[crims0n]

As the last generation that remembers what life was like before the internet, we need to ask ourselves - is the world we built better than the one we were born into? The older I get, the less convinced I am. It's not just nostalgia, as affirmed by Gen Zs rejection of the digital world.

[anonymous908213]

I don't think this is a very difficult question to answer. The internet of the year 2000 made the world a better place. The internet of the year 2025 makes the world a much, much worse place. We now live in an era where not only governments but every private business willing to pay a data broker has access to unlimited data for roughly every individual in a population, including their age, gender, occupation, hobbies, friends, political positions, sleep schedule, every phone call they've ever made, every website they've ever visited, every location they've ever taken their phone, every thing they've ever purchased. This information is currently used to shape the course of politics by manipulating what every individual sees, and will undoubtedly be used for unthinkable crimes against humanity in the coming years.

[Terr_]

Feels of 1995: "A personal computer and an internet connection are democratically-cheap pieces of capital-equipment than you can use to accomplish the goals that matter to you! Vast new realms of agency and autonomy! If you don't like it, make your own!"

Feels of 2025: "The device in your pocket is a way for companies to make you see the things they want you to see and nothing else you dirty criminal. You can talk to your friends but if your GPS trace is interrupted your account will be suspended. If you don't like it, sucks to be you."

[idiotsecant]

The internet of 2025 isn't the same thing at all. The early internet was a toy - a place for deviants and weirdos to do weird deviant things (and it was glorious). The rest of humanity found it and turned it into a mirror of the real world. That doesn't make it bad, in some ways it makes it better, in some ways worse, just definitely different.

[anthk]

Early internet was just a world of academics, scientists, engineers and maybe on the very early web and IRC, journalists.

[quietsegfault]

I'm not sure that's the /internet/'s fault, but the humanities inability to anticipate what we can do with the technology and our inability to regulate the technology to prevent harms.

[georgemcbay]

> humanities inability to anticipate what we can do with the technology

I think it is more a problem of not caring (especially when not caring will result in social and/or economic reward) rather than not anticipating.

For any technology that is created you can and should anticipate that it will be, literally, weaponized since there are hundreds of thousands of years of precedent for this happening.

[immibis]

We - technologists - mocked the humanities for decades for being useless. Now look where we got without them.

[aleph_minus_one]

> We - technologists - mocked the humanities for decades for being useless. Now look where we got without them.

A lot of programmers were very critical how in particular since the release of the iPhone people suddenly accepted the golden cage against which programmers before very aggressively fought.

So the issue is rather that people did not listen to these old-school programmers, (as usual) mocked these as nerds, and instead listened to "hipsters" and marketers.

One can discuss a lot how useful humanities are, but what brought us in the current situation is rather that the masses did not listen to the old-school programmers.

[quietsegfault]

Ha ha - I meant "humanity's", not "the humanities". Stupid autocorrect! I blame the internet.

[SoftTalker]

> The internet of the year 2000 made the world a better place

How so? Because we could send mail instantly instead of using a stamp and envelope?

Because we could buy stuff without leaving the house?

Because we could read/listen to/watch stuff without paying the people who created it?

[torben-friis]

>Because we could read/listen to/watch stuff without paying the people who created it?

I can tell you I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am without this, yes.

First because I (/my parents) didn’t have the money, second because of pure geographical access.

I saw movies and shows from countries that would never sell near me, read books that would never be in my country’s libraries, took courses straight from scientists and engineers rather than a thrice translated work…

The barrier of entry was also useful, curiosity is much better fed when you can download a medicine textbook just to check rather than venturing into the library of a university you’re not part of.

That is the one thing the internet did right, spreading culture. It was over when they took boredom from us, that was the big evil.

[anthk]

Ditto here in Spain. If you were able to watch Northern Exposure or The X Files with the Spanish dub in the 90's with a normal TV schedule (read: with human schedules, you need to sleep), I would ask you a unicorn just in case, because I woudn't believe you. After 2003 with Emule and BT? Damn it, I've got whole NE series over torrent and I regret nil.

My public TV already paid the US TV producer with money from our taxes, so in the end it's a draw.

Programming books? Your elder brother/sister it's doing CS at some uni, right? Then, good luck paying $50 on big book stores from malls. Entry courses you mean? Pay ~$50 a month for a private school and try enjoying Visual C++ 98. Linux? That's was for CS engineers and PC freaks right?

Nowadays you can learn damn Calculus on your own and install Maxima from any distro with online guides and tutorials. I had to learn Calculus from my own (I was some HS dropout) early Debian DVD's which had a PDF on Mathematics and from that I tried to understand every exercise and equation under Maxima. No upgrades, no updates, no tutoring. Hard mode my default for everything. Your TV tuner didn't work? Messing with Linux kernel modules like crazy and even editing the source code to fake the tuner and PLL and watch something in XawTV.

