Like what
A complete lack of strategic, long-term thinking, of preserving any kind of survival tactics during bad times, lack of people to guide you through normal issues in your community, etc.
However, I don't recall many, if any, people over 30 around. It was very much like one of those stories where everybody above a certain age is wiped out. Hence my affectionate dubbing of us as feral children.
A lot of our cultural problems come from the fact that we have millions upon millions of people who have gotten online in the last 10 years and a new generation that's grown up in a radically different information paradigm. There are just way, way fewer 'adults/elders' than 'kids/novices' online, and since so much of our lives and culture have moved online, it's a shit show.
I'm 34 and I was one of the first people to be raised with the Internet in the modern sense: I had continuous, assumed, free (in the sense that I wasn't censored) access since I was 4, but among my cohort there's very few of us. Even people who did access the Web in the 90s as children often didn't have a modern experience: Most other online Millennials had to access the Web at school, with adults looking over their shoulder or had some really strict controls that were more possible before everybody had a smartphone and the time they could spend online was restricted (you had to have some really nerdy parents to pay for unlimited Web access in the 90s). I tried deriving approximate numbers once and on the high end there MIGHT be a couple thousand of people my age with experience/context to offer advice to current younger people. And the numbers get worse as you go older: Before at home Web service existed, the only people who could really grow up online were academics' kids. So you're getting into 3 or even 2 figure numbers if you go back to Gen X.
SOME of the gay men survived, there just weren't enough of them to be an actual generational resource.
Same thing: There ARE people out there with the socio-cultural knowledge, but there's about ~5000 of us compared to over 100 million relative newbies, based on American numbers. Luckily, the numbers should level out as the 100 million newbies grow to have 20+ years online and start growing a culture and heuristics to deal with it.
There's also that, much like the current generation of gay 30 and 40 somethings, that those of us who were in the first few generations of kids who grew up in the digital age (and therefore have a first-hand understanding of how your informational models evolve differently through puberty, adolescence, young adulthood, etc) had zero guidance when it came to 'pay attention to these things; future generations will care' since most of the adults online pre 1995ish were mostly just there to play with computers or be nerds.
And all we've been doing for decades in that space is making things that onboard the newbies a little better. Now when something new and hyped launches, a bunch of people run in and claim the space speculatively, like a land rush(or maybe crypto mining, for an updated analogy). Their intuition is that they have to "win" at social media and get a high score, and there isn't a strong enough group of elders to add perspective and suggest that they need to define their goals independent of the platform, so they just roll over and succumb to whatever the algorithm is pushing that day.
Likewise, there's a stereotype of an intense party-drugs-hookup culture in the gay scene. But the one time I remember speaking at length with elders of that community, it was in a much more toned down party with literary readings, instrumental recitals and cake. And I think that's kind of suggestive of what a healthy culture is, really: it's the part that can survive to old age, which by its nature means it is usually a little more buttoned-up than what a young person craves.
Yup. The ratios are just bad. On the 'understanding the impact of living on the digital world on one's life stages' aspect, we're looking at ratios of about one elder per 20,000 students at best. Then consider of us 5000, there are plenty of variables that might mean somebody can't help teach. Either they have no education background, aren't people people, aren't alive anymore (RIP Aaron Schwartz), or can't understand the average person's life experience well enough to offer any practical advice (I can't see Zuck having many good ideas here; he's too busy exploiting the situation for personal gain).
Which is another problem: The people who would be most helpful for this particular problem are those in the 5000 kids/earliest adopters who spend the most time around normal people (as opposed to academia or SV), because they're going to have the best ideas of how to adapt the digital world to work for the average citizen who has to work around things like trying to keep up with tech while raising 3 kids and working 2 jobs. But those people are also the group with the least resources, time, and ability to find each other.
I'm surprised it isn't more of a shitshow, honestly.
> And I think that's kind of suggestive of what a healthy culture is, really: it's the part that can survive to old age, which by its nature means it is usually a little more buttoned-up than what a young person craves.
I'd expand this and say a healthy culture can be transmitted and has something to offer for different stages of life. Which is where I think geeks have some issue: Because we're so forward thinking/future oriented + our greater social acceptance is so new, we don't even conceive of ourselves as being a culture, and we can be kind of disdainful of tradition and history efforts.
- Some people (mostly young people - people below the age of ~25) believe that being 'gay' or 'lesbian' is about gender (e.g. a woman attracted to a pre-op trans woman can still be a lesbian, but a woman attracted to a trans man wouldn't be). Others (mostly older people) believe that being 'gay' or 'lesbian' is about sex (e.g. a woman attracted to a pre-op trans woman is bi but a woman attracted to a trans man can be a lesbian).
Honestly, I think we should just have different terms for each. It's clear that there ARE large amounts of people attracted to (basically) either femininity or masculinity as opposed to bodies, so why don't we make a term for that just like we did for lesbians and gay men? That's what humans do.
The main thing I'm concerned about is how mean the young people are to those who don't agree. It doesn't impact me much, but I do worry about the messages young homosexuals are getting from their peers: There's a large conflation of being attracted to someone with moral approval which is...gross. Basically 'if you're not attracted to trans people, you're a transphobe.' Which isn't how any of this works, but teenagers listen to their peers because developmentally, that's what they need to do.
The person replying to you isn't correct that they want to 'change' the definition, though. It's more that we (the queer community) didn't bother nailing down which definition it was when the queer community was small enough that the issue rarely came up, but now it does and it turns out a lot of us disagree.
That's as neutral a run-down as I can give you. The person replying to you is on the 'it's sex based' side of the fence and I get the sense they're testing out whether they can discuss such things here, since a lot of queer/gay spaces online have very much Chosen A Side, and since the internet is full of young people and they have more time, it's mostly the young people's side.
There are an awful lot of things that people are really bad are learning from books, and only slightly less bad at learning from people.
"Kill the Indian, save the man" - the statement has been attributed to Richard Henry Pratt, an Army officer who developed the Carlisle Indian School
Now, we are dealing with elders dying (even when fully vaccinated[2]) that has created holes in our language, history, and cultural teachings. We have been trying for years to document everything, but living examples are so much better.
0) https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/indian-boarding-school-... - 'The report notes the investigation will likely "reveal the approximate number of Indian children who died at Federal Indian boarding schools to be in the thousands or tens of thousands.”'
1) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57325653
2) Tribe paid everyone $500 to get vaccinated - that did an amazing job