> I am certain they never intended to inspire a 12 year-old kid to find a better life.
i can't speak for everyone, but as one of the people writing tutorials and faqs and helping people learn to do things with free software during the period miller is talking about, that is absolutely what i intended to do. and, from the number of people i knew who were excited to work on olpc, conectar igualdad, and huayra linux, i think it was actually a pretty common motivation
as a kid on bbses, fidonet, and the internet, i benefited to an unimaginable degree from other people's generosity in sharing their learning and their inventions (which is what software is). how could i not want to do the same?
underwritten by the nsf, the internet was a gift economy, like burning man: people giving away things of value to all comers because if you don't do that maybe it's because you can't. the good parts of it still are
"the internet was a gift economy, like burning man: people giving away things of value to all comers because if you don't do that maybe it's because you can't. the good parts of it still are"
But it feels like more and more are taken over by money from advertisement. It is allways a relieve to me, find a site in the old spirit.
I'm old and fortunate enough to have gotten on the Internet in 1993, when it was smaller, more communal, and less commercial. As much as we old-timers lament the direction things have gone, there are still corners of the Internet where people still help each other, where people seek to share their knowledge freely, and help other humans, even strangers, without regard to artificial reputational or commercial gain. You just have to seek them out.
i only lament some things; others have gotten better. there's enormously more free software and better information, and disks are big enough for kiwix to be a thing. consider: wikipedia, openstreetmap, library genesis, sci-hub, the internet archive, bitcoin, stack exchange, tor, debian, termux, f-droid, and lineageos. heck, even firefox is noticeably better than lynx was when i joined the internet!
and, as i alluded to in my comment, it's not clear that people were ever purely altruistic; artificial reputational gain was always a consideration
Bitcoin can come off that list - it's real estate trading for people who can't grasp real estate trading. Cool concept when it was invented, but its net effect has been rather negative, serving to further concentrate wealth.
i don't agree, but that's probably just because you don't know what you're talking about, which is probably because you're here to do ideological battles instead of share knowledge
to post an actual argument rather than just the one-line shallow dismissals you're here for, several of the other items on the list depend on bitcoin to survive. several others will start to depend on it as soon as they are banned in the usa, probably after the next major terrorist incident. and, in my actual experience, the people who benefit most from bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies) on a personal level are impoverished venezuelans supported by family remittances from abroad despite economic sanctions by the usa
more broadly, the reason the internet is good is that sharing knowledge is a positive-sum game: the social benefit that results from sharing what you know is far greater than the cost of doing so, while it's comparatively more difficult for bad actors to do harm by spreading misinformation. it's not that nobody vandalizes wikipedia; it's that undoing and blocking vandalism is easier than the vandalism itself. this makes it possible to collaborate effectively on a wider scale than the social scaling of dunbar's number permits
unlike knowledge, though, some things are zero-sum, like the ownership of computers and houses, and the allocation of human effort to competing goals. as it turns out, having 'money', an impartial way to keep score in voluntary transactions regarding those things, is also publicly beneficial, because such 'markets' also permit collaboration on a wider scale than the social scaling of dunbar's number. money and sharing of knowledge have different strengths, so we cannot simply replace one with the other
the dramatic irony of this bears repeating: having an impartial institution for zero-sum transactions is a positive-sum outcome
a problem with money systems so far has been that they mostly depend on a central authority to regulate the money supply. this opens many vulnerabilities to the abuse of that power; the money in my pocket today buys a quarter of what it bought a year and a half ago, for example, evidently because a disproportionate expansion of the money supply made our domestic inflation here the worst in the world. and, when russia invaded ukraine, 300 billion dollars of its overseas reserves were confiscated by ukraine's allies, who were in a position to do so because they controlled the international money system—a power which, though used justly in this case, is too great to be entrusted to any potential belligerent in future international conflicts
on a smaller scale, in 02022, the canadian government froze the bank accounts of people suspected but not convicted of donating to fund a protest against some of the government's domestic policies, the so-called 'trucker's strike'. in this case, in the end, the government backed down and returned the money, but it's another clear case of structural vulnerabilities in the current money system
cryptocurrencies make it possible to have money without these vulnerabilities
when bitcoin appeared, i thought this would probably destroy civilization. now i think civilization is doing a fine job of that on its own despite cryptocurrencies slowing the collapse
Thanks, you have really raised the quality bar for discussion by combing through another user's comments and cherry-picking ones you don't like. Especially complaining about comments on political posts being political. And complaining about the same thread multiple times is chef's kiss.