[roadside_picnic]

> Because we could buy stuff without leaving the house?

I'm guessing you were still pretty young/not yet born at the time?

Online shopping didn't just mean "I don't have to leave the house", it opened up a whole world of what was even possible.

Prior to the web if you didn't live in a big city (and less people did then) then your access to books, music, movies was insanely restricted.

I deeply recall how painfully limited my local Sam Goody was, even major "alternative" bands only had partial discographies available. I remember visiting my father's college campus as an early teen and being beyond excited to find a copy of NIN's "halo 1" in a college town record store. True indie music was reserved for kids with cool older siblings that both knew where the stores were and could drive there. In order to watch Dragon Ball Z I had to rely on a friend whose dad was a plumber in NYC and knew where the bootleg stores in China-town were. I got to tag along once and picked up a single random episode of a Gundam series, never to be finished because I could never find another.

Sure it was sort of fun to figure all this stuff out, but at the same time my bookshelf is filled with books that changed my life in various ways I would simply never had been able to find (or even be aware of) in the pre-web days. If you wanted to learn programming in the 90s you had to hope your local Walden books had some good options, and you certainly weren't going to learn Haskell or Lisp. Mine only had books on Excel, so I didn't learn to program until I was older.

Now the fact that American suburbs where a complete cultural wasteland in the 90s might be the bigger issue than the cure which was the web, but nonetheless the early web did make the world of information much bigger.

[anthk]

Same for indie music and culture, except for DB, where in 1990 in Spain Goku was more widely known and read than Superman. We finished DBZ in 1995-6 with the translated manga. Marvel/DC existed, but DB was everywhere. For the rest, almost 100% the same. Mangas were for kids wich cool elder brothers, they were expensive, but shared like drugs. At least regional TV's aired tons of anime back in the day (Sakura, Doraemon, Lupin...), we were covered.

But for the music, the crappy pop was on every radio and TV, altough it was far more variety than today where's 90% reaggeton (even faking Latin American accents from Spaniards) and mediocre pop singers. When I got some discount CD's - Def con Dos, similar to Public Enemy- and the like, it was like crossing to a different universe being myself a son of a blue collar worker.

Oh, and thanks again for the regional TV's in Spain (from autonomous regions), as they reran The Outer Limits in mid 90's instead the usual shitty sitcoms. That drove me into scifi, among getting 1984, Brave New World and the like from dollar stores at very cheap prices in early 2000's. Yes, once they sold classic in "Spanish Dollar Stores" (under a different name), it was glorious to find pulp fiction books, staunch joke books and often an Asimov or Bradbury book. That under ~$1 back in the day, almost the price of a bread baguette or your daily newspaper. A damn bargain compared to the $10 pocket cardboard cover book or worse the normal, thick volume $20 book. Comics from Tintin and Astérix were expensive too. But the English edition of these were also available in these stores, so often I bought them understanding maybe a 30% of it, 80% with a dictionary.

Video games? A single one per year and that's it. Choose wisely. An RPG? Great, tons of replaying. In order to save money, the next year I could get a Chinese pirate 21 in 1 cartridge with platformers and games like Batman, Goal, Metroid II... in order to disconnect from the RPG.

But when I could get scifi games, text adventures and the like from cybercafés 2000-2002 the 1990's felt rancid, outdated and tacky compared to Emule, Soulseek, Deus Ex, the first Linux distros...

[SoftTalker]

No I'm much older than that. My comment was somewhat sarcastic, rhetorically asking whether amplifying our consumer culture "made the world a better place."

I grant that it made hard-to-find stuff easier to get. But any bookstore I ever dealt with in those days would be happy to special order anything they didn't stock.

[1bpp]

Yes. The current generation of creatives could not exist as it is without free information and pirated professional software.

[anonymous908213]

For many reasons, but if I had to pick one for brevity: because there was unprecedented access to educational information, allowing anyone to learn about the world and develop skills that would typically have required a university education. Of course, even that has been corrupted, and now while the information still exists it is drowned out by orders of magnitude more misinformation.

That's not to say that the internet in 2000 was without flaws, but I do think on net it was beneficial to humanity.

[huhkerrf]

There has been a lot of bad things about the technology of the past 30 years, but I refuse to say that things were fantastic pre-Internet. The fact that I can listen to any music I want for less than it cost me to buy a CD in 1995, not even adjusted for inflation, is amazing. The massive CD book I carried around is definitely nostalgia.

Or, I can think of something, and find the answer quickly. I can make friends with people (or argue with them) across continents.

