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Comment by burger_moon | Hacker News Reader

> I think this is the WWI of our generation

That's a weird analogy, could you explain that further? I don't really follow how living months in cold wet trenches, watching your friends get killed everyday and killing enemy soldiers relates to social media addiction?

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Before WWI, I don't think the world had yet grasped how horrifically effective industrialized countries were at killing enemy combatants. Not just killing either, but being able to sustain bloody conflicts for a very, very long time (being able to "take a punch" - to coin a phrase from Dan Carlin). WWI had many battles that individually had more casualties than entire past wars - it was shocking and it changed people's perception of war.

I think the parent poster is referring to the technological explosion that preceded WWI, where social conventions about how war ought to be waged had yet to take into account the ruthless efficiency of modern warfare (tanks, cars, radio, telephone, submachine guns, planes, chemical weapons, flamethrowers, indirect-fire artillery). It was a 19th-century war fought with 20th-century technology; similarly, current generations are trying to reconcile 20th-century methods of social organization with 21st-century tech. I don't get the impression that they were literally trying to compare the experience of fighting in WWI to being on Reddit.

Right there! It's the acknowledgment that a tool that is thought to be beneficial can have some extremely devastating outcomes.

There's a few replies to this already but I see a missing piece. We're traumatized as a generation. And our social networks have taken damage we're just beginning to understand.

Previously, survivors of wars were fairly small populations. Our great- and great-great-grandfathers were in that war. Not a few, but a major fraction. Not just in one country, but in many.

The world had never seen that sort of trauma before. It shook our cultures to their foundations, as male role models either disappeared altogether or came back with PTSD and no support structures.

It's all very different, of course. But I grok the analogy.

That wasn't what I was going for. But it's an interesting description of not realizing the effects until after the thing has caused significant damage.

The analogy is that human lives are wasted. Karma whoring for years is no more productive than killing enemy soldiers. He doesn't see his friends get killed because he didn't have any in the first place.

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