The rest of your comment was only added an hour after the comment was originally posted, presumably because you realised in hindsight you were doing the thing you were complaining about. It was a good start, but you should have deleted the old comment instead of appending to it.
Brief commentary on the appended content: the blockchain rules constitute a state (as in a country/government/central authority) and it's good that there's a way to take money away from criminals, actually. Even cryptocurrency people agree, since Ethereum even forked itself to cancel a criminal's transaction once, and the post-fork chain is massively more popular.
It's simple selfishness - the people with authority to choose to fork had much more money post-fork, so they chose to fork and take the money away from criminals. In other circumstances, they are the ones having money taken away by the government, so they choose to not fork or design protocols in ways that help the government get money. No moral position is involved.
I don't agree with your assertion that pointing out that you're here to do ideological battles instead of share knowledge is the same thing as me being here to do ideological battles instead of share knowledge. I didn't have to cherry-pick anything; virtually all of your comments over the previous 48 hours when I posted that comment fit that description.
The context of your continuous hate-driven behavior, in egregious violation of both the site rules and basic norms of healthy discourse, is important information for anyone else reading the thread.
No, we cryptocurrency people don't agree. It's actually hard to get them to agree on anything. Even whether it should be under state control or not.
Labelling the ethereum fork (I assume you are speaking of the DAO) as criminal is interesting. They simply executed the contract according to the terms of code which isn't necessarily illegal. At the time, ETH was a hundredth of its current size (losing 1/3rd its value on the contract) and considered an extinction level event. The other cryptos were innovating at a rapid rate to make "the next bitcoin" and could well have surpassed ETH in market cap.
Objectively unethical, subjectively criminal activity. In 2016, it was unregulated software code during a "code is law" mentality. The regulatory agencies hadn't caught up (the IRS had laid claim in 2014 then revised in 2019).
Yes, similar reasons would justify taking your fiat away. I do sympathize with the Ethereum Classic crowd and generally agree with the code is law idea. The investors very well knew the risks.
Central control of money supply is a good thing. It helps avoid counterfeiters. It also helps make sure that we are broadly using the same means of exchange.
Crypto moves control from the state to whoever runs the tech stack or has cheap enough power to mine crypto. Which in many places is still … checks notes … the state!
Had Russia kept its reserves in Bitcoin or any other crypto, I am skeptical that the clever finance ministries of Europe and America would be unable to reach them. Moreover, the holders of these reserves haven’t sold them. They’re holding them to secure other financing for Ukraine. Which is honestly what anyone does with money they hold - they use it to invest and generate revenue.
An integrated financial world makes armed conflict more costly by threatening a belligerent’s access to markets. That is a good thing and why blockades (i.e sanctions) can be effective in shortening or ending a conflict.
your argument about 'central control of money supply' is exactly backwards. the problem with 'counterfeiters', if we look only at the facts and avoid the question-begging derogatory term, is that they can print money while providing nothing in return; that's exactly what a mint printing paper money does, as do other entities with central control of the money supply. so, far from avoiding counterfeiters, it officially licenses them. you could as well say that stand-your-ground laws help avoid murder because the killings they permit are not murder, since the law permits them
most states are unwilling to allow a foreign power to print unlimited amounts of the money they use, because this would represent a major concession of sovereignty. this ensures that almost no two countries use the same means of exchange
your argument about who has control has more merit. but you're overlooking structural differences; it's like saying that democracy moves control from the king to whoever is popular enough to get votes, or that freedom of speech moves control from the ministry of truth to whoever has enough money to run a printing press. the structural differences prevent cryptocurrency miners and exchanges like coinbase from simply inflating bitcoin into worthlessness the way my local currency has been inflated over the last year. the most extreme event we've seen along those lines was ethereum's controversial unwinding of the dao theft; nothing similar has ever happened in bitcoin, and probably nothing similar will happen in the future in ethereum or zcash
it is definitely true that russia could not have kept its reserves in bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, because the market capitalization of bitcoin was far too small to provide 300 billion dollars of liquidity if it had to sell off those reserves. that is probably still true and may possibly remain true forever. but you can bet your life that every head of state who saw that confiscation is formulating a strategy to ensure it won't happen to them; that will have the opposite effect on financial integration from the one you want
i'm skeptical about your integration thesis, though, partly because it was very popular in 01914, and partly because of the limited repercussions from the usa's completely unprovoked invasion of iraq in 02003. (arguably the invasion of the ukraine is one of those repercussions, but that hardly seems like a major disincentive to future us presidents who find tempting countries to invade!)
