People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
The real brain melter was the societal culture shift.
I grew up witnessing "the end of history" with my own eyes. People were getting wiser and kinder year after year, decade after decade. It was like a feedback loop of positive changes, the only way was up.
Then 2010s hit and I'm still processing the 180 degrees shift. I read dozens of books about nazis, authoritarianism, societal memory, cults, fucking roman empire. But I still have cognitive dissonance every time I open news feed.
The real brain melter was the societal culture shift.
I grew up witnessing “the end of history” with my own eyes. People were getting wiser and kinder year after year, decade after decade. It was like a feedback loop of positive changes, the only way was up.
Then 2010s hit and I’m still processing the 180 degrees shift.
Fucking thank you! This has been hard for me to put into words. (I'm on the older end of Gen-X)
Facebook and unregulated social media. Up to now most governments in the world don't even have a clue or idea that the internet is a very powerful tool that should actually be regulated because there are very evil people who will always act in bad faith to manipulate others for power and control. The Golden era of the internet is definitely over, I think 2016 was a defined shift that will be recorded by historians.
I feel both cuddled and attacked
I stood in line for VHS tapes. I also know that the blockchain is slow as hell and that cryptocurrency is glorified gambling for people with too much money - and I had a friend in the early 2000s that was trying to make a Bitcoin exchange.
The Bitcoin network initially went online in 2009. Was your friend a time traveller?
Time gets wonky when you get old. You'll be surprised too when stuff that you were certain happened at a specific point in your life, that you remember it alongside so much else from that era, seems to turn out to be a chronologically misplaced memory from years later.
Can confirm, am getting older and making the timelines from my teens and early 20s make sense is getting harder and harder.
The “2000s” also has no meaning for defining a specific time period. It should mean 2001-2010, but I’ve also never heard anyone seriously refer to 2011-2020 as the “teens” and 2021-2025 as the “twenties.” Those words are already associated with decades that we still culturally reference.
We’re a quarter of a century in and I still don’t know how to precisely refer to a 21st-century decade.
A slightly different example of the wonky-ness of time is that 2016 was… Almost 10 years ago.
I'm not even old and this has happened so many times, I think about something random I think was only a thing after 2021 but turns out I had been using it since 2018.
But crypto is borderline useless that consumes more electricity than the entire AI industry while enabling alot of illegal activities and money laundering. I was quite susprised when my drug money found their way into normal people's lives.
But crypto is borderline useless
As decentralized money it's great. Even central banks are making their own crypto. It's a great technology for supply chains.
that consumes more electricity than the entire AI industry
AI and cryptocurrencies consumed around 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity
Bitcoin is estimated at 155 TWh per year to 172 TWh per year
while enabling alot of illegal activities and money laundering.
Given the public and immutable nature of crypto, it's a really bad way to do anything illegal. In 2024 Illicit volume dropped to USD 45 billion, down 24% since 2023. This represents 0.4% of overall crypto transactions
As decentralized money, it's great
It's not money. It's not accepted as money anywhere that matters.
It's a market speculation vehicle built on the fucking aether, that you can currently sell easily enough in small quanties in order to get some actual currency that retailers will accept.
But it sure as fuck ain't money. It's just a bunch or techno-utopians huffing farts.
It's not accepted as money anywhere that matters.
You can buy houses and cars with crypto.
It's a market speculation vehicle built on the fucking aether
Heard of futures, options and swaps? Aren't they equally built out fucking aether.
But it sure as fuck ain't money
It is accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts.
Most of the kids I know who have this attitude would also call IT if they accidentally opened the Command Prompt or BIOS.
It's not "brain melting". Even watching the internet go from "this is super neat, and way cool" (For nerds) to "Well, it's ALL going through enshittification now" wasn't "brain melting", it's just what happens under capitalism.
Going from seeing nothing but possibilities when I heard about some new device or software coming out to dreading what they are going to remove or break has been one of the most depressing parts about my life.
Hell, I was looking to replace my 10 year old mouse last weekend and couldn't find one that was equivalent or better. I even asked people who were more into computer shit than me and I felt like I was taking crazy pills reading their responses. I ended up just fixing the problem myself rather than replacing it.
elders
1990
I don’t expect them to understand crypto. No one expects them to understand crypto.
I expect them to understand FUCKING FASCISM.
Is so crazy to explain people I played games in an spectrum in 1987 back when many didn't knew what a "computer" was in my country cause like less than 10% of the people in my country. And now you put a helmet and you're inside the game!
Apparently I'm an elder.
The shifts in tech were easy.
It's the repeated economic punishment, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and political dive bomb this country has put us through that's been tough.