• maegul (he/they)@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    It’s an interesting question IMO. It’s basically a trope of aging to remember how great things were when you were young that we can’t really trust it (especially in the “OK Boomer” era). But sometimes (often arguably), things are actually lost and mistakes are actually made. So digging out that information can be interesting and helpful IMO, even you’re only starting with impressions and experiences and feelings.

    For me, as a 90s kid, it’s the constant internet rage and catastrophe. Not to discount taking serious issues seriously and being informed and active. Not at all. But the whole thing of doom scrolling a feed and getting dopamine from “bad news” then echoing it into the echo chamber you’re part of.

    Pretty sure it’s mostly a rubbish phenomenon.

    In a similar vein, the whole Daily show comedy news thing is likely ineffectual in actually altering anything about politics as it’s almost always “the other side is dumb” (and sometimes “our side” too LOL).

    Also, I was never a Twitter person, but I see a lot of people claim that important political things happened on twitter (and some of those are trying to recreate the same structures on the fediverse and other alt-social). I’m skeptical of all of that. Which isn’t to discount the value of organising communities online, I just don’t trust that much good came out of twitter or that there was a net benefit of the total system.

    Interestingly, I wonder if the new tiktok generation is going to do better or more interesting things. I saw a tiktok event nearby recently, it runs regularly and it’s basically a dance jam. Random songs/clips get played over an audio system and the group of people “jamming” all try to remember the accompanying dance moves on the fly. Awards are given out at the end and the whole thing is recorded presumably for twitch or something. I’m no tiktok or dance person but it seemed like a whole lot of fun and, interestingly to me, was happening in real life.


    The other thing is that I think music streaming was/is probably a bad idea. It’s hard for me to be object about this as your relationship to music changes as you age, but I think there’s a demotion of the role music plays in my life by putting it all into a streaming smartphone. Even the basic physical things of having booklets or liner notes and cover art that you could hold and read go pretty far (and also, how fucking dumb is it that streaming doesn’t have digital equivalents for albums??!!)


    Lastly … housing. JFC we/boomers have fucked this up. And like the ozone layer or some other environmental damage it will take a while to clean up.