Conservatives. I hear conservatives saying this. That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now.
I don’t know how true this fun recession is. The stats say there’s a kernel of truth to it but it’s being exaggerated, and if you talk to young people they say it’s as much about the high cost of anything as digital distraction. It’s become crazy expensive to do things in the real world.
Meanwhile if they know you can't afford to do anything other than get into trouble somewhere then your parents aren't inclined to give you a ride, so instead you sit at home on your phone.
I suspect that's because what they [0] overtly asked for was not what they actually desired. The true desire was to be obeyed, for their teens to eagerly mold themselves onto stated parental-priorities, disassociating with peers their parents had a bad feeling about, etc.
In other words, control, rather than outcomes.
[0] Here, I'm treating "conservative parents" as a persistent group identity, even though individual membership changes over the decades. The ocean-wave exists even when it's not the same water molecules, etc.
Are you complaining about 'conservatives theses days'?
If there is a wild part at all then it isn't that 'they' are saying it, but what we came to view as conservative.
In a couple of years you might find yourself in that whining bucket.
"Kiddo, every generation thinks they invented sex and fast music."
Ours are jealous of bygone music etc, but on the whole kids treat each other so much better now, I am jealous of that part for them. YMMV of course.
One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.
To me, the smartphone impressed me for a couple years, but it's just one of many miracles of miniaturization I've lived through - and less qualitatively different than, for example, personal computers or the GUI or the internet going public.
My father noticed a similar phenomenon with Rock n Roll. People younger than him saw it as a musical sea-change, but to him it just sounded like the boogie woogie music the radio already had been playing for a decade.
Back in my day, we had a separate (wired) telephone, a camera, a notepad, paper maps, a walkman, and a million other things. Now I just have a phone and it can do all that and lots more.
It's a convenience to carry around one smart phone instead of a dumb phone, a digital camera, and an iPod... but today that fills me with no more wonder than the advent of any of those three devices on their own.
Not only are they absolutely miraculous, but they're commodity products that make the miracle seem routine and mundane.
These days the smartphone doesn't fill me with awe anymore the same way many earlier and even subsequent inventions still do.
It's possibly because I could carry on quite easily without a smartphone. The greater loss would be for me to live without a mobile phone (of any variety), a computer, or a portable music player.
Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?
I mean smart phones are a great achievement, but they were an incremental improvement, nothing to be blown away by?
Listen to the audience reaction when he shows how you scroll a list view: https://youtu.be/VQKMoT-6XSg?si=OmbgSG7nmEpdAETl&t=970
It's the other way around. The iPod touch (introduced September 2007) was basically an iPhone (announced January 2007) without the phone part.
> I mean smart phones are a great achievement, but they were an incremental improvement, nothing to be blown away by?
Feature phones ("dumbphones"), even ones with cameras or music player functionality, were and are extremely limited compared to smartphones like the Palm Treo, which was basically a pocket-sized, wireless internet-connected computer with a much larger, color screen, OS and GUI, installable apps, and a tiny (but usable) keyboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Treo
Phones using DoCoMo's i-mode (which took off in Japan starting in 1999) were sort of a bridge between feature phones and smartphones. i-mode will finally shut down in 2026.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode
Smartphones also generally looked very different pre-iPhone and post-iPhone.
> "What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties," DeSalvo said. "It's just one of those things that are obvious when you see it."
https://www.engadget.com/2013-12-19-when-google-engineers-fi...
Oh, thanks, I got my history the wrong way round!
No, the iPods that were like iPhones (iPod Touch) were after the iPhone, not predecessors. The main iPod at the time of the iPhone introduction ("iPod Classic") had a small, non-touch screen in the top area of the face (except, most of the face taken up by the physical "click wheel" control, and a hard disk for storage, and other immediately pre-iPhone iPod's were basically scaled down versions of the same design (with Flash memory on, IIRC, the Nano and Shuffle, and no screen on the Shuffle.)
Probably over-analyzing this, but I can see why this might happen:
1. There's an ulterior motive of getting them to treat it safely, as it's one of the more-expensive and breakable things they might be carrying around, and they become obstreperous if it is unavailable.
2. It's probably the most immediate and tangible candidate. They probably aren't going to be around MRI scanners or cryo-cooled qubits or whatever.