I'm skeptical that Bitcoin's value is strongly related in any way to Tether. The larger meta-Bitcoin point, though, is that although nobody can print Bitcoin at will (because it's open and auditable, unlike the printing of dollars) anybody can create their own cryptocurrency and print that.
On the other hand, everybody knows that, so Bitcoin's so-called "market cap" is several times bigger than that of all the other cryptocurrencies put together.
Whatever assets you keep with custodians abroad while invading a neighboring country might not be safe, irrespective if that asset is paper cash, gold, bitcoins, luxury yachts or anything else. That tells us nothing about the assets themselves, and only a little bit about how international law is practiced.
well, the specific reason bitcoin is better than gold for this purpose is that you don't have to keep it with custodians abroad in order to sell it easily. right now a more important reason that it's worse—unusably bad, in fact—is that its so-called market capitalization is too small, and the markets backing it too thinly traded, for the reserves of any country but a fairly small or poor one
that might change, but for the time being, central banks of the world are somewhat adrift in the wake of this unprecedented action
How is that different from gold? I believe central banks keeps that around for precisely that reason. Or, for that matter, the difference from paper cash or luxury yachts? All you need is to find a buyer.
Which might not be easy for yachts, and maybe not for bitcoins for the reasons you mention, but shouldn't be too hard for gold or cash. For central banks, bitcoins should be pretty similar to other assets.
(This made me curious, but I couldn't find any reference to whether any central banks are known to own it.)
generally to sell gold you either need to ship it to somebody, which poses the risk of it being stolen, lost in transit, or interdicted when crossing a border, or you need to have previously deposited it in a warehouse approved by the commodities exchange that you are trading it on, which involved shipping it to the warehouse. lme has 465 of them https://www.lme.com/Sustainability-and-Physical-Markets/Ware...
commodity metals like gold can change hands many times before ever leaving the warehouse, and so some fraction of the metals purportedly in those warehouses don't actually exist, having been stolen years earlier—an eventuality normally handled by insurance
consequently a very large fraction of the world's non-british central bank gold reserves are actually physically located in london
what's not covered by insurance is having your assets frozen by a foreign court that has jurisdiction over the warehouse 'your' metals happen to be in; historically this was not considered a plausible scenario in reliable countries, but then it happened, and now, as i understand it, nobody knows what to do. keeping your reserves in warehouses under your own jurisdiction doesn't solve the problem; it just transfers the risk to whoever you're trading with
with bitcoin, no shipping or warehousing is needed, so these risks are replaced with subtler risks related to information security
in this imf note from january https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/IMF-Notes/202... the possibility of adopting cryptocurrencies as a new class of international reserve assets is discussed, though that's not really the main point of the note. in general central bankers are extremely skeptical of cryptocurrencies, especially decentralized ones. the world bank helpfully issued a communiqué on its blog last week, entitled, 'crypto-assets: unfit for central bank reserves today' https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/allaboutfinance/crypto-assets... which mostly echoes what i've said earlier in this thread
so i would be surprised if there was any adoption of cryptocurencies as international reserve assets yet
been looking for a while. But my hobbies are either too niche or these groups aren't in the public eye to begin with. I guess that's the other issue: more of these remaining bastions are retreating off the indexable web at best to minimize spam management and at worst to avoid having all their data scraped without consent.
Much of the (true) "open source" movement / community is still all about that mentality / spirit. Much of the "hacker" / Maker crowd, too. So much of what made the early Internet great still lives on in later generations who keep that spirit alive and continue to share it with others.