Still, there are things that I do miss that were objectively "worse." Like there only being a few dozen channels, and cable TV being less important, so you knew everyone was watching the same thing. There seemed to be more of a shared culture.

[pjc50]

> I can make friends with people (or argue with them) across continents

I really feel that internet socialization has gone from a means to make friends to a means to make enemies. Often to reinforce an ingroup, but that's not the same as friendship.

[jl6]

To answer this question honestly, you have to ask: if you could time travel back to live in, say, 1990, would you? You don't get to just dial the internet back to 1990, you have to dial the rest of the world back too. The world is a package deal.

I think a lot of people would be tempted by the nostalgia, but would quickly realize how much they'd be giving up.

[toast0]

I think there's a lot of people where 1990 social norms and pressure caused existential distress; or they lived in a repressive regime then and not now, etc. So I wouldn't wish to have those things back for those people. There's also a lot of health advances that I wouldn't want to turn back either.

But the internet and technology in general was so much more fun and exciting back then than it is now, IMHO. I'm sure some of my feelings there is nostalgia and youth or lack thereof, but a circa 1995 Socket 7 desktop motherboard could take cpus from Intel, AMD, Cyrix, IDT, and some others, and then there were all the non-pc options; that's a lot of competition and fun. Video game consoles were meaningfully different than each other, instead of the massively consolidated situation we have now. Arcade machines were more capable beyond just having large screens and specialized input devices.

I didn't get on the Internet until ~ 95, but at least for several years after that, it was a community of choice, rather than a place everyone had to assemble. That made interaction special in a lot of ways that are hard to reproduce now. There's some communities of choice on the internet, but they don't have the same kind of broad reach where you got all sorts of people where they would appear because computing was fun or helpful but they often had other things going on too, but most people didn't appear because they could avoid computing. The mixing function was pretty cool, but it's hard to replicate when forums tend to be all encompassing and there's too many people to really converse or are so narrow that everyone is too much alike.

I could certainly live with larger bid/ask spreads and fractional rather than decimal stock pricing as well as no odd lots and T+3? settlement. Current situation is better, but it's really not a huge deal. I can wait for slow shipping, and call people on the phone to make special orders...

[pjc50]

Really tricky. The big invisible (to many people) piece of progress is equalities; homophobia was much more overt back then. But I still think the best time for us in the UK was the 1997-2001 period. "Cool Brittania" to Iraq War.

1990 probably a bit too early. Right at the end of the Cold War. Deindustrialization still a big, ugly scar across many cities. The Troubles still ongoing; few residents of Northern Ireland would set the time machine back before 1998, I think.

[atherton94027]

What would they be giving up? DoorDash?

By most aspects the world of 1990 didn't change that much from today's world, with the exception of having computers in our pockets and some advances in medicine.

[doubled112]

I think you can go back further

I used to work with a guy who would tell me that, except email, life didn’t really change since the 80s. All we did was stick a screen onto everything, whether we needed to or not.

I was only born in the 90s but I mostly agree that far back.

[owisd]

> I think you can go back further

Reminds me of a line by John Maynard Keynes from 1919 about life before WW1 —

“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep”

[immibis]

It's hard to commit to saying yes but it's also hard to commit to saying no.

[AuthAuth]

There is no "GenZ rejection of the digital world" thats a marketing narrative. Gen Z is overwhelmingly online and the handful that do reject it are no more than a rounding error.

[tomth]

Using it because you're practically forced to use it, is not the same as not rejecting it intellectually. While that's probably still a minority, it definitely seems larger than just a rounding error to me.

I've seen, though rare, other people with dumbphones, for example. And more people who would like to have one.

[AuthAuth]

I think that people often say they want things they dont actually want. Like living in the woods and we can only look at their actions to judge their actual desire. We know people dont want to live in the woods because when they have the money and freedom to choose ot live in the woods they buy an apartment.

Its even easier with dropping social media because the cost is actually so low and yet people still dont even attempt to.

[6510]

We've ruined everything just like all other generations, specially programmers. But it doesn't matter as those who follow us don't know any better. It's like we are walking though a forest and you suddenly ask if this tree is better than the one 10 minutes ago.

We use to talk a lot, now we talk to the young ones and each of their sentences seems designed to end the conversation. When they are older the next generation will be glad they don't know how to talk either.

Not so long ago everyone also knew how to sing and make music. Each porch its own songs. Then came screaming radio boxes which was wonderful and everyone sang along.. for a while. They gradually turned into door to door sales men only you couldn't slap the door in their face anymore.

[aleph_minus_one]

> We've ruined everything just like all other generations, specially programmers.

