Gen Xers and older millennials want to go back in time to before the internet | Hacker News Reader

Gen Xers and older millennials want to go back in time to before the internet

fastcompany.com

10 pointssmitty1e14 comments

I've been using the internet for 35 years so no I wouldn't. These cries seem more like disgust with the present garbage that is on the internet but it wasn't always a dumpster fire like it is today. Folk who "live" on their phones need to put them down. It's a battle for willpower I guess.

The world was more humane when it was slower. Everything took longer, it gave you some breathing room and time to think.

I saw a placard yesterday in an upscale cooking store: "My kids asked what it was like growing up in the 80's. I took their phones and turned off the Internet." There was still connectivity (email and IRC burned a lot of time) but no social media and USENET/Arpanet was still rather restricted.

Speaking as a Gen X'er myself, this does not resonate with me. Sure, I feel some nostalgia for the "older days" here and there, but who doesn't? But to wholesale abandon the Internet and modern tech? Hell no. For the downsides that exist, there are - by my accounting - an at least equal number of upsides (or rather, an equal magnitude of total upside, regardless of how you chunk that up).

Give up Wikipedia, ArXiv, Youtube, HN, the EEVblog forums, the StackExchange network, the convenience of online shopping, (Netflix|Hulu|Prime|Max|etc), MUDs, Github (and before that, Sourceforge), and on and on and on and on... No freaking way.

The poisonous aspects of the internet could largely be alleviated by going back to dumbphones. I don't think you would have to change much else. Having the drug in your pocket at all times is what's making society sick. There wasn't a real problem during the desktop era.

There were always shut-ins and recluses, even prior to smartphones going mainstream. We had suicide cults, publicly open pedophiles, microwaving animals et al in the '90s, and we had World of Warcraft in the early '00s, and people still used MySpace et al.

Not saying you're wrong, but I am saying that where there's people, there's problems.

If there wasn't "the internet", it'd be happening in public. You used to get way more mentally ill folks coming up and talking to strangers about what was making them paranoid, now you get them on Twitter.

Back to the stone age! Might as well give up on electricity too. I never understand these generalization articles either.

From my perspective, the best of the internet was probably mid-late 00’s before FB/social media became omnipresent. Before the web became mobile optimized.

One thing I probably couldn’t live without though would be Uber/Lyft. Transportation was a real pain before that.

I have zero desire to ever have to live in fear of getting lost again, or buy something that is crappy because it looks ok in the store, or have to use a dedicated MP3 player, or not have a camera with me all the time..

But I remember a lot of pretty amazing things in the pre-smartphone era, even computer related things. People would camp out on launch day for consoles and do LAN parties, now, nobody seems excited enough for that. Gaming culture is more about... talking shit on the chats. I mean it was always about that but it used to be a lot more.

But getting rid of phones wouldn't be enough to bring back everything we lost. We are on our phones because the present moment is no longer somewhere we want to be, and we don't change that because either we don't currently have the ability to, or because the phones mean we don't really have to, the same as some people who get really into weed can accept a fairly empty life and never get bored.

They're kind of experience machines in real life, but they're not really pleasurable enough to recognize as such. I think we should start with the "What do we want to do instead of use phones" part rather than getting rid of some fairly useful devices.

I do kind of want to kill endless scrolling+dynamic recommendations, with a comically excessive amount of fire.

And I think tabletop gaming is mostly best left tech-free unless the setting itself is scifi, which is part of why I prefer lighter systems that are more story focused and don't make people feel the need for an app.

>We are on our phones because the present moment is no longer somewhere we want to be

I would correct this to "no longer somewhere we have to be".

We were in the present moment because we were forced to be.

That's how it seems to go: people only do stuff that they themselves report wanting to do if they're actually forced to do it. See personal trainers.

I'm 45 and I think this headline is total nonsense.

How do Harris Polls work? If it's asking mainly Americans who use Facebook and answer unsolicited phone calls, then that's a particular sample that is not representative of the whole.

I was always fascinated by the internet as a kid as soon as I found out about it, just as much as I was with microcomputers.

I guess there are a lot of social media things that I never totally figured out though. Like most of them. Probably still don't really understand HN even. But love to ramble on here.

But also the headline is misleading if you read the article.

I clicked on the article and read it though so maybe that's the whole point of what seemed to just be a poor article and headline.

I suspect that some Gen Xers may be more enthusiastic about certain aspects of the internet or technology such as AR and AI since we have the perspective of previous versions being so relatively weak. So the new stuff is exciting in comparison.

Whereas for kids, I suppose some of them may be disappointed or unimpressed due to really high expectations for technology.

More like to a time before the multimedial derangement; when we thought this thing would generally advance (Western) civilization on an individual level. Well played consumer industry and China, anyway!