Why Generation X will save the web
webdevlaw.uk
webdevlaw.uk
I was born in 1990. Facebook is not my Internet. When I grew up the Internet was a very fascinating place. Flash games, web forums, chat rooms, peer to peer file sharing of mp3 files and movies. A friend of mine had an older brother who used to give him home burned CDs with software, anime, games and other files, that the older brother had obtained via Suprnova.org and other torrent tracker sites. And me and my friends also downloaded and shared files using BearShare, LimeWire and KaZaA Lite.
So no, I can not agree with the overly simplistic characterization of millennials as thinking that Facebook is the Internet.
The tech-literate millennials definitely still shared the tail-end of the internet that gen X was familiar with. However there is also a big part of our generation that only really experienced the web through social media starting in their late teens or early twenties.
Though I might add, that younger generations have a wast different experience what the web and _beeing online_. Is for us beeing online was not a omnipresent. When you log off icq you are simply not available. Very different to Facebook messenger / WhatsApp imho.
Not saying that we are not living in the same world today but the way to experience the web is different.
But also I was for many, many hours on phone with friends (unlimited minutes). So, I'm not sure that changed much
You're an older millenial. Barely one, as a matter of fact.
The folks born 10 years after you were are in an entirely different headspace.
Zuck is a Millennial but the rest of web 2.0 is run by GenXers, no?
Well anyway, generational blame is pretty useless. Lets just try to fix stuff.
The main point I took away from this article is that the younger people today, Millenials if you will, are not used to an open internet, so they see the internet as a closed gate community, a divisive force. A completely different view of the Internet than the previous generation had. And as the younger people are the ones with the most energy to fight against what they perceive as injustices, they tend to actually dominate policy making even if indirectly, and what they see as the enemy is things like encryption and even privacy, which the previous generation saw as essential for a free Internet.
I agree completely with that, but I am not optimistic as the author is that GenXers will at some point get their act together and make the internet more open again. I believe what will happen is that the Internet will continue being this divisive force until legislation (pushed by younger people who don't know better) is introduced to curtail freedom of expression and remove all privacy in the name of justice. That will be a very different Internet and not in a good way.
Most tech company resources go to litigation and legal fees rather than research and development. They get all the money and they're given the power to read our private emails too, so they can take more money if anything we say using a computer could be portrayed in a negative light. That's the closed internet.
But the average person doesn't do any of this, I think because we're all addicted to the fake internet points, and you don't get fake internet points for writing a blog post, or making something fun, unless you post it to social media. And it's so much easier to get those fake internet points by just commenting. (Hence me writing this right now instead of getting on with unclogging the 3D printer which is what I should be doing. I kicked my Facebook addition, only to find myself here).
We can't put the genie back in the bottle. Now we know that humans are susceptible to fake internet points, that's always going to be a business opportunity for someone. We could regulate it, but I'd hate to see what that regulation would look like.
But we can, individually, go and find the old open web. Because, as you say, it's still there.
The problem with hanging out here is that I'm doing this instead of anything useful or productive, because my brain likes the feel of fake internet points.
The youngest millenials are ~26 years old, born in 1996 according to US census definition. They were already 13 when Whatsapp was invented, much older when it became popular.
Replace Gen X (avg 47 YO) with millenial (avg 33 yo) and millenial with Gen Z (avg 20 yo) and at least the premise of the article starts making more sense.
The average Gen X had no computer in their teens. Millenial had dial-up. Gen Z had iPhones. Who is most likely to care about open internet vs walled gardens?
I don't think this is true. I was born towards the front end of gen x - 1969 - and I had a vic-20 as a teen. Most of my friends, including some that were definitely not in the "nerd" circles I ran in had them. I had friends with commodore 64s, tandy color computers, timex sinclairs, etc. Our high school had macs and my jr high had TRS-80s.
By 96 I had a packard bell 386sx that came with dos but ran windows. AOL was a thing and it was a very, very different world than dialing up BBSs on my vic-20 as a kid.
I don't know how much I agree with the author's premise, I would need to think on it more. But I think at least from the perspective of people my age - there is definitely a big difference between how we grew up and what was available compared to millenials. I didn't own my first cell phone until after 2000. By the time the first millenials were 10 in 2006, 77% of people in the US had cell phone subscriptions. By the time they were 15 in 2011 it was over 95%.
I think the article's tone is problematic and some of the assertions but I also feel some agreement in terms of how I emotionally viewed technology and the possibilities it brought compared to when I talk to younger people now and how they see it.
Blame is useless but I can’t help but think about the possibility of a generation-specific tax. For example, you’re 80 and lived through the period where global warming was tipped beyond the point of no return?
Boom, 10% increased tax to pay for it so the burden isn’t put solely on the younger generations to solve the older’ lack of concern for the planet.