People were running adsense and Amazon affilates in 2004. I visited many websites who would let you spin a wheel and send you a check if you won. Browsers would pay you to surf. Money was a big factor and you would have to go pre dot.com or the bbs world to find it. Geocities had ads. Punch the monkey was everywhere.
Google was, ironically, a reaction to how heavily ad-laden Altavista was.
Russ Alberry's famous rant about spam ruining USENET was 1998: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html and should be required reading for anyone trying to build a decentralized communication system.
> pre dot.com or the bbs world to find it
That was indeed where the good stuff was (and some of the bad stuff; BBS culture could be flamey and cliquey as well as welcoming). It was so good that an entire generation of people keep trying to build it over and over again, such as bluesky, mastodon, and the deceased cohost.
Yes, check All Advantage. It was a browser addon showing you add while you were browsing. I remember receiving a check from them (adressed to my mother obviously) when I was a teen.
i was on the internet in 01992: before adsense, before monkey punchers, before geocities, before amazon, but not before dot-com, as my references to lynx and the nsf should have told you. money was a big factor but not in the way you are describing
same year for me. I have such fond memories of those few years where you could just scour through university FTPs and websites for hours, finding so much cool (and informative) stuff. It felt like getting a peek into so many worlds I knew nothing about, and it felt limitless (especially as I was a kid at the time). Indeed, the openness and "generosity" of people online in those days set such a good example for me, that I try to "pay forward" in my daily actions and work.
kagi is explicitly not a community; it's a service you pay for. it's organized around a them/us distinction, and the users are the (atomized) outgroup, individually paying the ingroup for the service provided by that ingroup
there is nothing wrong with that; it's a perfectly good way of organizing things. but it's important not to confuse it with the relationship between, for example, linux users, any of whom is free at any moment to improve the kernel for everyone
I think you misinterpreted what I was saying. Kagi is indeed a paid service and not a community. I was saying it has a way to find small web type sites, but lamenting the fact that part of what made those sites so useful in the past was a tiny community, is gone, and probably not coming back.
That's exactly why it should be a community. Being willing to pay a monthly fee for a search engine sets a higher bar for affluence and caring about the web. So I wish they would do something like create a "Kagi Web" search engine that just consists of their websites, since I'm sure Kagi users have interesting things to say.
It feels to me like the old lovingly curated and crafted internet sites are being pillaged and displaced by a wave of AI regurgitations — with the cheerleading of "information wants to be free" advocates.
I had a discussion around this with a friend a few days ago.
They saw it as a bad thing.
But to me it's the same as before : what I decide to share on the Internet is for everyone.
If someone find a way to make money with it, it's probably because they made it more easy to find or use for users (customers), so good on them!
As someone who relies on AI quite often to work on new topics, I'm fully aware that what I get is the result of someone else's content being digested by an LLM.
With Kagi's Assistant I even got the sources if I want to access it.
If I publish some niche content that is fed to an LLM and then just one person got the answer to their problem through the LLM instead of finding my website through an ad-ridden search engine, I'm more than happy, I helped someone!
Likewise. The idea that I can elevate others like others have for me is exhilarating.
My childhood was a little bleak in some ways like the author of this post. Not as bleak. But definitely lean times, sick parents, lots of time alone on the internet.
Without that, who knows what would have happened to me. I don’t think but I know deeply that I can help others, both through my experience as a kid being helped and through my experience as an adult mentoring others.
I wish I could write more and do it better, or find some means of giving back better. People have often referred to me as “self-taught”, but the reality is that I was taught by thousands of people. I only had the good fortune that I was willing to seek out their knowledge. I’m extremely grateful for that.
I don't consider the term 'self-taught' to mean that you didn't learn from others. Before the Internet, the local library was the primary source of information. People would go spend an enormous amount of time reading and browsing books written by other people to learn a skill.
Of course, you're right. I think what I meant to say is that people often emphasize the autodidact aspect of my career, but it feels like it detracts from how lost I would have been without the combination of people generously sharing information, whether it was a tutorial or open source code to reference. It's such an incredible resource we have. But yeah, absolutely, I don't mean to claim there's no self-teaching involved at all.
Many have definitely been motivated by the wish to share information. But there also wasn't much of an alternative. If you wanted to actively learn something, get someone else to use it, or get them to share what they knew, you almost had to interact with others. Which doesn't mean there wasn't a genuine want to help others. But it was also wanting what you shared to become better. Something that was a direct consequence of many of us having experienced a scarcity of computers, software, and information. And then experiencing network effects.
