrating the end of the cold war and so vehemently protested going into the middle east, and the government just did it anyway. the largest protests in the history of the west were against that war and it was all totally ignored https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War

then we got the PATRIOT act, NSA/CIA spying on the population, heavily armed police. btw, in the 1990s you would NEVER see police with assault rifles and armoured trucks etc except for swat teams in major cities and the ATF. The idea of your local police department having a heap of military equipment was crazy. a great example of this is the LA riots in '92 - they had to call in the army and the national guard because the police simply werent equipped for it

and they would run these polls on tv, like gallup polls, falsely claiming that 20%+ of people publicly supported the war

even though it didnt affect anyone as much personally, it was the turning point where the gov just started brazenly ignoring people and introducing the heavy duty surveillance state, which was especially painfully felt in aus, canada, new zealand, the us, and the uk. and covid19 tyranny was only possible because of what bush did in response to 9/11 - it physically could not have happened in the 1990s as there were no government agencies that could have done it

I thought the AR-15s that the police carried in America were semi-auto. More like a sporting rifle than what the military uses.

AR-15s are more versatile than shotguns, though less powerful they are more accurate. If your going to carry a long gun around, it's probably the most logical option.

Basically anyone who isn't a prohibited person in America can field the same equipment. Though I think police have more access to restricted ammunition.

Police carrying AR-15s is a very different vibe from police with only holstered sidearms. Regardless of the trigger system they’re equipped with.

you are correct re: semi autos. most infantry would rarely use fully automatic fire with ar15 spec rifles too, as it is wasteful and inaccurate. exception being squad automatic weapons

echoing wat titanomachy said, there was a time where it was unthinkable to see police with anything more than a sidearm. a lot of police still had revolvers into the 90s as well.

Sounds like you were born around 93, but a lot of the things you're saying weren't the case in 2000. Airports had metal detectors and xrayed carry-ons well before 2000, and drivers licenses also had photos on them around that time. What you're describing is more 1990 than 2000.

> really ripped away the illusion that the adults of the world are in competent control

In the context of this the GFC was much worse, though. It was entirely avoidable and a direct outcome of extreme greed and extreme incompetence. With Covid/lockdowns all options sucked to one extent or another.

When I was a kid in the 1980s, distant buildings were bombed too, and endless Cold wars and Middle East wars etc were a given too. However, your average 12 year old doesn't deeply care about finance or politics or distant wars. Their day-to-day routine goes on. Those are adult problems.

With Covid, the difference is that it came home, for everyone. And not just the US, but globally. Every home was directly affected, for months or years. 9/11 or 2008 didn't lock down entire countries for weeks and months at a time, impose country wide curfews, close all schools, suppress all socialising, impose home schooling, adults/parents working from home or not-at-all, shuttering of global supply lines, increased mortality fears for all older relatives, and constant everyday panic headlines and monitoring for years. We're still working through the aftereffects. So yes, very unique, in its direct effect upon the youth of wealthy countries in modern society.