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Comment by llm_nerd | Hacker News Reader

Someone who entered their teens in the early 00s talking about being "pre-internet" is really something. Beside the weird "woke in my guest house" flex and the bizarre take on how to explain the internet, I just cannot comprehend how this piece is doing as well as it is on here.

I suspect a lot of people are clicking up arrow because they reminisce about blogs or something, because it seems unlikely the actual content is yielding this support.

There is a pummelled, low rated post that says this is "pretentious and stupid", and I'll take those same lumps and agree with them. This reads like the sort of fevered word dump of quasi-enlightened noise someone writes when they're a bit high and think their takes are brilliant.

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Yeah, I don't think, being born in 1989, he had much of a perspective on the pre-internet world. What was he, 8 or 9 when he started using the web? That raised an eyebrow for me too, but I didn't want to call it out. There's always some older grognard waiting, ready to step in and tell you they were using the internet on an acoustic coupler in the basement of Xerox PARC before you were a gleam in your father's eye. And even that isn't much to brag about anyway. Not as cool as having a guest house, even.

In terms of the value of the post: I liked the metaphor of a blog post being a search query for human contact, so I got something out of the post. On the other hand, I've been running the same blog anonymously, with no contact information or social media sharing, and all bot indexing and commenting disabled, since this author was 11. So, I can't agree that what he's saying is always true. Bah, humbug!

I'm probably, like you, part of the "older grognards" compared to the piece's author, but I would venture the idea that 2000 is still "pre-web" for the general public.

I think most of the general public don't remember a web pre-YouTube (2006) or pre-Facebook (2008-2009).

So I think for most, "pre-internet" is not "right when Google came out as Yahoo's search partner" but closer to "right when I created my first public online profile".

> Yeah, I don't think, being born in 1989, he had much of a perspective on the pre-internet world. What was he, 8 or 9 when he started using the web?

Maybe if he's from the US? In Romania, in my home town, we had our first internet caffee when I was 12 years old, around the year 2000. Two years later, I had shitty internet at home, and 4 more years later we had the best internet in Europe (for a while).

I'd believe any 80's kid, living in post communist countries, that they've grown in the pre-internet era.

In the article, he clearly brings up this fact in the context of his generation—the people born around 1989—not about how he's a special case.

“I am of the last generation who will remember the time before the internet” means “many people in my generation [and no later generation] remember a time when the internet was not a meaningful presence in our lives” — which is true for those who spent a substantial portion of their childhood before the internet was used by practically everybody. So I don't see what's the objection to it.

And what you're calling “weird” and “bizarre” is exactly the author's point about writing to be niche and specific, in contrast to “Writing for a general public, you need to be broad and a bit bland”.

The writing is pretentious, but the post has several interesting insights, and you have not engaged with any of them.

Write for your desired audience. That's the insight.

Alright, sorry you didn't see the same things in it I did.

Or, write what you find interesting, and your audience finds you.

I got through the first couple paragraphs. I would say the writing is bad, and self-satisfied, but not as bad or as self-satisfied as you say.

It’s just much too long. If he’d pared it down a little, it could have been quite good. His big mistake was this:

I will spend the rest of this essay unpacking those two statements.

That’s when I gave up. Two blocks of text, each with a few good ideas smothered beneath way too many words, and he says “I will elaborate.”

I am somewhat younger than the OP and while I would not say I lived in a pre-internet world I would certainly say I lived in a pre-modern-internet world, and that is a much more important border.

In 2010, a significant majority of people didn’t have smartphones. It wasn’t until January 2013 that most US adults had smartphones. The social media that we had then is a crude prototype of what we have now. 13 years ago, technology for the average person was a moderately improved version of traditional TV, mail, books, and office technology. More than a quarter of US adults in 2010 did not use the internet at all! That was a normal and fine way to go about things and you could live a typical life like that. Nowadays meeting someone who doesn’t use the Internet is like meeting someone who doesn’t use electricity! In 2010 it had not yet transformed business, shopping, relationships, life or anything really for the average Joe. Now it affects every facet of our society and absorbs every moment of attention we have. For your average person, their phone is where they meet their partner, the single physical object they touch the most, the first thing they see in the morning and the last thing they see before they sleep at night. Technology has completely transformed the entire human experience. No, I would argue that the real shift occurred around the early 2010s and what happened before was only important in relation to what happened next, which is the largest societal shift in recorded history.

He mentions he was born in 1989, so it makes sense to talk about pre internet. Till the mid 2000s the internet was not this available. Growing up we didn't have ADSL till around 2004-2005. And even then it was 512mb/s. Yes the internet was invented a long while before that, pre-internet in this context makes sense to me as time before the internet existed this widely, and at these speeds.

I think you might have picked up a magnitude there.

ADSL at 512mbit is out of spec; tops out somewhere at 24 in the best case i think

There was a huge difference between 1992 and 1994. The internet was readily available by 1995 when the author would have been 5 or 6 years old. Some people would argue that 1995 was peak-internet, not pre-internet.

Who would argue that? Most people were not using the Internet in 1995

Exactly. Everybody tired of it being September (since 1993!) would argue that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

It was available but barely had any penetration.

Notably this was pre- social media and smartphones which were the societal phase change most people think of as the line of demarcation.

A number of people have replied to me arguing that by some measure the author's claim that they're the last "pre-internet" generation is true. Some magical cutoff of saturation, whether YouTube was popular yet, smartphones, etc. The sort of qualifications that mean that every year is the new "real Internet" and everything before was just a fun and games toy and didn't really count.

One of my children, born well into the 2000s, claimed exactly the same thing: They remember when you couldn't do classes online and the pre-TikTok era, etc. They remember back when people would rail about vertical videos. It goes on and on. "Kids these days". Etc.

I was born in 85, and I definitely came of age in a pre-internet-dominated world. Maybe that extra four years makes a big difference, or maybe internet adoption among families was still widely varying, but I don't think his claim is as absurd as you think.

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