Rather: programmers did warn very vehemently of the situation (and were particularly worried that with the release of the iPhone people accepted the golden cage). The problem was rather that people did not listen to these "nerds" (or at least did not act on their strong recommendations), but rather listened to "hipsters" and marketers.

[6510]

The war isn't over tho.

Warning people is the domain of influences, hipsters, propagandists and marketeers. Programmers cant really compete there but money does talk in the domain. Our world is such that if we want something we have to pay for it.

What we can do however is write code. Solving it in code makes the problem orders of magnitude more complicated to solve but [say] an Iphone is now merely a decent camera with great software enhancement. When I switched to Android, transferring the apps and data worked gloriously. While it might not be real progress the new HarmonyOS is still running most android apps.

Every year or so I realize I was conditioned to accept something obviously absurd if only superficially examined. (which I didn't do up to that point)

The warnings might not have the desired effect, it is hard to unsee the obvious so they do contribute.

Keep fighting!

[ferguess_k]

For me the late 80s - early 2000s was the peak. But I guess every generation has their own peak and I totally respect that.

That said, the later generations probably are going to have a more shitty life, because of economic downturn since 2008. I can't even imagine what kind of life my son (5Y) is going to live through whence the cyberpunk world falls.

[mawadev]

I went online first time in 2010/2011 and I have to say, I wish I didn't. I remember the world before the internet and ever since it started, life became a massive blur...

[venndeezl]

We built?

You mean innumerate and STEM ignorant politicians manipulated by tech bros high on their own supply financially engineered into existence?

Poverty wages everywhere except tech jobs was intentional. Ignoring the externalities like reliance on sweatshop labor and sacrificing diverse skills development was intentional. Little different than what they are doing with the ICE hiring bonus.

They got employees to go where they wanted; not operating from a diverse playbook: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...

Offshoring the late 90s and 00s was 100% meant to protect Intel, copyright; this isn't anything we did. Broad strokes were gamed out 2 decades ago.

The elder politicians don't want Americans in a position to win. They didn't want the risk of open compute production thriving in America; back in the 00s Napster made the threat to their IP and copyright schemes obvious.

They want political serfdom, fealty to elders delusion about themselves. We did little but follow orders because what choice did we have?

I am not owning this circus.

[tac19]

If you think there is ever any other outcome for a democracy, you are part owner in what we built. Corruption and capture are inevitable, and blaming the particular politicians in power today, misses the point. They're only in power because at every step along the way, we the people happily swallowed beautiful lies in exchange for the "freebies" that trickled down to us.

If you imagine we just got unlucky with the _wrong_ people in power, you haven't yet learned the real lesson, and are doomed to support the entire thing continuing, or being reborn in new form.

[venndeezl]

You're putting words in my mouth. I never said anything about unlucky. I said broad strokes were intentional. Does that sound like I view it as something akin to gods will?

Am almost 50. Was in the room being told I had to help offshore others jobs. That's why I claim this was no accident.

I like how you make it a character problem of the masses! How dare they not know things intentionally kept from them! How dare they select the subset of dumb options.

Media intentionally kept people like Chomsky and others off the airwaves to keep control of the narrative, but damn gen pop! They should have known!

You going to sell me on Intelligent Design next?

"Us"? Don't lump me into this. I’ve been mocking tech bros and software startups the whole time. Low skilled, know nothing work. I started in EE. I look forward to AI that organizes machine states without software engineer middle men inserting their preferences on me.

[tac19]

You've just made my case for me. It's why democracy can't work. Because the people who vote in the evil politicians don't (and really can't) know enough to make an informed decision. All those middle men you hate, get a vote too. The problem is not the politicians, it's the system. It's the belief that big brother will take care of us. It's the mistake of thinking you can just vote in "the good guys" and give them extraordinary power, and they won't get a knife in their back and be replaced by bad guys... who inherit all that power we forfeited.

We need to look at ourselves, and the dream we've swallowed. It's not going to get better by voting out the current crop of criminals. There is a never-ending line of equally corrupt applicants, right behind them. The entire system has been subverted. There's no fixing it.

[lobf]

What's your alternative?

[tac19]

I don't have one, nobody really does. But the blind belief in, and search for, some utopian society is what needs to die. Reduced expectations, less ambitious goals, and a renewed reliance on small local communities.

I'm not hopeful we will actually break out of the spell of modern big-government before we're surrounded by famine and rubble; but the seed needs to be planted now. Trump (and worse) is the logical and inevitable outcome of delusional self-indulgence, treating the state as an endless piggy bank, and knight in shining armour. It's just handing our fate over to the psychopaths, on a silver platter.

For whatever it's worth, working together in small groups ("prepping") is probably the best practical option we have as individuals and families. Building skills and local communities.