I personally believe that things will get worse before they get better. The momentum is on the side of the young people. The western world is already moving closer to the Chinese model -- that's been in progress for years.
Eventually there will be a backlash. And I think open distributed protocols, such as content-centric networking, will play a part.
But unfortunately, I would not be very surprised if the younger generation had to learn the hard way about the importance of things like freedom of expression. And as the author says, they are in the driver seat, in some ways, and we will all be dragged along for the lesson again.
Ultimately, there is a cultural imbalance that will need to be adjusted. But the adjustment is not what young people think it is. There is no truth fairy that can wave a wand and make all the bad facts go away. And appointing truth fairies will be deadly.
The culture has a tendency to enthusiastically distort facts to support one extreme political perspective or another. The answer is not censorship. The answer is to change the culture so that tendency which is practiced by all sides is no longer tolerated.
It's a subtle and difficult thing that humans may never get right. But there is a difference between open, nuanced and honest debate and the hysterical polarized rhetoric that is typical, and a difference between nuance/integrity and censorship.
To me both the east and the west have taken extreme cultural stances that are missing that subtlety.
Younger people use technology a lot, but what is being used tends to require much less understanding of any of the underlying tech. The level of abstraction is a lot higher now.
How many times do I advise: "Just unplug it and plug it back in."
P.S. for non-digital electronics, the cold reset doesn't work.
P.P.S. My skill at writing programs took an enormous discontinuous leap forward when I learned how transistors worked, how to wire up a transistor to make a flip flop, and how to hook up flip flops to make registers, adders, etc.
At a certain point of specialization and advancement it no longer seems productive use of your time to try to understand it, leading to large portions of the population who view the technicians holding things together as inscrutable magicians.
Awesome, I was looking forward to Kafka running on EC2 instances.
It makes some sense to bring up in a TV advertising perspective context, where the first thing you can target is a general age group.
If you try to break the world down this way, you just end up with a vague, soft, pile of BS.
Maybe the generational framing is not ideal but there's definitely some value in talking about people born within this particular era because it's so incredibly different from the eras before it in many complex and deeply interconnected ways.
That said - I see the author's point about how we grew up with a sense of the wide open possibility. There is a feeling I had as a teen that this new world of computing made anything possible. I had posters of EA devs up on my walls and my friends and I wrote our own games that we played.
As things moved along and dev tools got expensive I lost some of that optimism until I ran into FOSS in the early 00s. That reignited the whole thing for me. But I think it will be a constant battle against many forces to keep open platforms, tools and networks. At the same time I think regulation has to be a part of it. It's a balancing act like so much of life.
I think the key is finding how it impacts the majority of people and helping them understand why it matters to them. They may not understand technical or philosophical arguments - they need to see the real impact on their daily lives.
It's more than that. We think of the Internet as something separate from the Web.
This is really a cultural problem, not a technical or political one. And given how cyclical culture seems to be, I have little doubt that in a few years we'll swing back to a rich federation of independent services and content.
Software engineers never united or created any meaningful professional organization, so it let the organizations with the most money create platforms. To SW engineers, “union” or “trade org” was a dirty word even back in the late 90s (I remember vividly arguing on forums even then).
Today, it’s the FAANG companies that dictate things these days, which unfortunately includes the worst of the worst.
Gen-X was also naive, because it never considered that the internet would become so ingrained or essential so quickly; indeed, it was more incremental until the iPhone and Android.
Therefore it also never seriously considered bad actors manipulating walled gardens and creating echo chambers, as an open internet meant that ideas (including bad ones) would flow BOTH ways.
Finally, it never gave any credible thought to what a a highly accessible internet would do for local/regional/national journalists. This above all else I feel hurts us the most, because it lets bad actors get away with so much.
So if there’s one thing I feel we must solve first, it’s to help revive the journalism field; and I feel ongoing help from software engineers (as a whole) is a must.
The intimate and memorable communities and experiences are out there still, you just have to go looking for them. Isn't that in the spirit of the old web, anyway?
The longest living and most "alive-feeling" multiplayer gaming communities form around games with moddable, dedicated servers.
I'm 32, grew up in a non-western country and my experience with the internet was much like the author's, because well, DSL was always mighty expensive around here.
It’s about why Gen Xers think they are well suited to do something that no organized group is planning, or executing, on.
Very self congratulatory, and absolutely no meaningful call to action.
On that topic I found "The Fourth Turning" very interesting - although I do not subscribe to the conlusions of that book.
I'm a millennial and definitely experienced most of this. Maybe not the magazines and payphones, but still.
Even so, I appreciate the open web sentiment even if the generational patter is unhelpful..
By the time GenX grew up, the boomers in charge had stopped selling drinks in refundable glass bottles and had shut down all the high street grocers etc.
It was GenX and Xennials who did this to the web and then started blaming younger folk for not having their own hand-coded Geocities page on a webring.