As a millennial who's still just trying my damnedest to learn everything I can and be a capable, intelligent, creative human being with my life, and maybe do something neat with all that...
These findings bring me to enraged tears over what they did to us in 2020.
...and the kid who drew the orange was paid by the...local orange juice cartel, or something...who were making tons of money off of this entire kerfuffle.
The legislators weren't stupid
Sorry maybe I'm giving away my country of origin but this part here is really hard for me to wrap my head around. I have no prior experience with this concept to relate to. Please be patient with me. 🤔
This is a very valuable take and much needed perspective here. I appreciate you sharing it!
Also can't help but lol at your experience with the wild girl who definitely used Skinner Box conditioning to make sure you always opened her emails! 😂
I miss a lot of the spirit of the hijinks and lulz internet, but I definitely don't miss all the disgusting shock content that came with deeper web exploration. I visited the famous /b/ exactly once and decided my soul didn't need that shit.
There's a lot of gore stuff that I think was photoshopped, but also damn someone spent time making that?! I didn't care to analyze it, I just wished there was such a thing as brain bleach.
There was also sites that would punish hotlinking by replacing images with the infamous "goatse" (no.), which was really great when trying to send my girlfriend a funny picture I found and she got to it too late. LOL that was fun to explain why she was seeing what she was seeing.
People warned me of misnamed videos on Kazaa and stuff turning out to be abuse material or execution footage but thankfully I mostly avoided that.
I remember clicking a phony download link and getting eyeball-blasted with CSAM ads seared into my brain once. (Actually I think I sent the link to the FBI on this one.)
Yeah, I miss the expressive freedom of "at your own risk" Internet, simply because you weren't as much constantly being tailed by marketing bots and algorithms, but I don't miss the mental trauma that came with clicking the wrong link.
You're right though, in a weird way a bit of prior desensitizing can almost help us keep it together if we find ourselves in a really, really bad place. But I wish for a world where nobody has to do that...
This is all also why, even though I find the Dark Web super intriguing...I don't need that shit. Lol
"Sir, the memes are coming from inside the house!"
Like the other reply said, when you go to a bar you're just showing your birthdate to some guy at the front for a few seconds.
Now, if the bar demanded to make a scan of my ID and uploaded it to some server, and reported my entry to said bar to the government or some privatized authority, then handed that data to some algorithm to cross reference everywhere else I've been to build a profile on my behavior, then established various metrics based on who I was seen hanging around....then probably sold all of that to a bunch of marketing firms...
And on and on. Now imagine it's been doing this since you were like 16.
If this sounds far fetched and overblown, I invite you to look at how US law enforcement uses dragnet surveillance like "stingray towers" to hand information to ICE, then make a decision as to whether "The Good Guys" or anybody else should be allowed to follow your footsteps across the Web.
Edit: quick side tangent:
The hilarious part is how the parties pushing for this "fOr ThE ChiLdReN" surveillance capitalism will also be the first to cry "Leftist Nanny State tho! Muh personal responsibility!" When people want something like universal healthcare.
Some pearl-clutches said “won’t somebody think of the children”, and then made the social media companies figure out how to implement the ban.
Bingo.
It's never about "the children." It's a way to normalize handing over biometrics and anonymity to an assumed authority to use the internet.
It's always about control, control, control. It's about tying real identities to online activity, then it's about wholesale harvesting your secrets you didn't even know you were keeping.
Then it's yet another instrument to make sure you shut up and don't step out of line or else.
First they take us away from our kids by necessitating that entire households need full time careers to survive.
Then as a substitute for education and actual parenting we're so eager to offer up our childrens' futures in the name of "protecting" them from the inevitable consequences of parentless households.
As a millennial I honestly just miss how something like MySpace was basically a micro blog, and otherwise, we just chatted with friends-only programs like Yahoo! Messenger / MSN / ICQ/ whatever. There wasn't really some motive to "connect" you to a million "randos" and make you slavishly compete for their fickle approval.
Growing up in a weird kinda rural/suburb hybrid area, the Internet was my gateway to the world outside of school.
It definitely had its problems and drama, but mostly we chatted with people we actually knew (Yahoo chatrooms notwithstanding. Yikes lol) and didn't care about what was "trending" across the world. Algorithms didn't control and force perception of our reality then.
It was literally just about enabling communication.
Outside of that, there was also a much better culture of maintaining privacy and anonymity online, and that everything you see online is BS until proven otherwise.
Of course, this was before techbros decided we should use our real identity everywhere for all to see.
Nowadays it seems like every service is about using your friends as bait to connect you to some hivemind of toxic manipulation to farm you for ads. It encourages creating cults and scams and brainrot bullshit because it's all about harvesting people's already-strained attention for profit, instead of just being a communication platform.
TL;DR: I remember the Internet as a place to log in and hang out, then log off, when meeting with friends outside of school was a logistical nightmare reserved for things like birthday parties if you were lucky.
A lot of damage is already done, but I think if we obliterated the Facebooks and Instagrams and TikToks of "social media" and instead it focused on augmenting existing relationships rather than siloing people as a billion lonely socially-starved individuals in a crowd, we'd see it much differently...
This. I feel so bad for teenagers.
They're at a time in their lives where community and free association are vital to them, and yet since they're not necessarily a profitable demographic, they're kicked out and shunned by everywhere that's not home or school, because all that's left is "commercial spaces."
People then wonder why teenagers flip off society and get up to no good, and then maybe wonder why we all turned out to be lonely adults with like maybe one long term friend if we're lucky...
Oh that's really cool! I'm gonna search for that! Maybe my library has it, or I can bug them to get it. :)
EDIT: Is it the BBC one you're talking about?
That's awesome! Thanks SO much for pointing me to that! I too wonder what the 2GB size is. It looks like they have two different sets of packages, one being a "source archive" that's just a raw CD dump.
I can see it, since the game was on like, 4 or 5 CDs back then, and involved a lot of heavily compressed video!
I have a fun feeling that maybe I can run this really well in Bottles, it ScummVM alone doesn't do the trick. :D
Here's a link I found to the soundtrack in "CD Quality", with a download link, if you're interested.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbSFnTrLHtkp8Yj7bSdaN_jQUy7iOXscq
That 90's crystal-synth is the most gorgeous thing...it reminded me very much of the soundtrack to Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time. :D
Fair.
I'm struggling with that a lot right now. I'm not even "old", I'm a martial artist, I'm a computer graphics artist, I want to design games, but I'm constantly feeling too slow to handle everything.
Am I getting dumber? Am I getting slower? Why is it taking longer to remember things?
And I feel my sense of imagination and wonder is slipping, being replaced more and more by "impending threats" anxiety: "Oh shit, food prices are doing what now?" "Wait what fundamental freedom are they now 'cracking down' on?"
A lot of artists and gamedevs and tabletop game masters all say they have "too many ideas." Lately I just see fog and don't know how to engage my creativity.
I wonder if COVID stole my brain power. :(