It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive
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Notes -
Bullying hasn’t gone away either. We may also be seeing a trade off between physical bullying and cyber bullying.
Something about the immediate and stark reality of an unsupervised playground seems to me to be painful but brutally honest in a way that is a microcosm of actual life in future meatspace.
(For reference I was in HS and university in the 90s. I’m not a gamer, I like 70’s 2-channel audio, and i don’t have twitter, so for me “online” is work, bills, and escapism. I don’t “live” here the way I think many younger people do)
I can’t imagine how terrible cyber bullying must be by comparison to what we had to endure in the 90’s for people who are invested in virtual life. Online the social signals are so complicated and the separation or anonymity imposed by screens brings out the worst in people. If this is a microcosm of the developing future societal order - social credit and AI - I feel somewhat sorry for those who don’t know what life was like before all that.
Also - the 80s were an awesome time to be a little kid.
I share the same concern, actually. I was fortunate enough to experience both physical and online bullying. Both were deeply humiliating, but at least with the former I could have theoretically done better standing up for myself.
Forcing people to risk getting their ass kicked when being a piece of shit is important.
My original comment, though, was trying to convey that for all the woke crap zoomers have swallowed hook line and sinker, I think that there's a lower tolerance for "dumb" bullying. I'm reminded of 21 Jump Street where calling someone a fag for dressing well isn't considered acceptable anymore. I miss being able to call people that name, but I also won't bemoan the loss of some of it.
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