Whereas if you've never used a PC, a phone is a black box. You tap the screen and it mysteriously does things. You're discouraged from trying to figure out how or make any changes to it yourself.
And if it's magic you better be careful because who knows what'll happen.
In terms of risk-taking (rather than knowledge) IMO the opposite has happened: Older generations had to worry about voiding the warranty because you held down the two buttons at the same time that the manual clearly told you never to do on page 37.
In contrast, younger folks have grown up with cheaper devices with much-improved idiot-proofing. That makes the strategy of "try shit until it seems to work" a lot more viable.
Meanwhile, older folks look on, seeing confident action and misinterpreting it as competent understanding, woefully concluding that "Unlike myself, kids these days just know computers."
That was never really a thing though. To begin with, warranties are generally pretty worthless because they cover exactly the things that don't usually happen. Power switch doesn't work one day out of the box? Covered, but unlikely to happen and probably not hard to fix yourself anyway. Dropped it and broke it? Not covered. Device is three years old and the battery is flat? Warranty is already expired.
If you haven't needed a warranty in the first month you probably won't need it at all.
> In contrast, younger folks have grown up with cheaper devices with much-improved idiot-proofing. That makes the strategy of "try shit until it seems to work" a lot more viable.
Except that the idiot-proofing is that if something is broken, you get a message that says "an error occurred" and there's no way to fix it because the brokenness is in an app you can't modify or is running on a server you don't control.
Meanwhile mashing buttons at random is more dangerous than ever because your whole life is in that device and it will readily transfer real money or send private files to people you don't want to have them or give attackers access to your accounts on various services.
From the perspective of my childhood, technology (cars, planes, phones & faxes, rockets, computers, refrigerators and other household appliances, rock music, radio, movies, television, science fiction & fantasy, the machinery of war, factories, farming, medicine, etc) were all elements of society that had advanced in technological progress, but had "always been there". I, of course, knew that there was a world before all that - my great-grandfather, who lived into his 90s and whom I got to know well, had driven a stagecoach as a teenager - but all of those had entered something like their modern form during or in the immediate aftermath of WWII, and to me it seemed like there had been progress, but not systemic change, in all the time since. It helped that all the adults around me largely saw WWII as the defining event of modern history. There was "before the War" and there was "now" (which came after the war).
Partly that was result of being born at the right time - the space program was in full swing, computers were a staple of fiction and large business but no more, the counterculture had come and gone, etc. The world really seemed like a timeless place to me as a child, and then about the time I reached adulthood, the Cold War ended, and the Internet Era arrived, and the world changed (and continued to change).
40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved millions of lives since then.
All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized
It's much more noteworthy to me how little medicine has changed than how much.
"We haven't cured diabetes" (only made massive strides in control and management and came up with whole new classes of drugs that attack root causes). "We haven't cured cancer" (except the ones we have cured, the ones we came up with vaccines to prevent (HPV), and came up with all sorts of innovative and less unpleasant treatments extending lifespan with less side effects), "Haven't cured blindness or deafness" (except for the types we have cured).
And haven't cured death...well, I guess you got us there.
But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.
“We can’t fix most damage to any organ so follow a lifestyle that minimizes it” is not a meaningful medical advance IMO.
It's not a sound assumption that everyone must either be "impressed by the progress of medicine within my lifetime" or "anti-science".
Good comment until here. This is a strawman.
There is a huge gap between the vision of what medical advances might have brought us with technological breakthroughs and what has actually materialized.
Cloning and stem cell research was supposed to let me grab a new organ whenever I needed it. Instead I’m still waiting for a poor person to get in a car wreck and be declared brain dead so they can scoop out whatever is useful.
Cancer is still killing half of my family members, just different kinds after a cancer breakthrough helped them with an earlier kind. Others are hit by strokes, heart failures, and the occasional horrific Alzheimer’s.
50 years I’ve heard doctors saying “it was just their time” as an excuse for some old person dying. The field barely has a grasp on human biology and we’re barely making inroads.
This is oft-repeated but it doesn’t pass the smell test. All it takes is a single principled academic to blow the whistle if there was any active suppression of cures or even research on cures.
In order for that quip to hold water, literally everyone involved in medical research would have to be a corrupt monster maintaining a worldwide conspiracy to keep sick people coming back for more treatments.
We are actually working on vaccines for viruses and for cancer.