I am of Gen Z. The opposite is true, I would think. Or, rather, the truth is more complicated in both directions. It’s not true to say we’ve “grown up interconnected”, by the 2010’s, most of the mainstream culture was basically gone. You had maybe the marvel movies, but, you know, social media, the internet, kind of revealed a self-evident truth. That there wasn’t a grand a unifying “american culture”. At the very least, such a thing had been waning for a long time, but the counter-cultural movements of the 90’s could still be considered a unifying culture of gen X, and elder millennials. Lots of people watched MTV. The closest thing zoomers have is stuff like mr beast, or kai cenat, which we might all be tangentially aware of, but we’ve all become atomized, there’s a limited number of zoomers who watch that and that’s not “the culture”. There is less genuine engagement with a “the culture”, and more awareness of a variety of subcultures, of a broadness.
You know, along those lines, there’s also a lack of ability to coordinate. We can “coordinate”, yes, you can use social media to DM and communicate with other people, but you’re doing so at great risk. Basically every social media site now, of the major ones, is a fed honeypot, and you can be banned at any time for any truly revolutionary action or coordination. Your coordination is also easily trackable and visible and thus easily co-opted, corporatized, destroyed. I would’ve thought that tech literacy would’ve gone up with Gen-Z, you know, kind of along the same lines as a fish swims in water, but, you know, owing to that same metaphor, what the fuck is water, david foster wallace style. I don’t know shit about that guy other than that single joke. The kids have no tech literacy, because everything has been crafted to be easily accessible, and simplified, by the companies that now control the internet.
I think the only shot really is if the tech oligopoly is broken up, and not just in terms of regulation, like what the FTC does, but it has to be bred out. The environment and technology must change in such a way as to no longer allow those sorts of fiefdoms. Tech adoption must happen that eliminates that. Which it kind of can’t, because the technology is still subject to all the material conditions and market forces, but then we’re kind of encountering a chicken and egg problem. Fediverse is pretty good as a solution but we’ve seen limited buy-in, partially as a result of the conceit of the thing, and I think, you know, if we don’t learn any lessons from the classic internet (we won’t), we could just see some fediverse instance, a singular instance, get uber-popular, and then just kind of separate from all the others after they’ve grown to encompass the whole thing. Migrate away, bam, new monopoly, just as happened in days past.
In any case, the environment must change, tech literacy, media literacy, all the literacies must rise, and then I think we would be primed to flip the chess board. I would say that Gen Alpha might be the ones primed for it, but I think, you know. They’re all like, the true Ipad kids, that are condemned to watch youtube kids content, which is the most reprehensible shit imaginable, with the worst of millenial parenting that I’ve seen. Maybe number blocks and alpha-blocks and bluey will save everyone, but I kind of doubt it somehow, the millenials seem a little bit too fucked up to break the cycle and I kind of don’t really want to see what happens when a bunch of Gen Z parents who watch mr beast and can breathe in the polluted water start having kids. You know, I think the reaction is going to be much the same generation to generation, in terms of people who uncritically propagate the same shit, people who are nihilistic and angry at everything and take it out on their kids, and people who do their best to give the best to their kids and end up sheltering their kids in the process. I dunno. I kind of hope I’m wrong.
Also climate change is happening at a really good clip so that’s maybe a bigger priority, cause unless that gets stopped, then this is all a moot point.
I am of Gen Z. The opposite is true, I would think. Or, rather, the truth is more complicated in both directions. It’s not true to say we’ve “grown up interconnected”, by the 2010’s, most of the mainstream culture was basically gone. You had maybe the marvel movies, but, you know, social media, the internet, kind of revealed a self-evident truth. That there wasn’t a grand a unifying “american culture”. At the very least, such a thing had been waning for a long time, but the counter-cultural movements of the 90’s could still be considered a unifying culture of gen X, and elder millennials. Lots of people watched MTV. The closest thing zoomers have is stuff like mr beast, or kai cenat, which we might all be tangentially aware of, but we’ve all become atomized, there’s a limited number of zoomers who watch that and that’s not “the culture”. There is less genuine engagement with a “the culture”, and more awareness of a variety of subcultures, of a broadness.
You know, along those lines, there’s also a lack of ability to coordinate. We can “coordinate”, yes, you can use social media to DM and communicate with other people, but you’re doing so at great risk. Basically every social media site now, of the major ones, is a fed honeypot, and you can be banned at any time for any truly revolutionary action or coordination. Your coordination is also easily trackable and visible and thus easily co-opted, corporatized, destroyed. I would’ve thought that tech literacy would’ve gone up with Gen-Z, you know, kind of along the same lines as a fish swims in water, but, you know, owing to that same metaphor, what the fuck is water, david foster wallace style. I don’t know shit about that guy other than that single joke. The kids have no tech literacy, because everything has been crafted to be easily accessible, and simplified, by the companies that now control the internet.
I think the only shot really is if the tech oligopoly is broken up, and not just in terms of regulation, like what the FTC does, but it has to be bred out. The environment and technology must change in such a way as to no longer allow those sorts of fiefdoms. Tech adoption must happen that eliminates that. Which it kind of can’t, because the technology is still subject to all the material conditions and market forces, but then we’re kind of encountering a chicken and egg problem. Fediverse is pretty good as a solution but we’ve seen limited buy-in, partially as a result of the conceit of the thing, and I think, you know, if we don’t learn any lessons from the classic internet (we won’t), we could just see some fediverse instance, a singular instance, get uber-popular, and then just kind of separate from all the others after they’ve grown to encompass the whole thing. Migrate away, bam, new monopoly, just as happened in days past.
In any case, the environment must change, tech literacy, media literacy, all the literacies must rise, and then I think we would be primed to flip the chess board. I would say that Gen Alpha might be the ones primed for it, but I think, you know. They’re all like, the true Ipad kids, that are condemned to watch youtube kids content, which is the most reprehensible shit imaginable, with the worst of millenial parenting that I’ve seen. Maybe number blocks and alpha-blocks and bluey will save everyone, but I kind of doubt it somehow, the millenials seem a little bit too fucked up to break the cycle and I kind of don’t really want to see what happens when a bunch of Gen Z parents who watch mr beast and can breathe in the polluted water start having kids. You know, I think the reaction is going to be much the same generation to generation, in terms of people who uncritically propagate the same shit, people who are nihilistic and angry at everything and take it out on their kids, and people who do their best to give the best to their kids and end up sheltering their kids in the process. I dunno. I kind of hope I’m wrong.
Also climate change is happening at a really good clip so that’s maybe a bigger priority, cause unless that gets stopped, then this is all a moot point.