That still exists in some ways. But much of the Internet is very much being gatekept. Including YouTube, Wikipedia, GitHub, Reddit, and Hacker News. There is almost no point in posting things publicly anymore because not only is the average user not genuinely interested, but they are genuinely not interested. That is why kids grow up with TikTok. Because it is one of the few platforms where you can post on almost the same terms as you consume. And thereby experience those network effects.
I've ended up enough times on the Raspberry Pi forum to understand why anyone young today would not want to go into computer science or electrical engineering.
LLMs kill stackexchange and all of the wonderful gift economy, because they replace humans in the loop with uncanny humanoids with whom it is impossible by their nature to have a real connection.
I think the next generation of popular counterculture service is going to be one which goes to extreme lengths to verify that the participants are authentic humans.
I joke but this is already has been happening for many years: email verification, captcha, pics with a customized message.. just like “AI” was present in 90s digital cameras.
>i mean, you could totally solve a problem yourself and not write it up. i did that lots of times too!
sure. that's how we shifted to a hustle culture. launch something useful, get fanbase, and then think of writing it up for marketing purposes.
but obviously the dynamic here isn't necessarily a community of like minded people sharing info. But more of a semi-captive audience interested in seeing more of the product.
no, i mean, for example, i got gnu patch to compile and work on windows nt 3.51 under cygwin, but i never made the additional effort to send the necessary diffs to paul eggert so that, if he wanted to integrate them, nobody else would have to do the same thing
LLMs are not intellence. They are not AGI. They do not have the reasoning skills of a baby. This is not something they will "grow into". No amount of additional training data in the world will turn LLMs into AGI. Any argument to the contrary is pure, 100% copium to justify the hundreds of billions of dollars industry has poured into this technology.
I also write tutorials and guides on my tiny blog because other people have inspired me with their writing. I have great memories of trying to answer a question about some obscure Unix or programming thing, only to come across some minimalist 90s style blog that had already explored those ideas. it's such a vibe when you are in the zone at 2am digging through the internet and using that resource to bang out some code.
The author seems about a decade younger than me and "raised" isn't the word I would use for myself, but I doubt I would have made it if not for the friends I made and the things I learned that way.
The thing about pulling yourself up out of a bad situation is that you learn to be usually very deliberate in how you talk about it and what you talk about. People who've never really known anything but stability in their lives tend to make a lot of assumptions they're not equipped to recognize, so it's usually just better not to create the opportunity.
If you feel you've noticed an odd ellipticality in accounts like these, the vague sense of something going unsaid, it's this. If that's all you've noticed, better not to pry.
It came up on HN recently, about how work is a place where it can be best to leave some things unsaid, because it invites assumptions about your character and capabilities that might not be true, or positive.
That isn't even unreasonable as a cultural norm, although it is that those who most firmly enforce it also cherish silly habits like saying "bring your whole self to work."
The expectation of not oversharing needs to be met by a commitment of not over-asking, but I suppose that's really too much to expect in an age so degraded that all the obligations across lines of social class are understood to run in only one direction.
> although it is that those who most firmly enforce it also cherish silly habits like saying "bring your whole self to work."
It is my understanding that about 50% of the cultural values companies prescribe to their teams are values they don't want to see adopted. Speaking up when something is wrong, open door policies, and work-life balance are the usual suspects. Continuous learning and development are also values that employees are often invited to practice, though not when there's work to do!
It's all aggrandizement with very little critical thinking about how these policies and values would actually change the workplace. And the companies often hate when they do.
> Continuous learning and development are also values that employees are often invited to practice, though not when there's work to do!
These are the things you're supposed to do on the evenings and weekends.
Honestly, I'd love it if companies took the tack of giving employees projects based on the skills they want them to develop, instead of the skills they already have.
> These are the things you're supposed to do on the evenings and weekends.
Along with "giving back" to "the community" in the form of unpaid labor. There is a class system at play where the owners and financiers--not the builders--benefit the most. And they make sure of it. They've effectively co-opted everything that made the early (mid-late 90s) Internet many of us grew up on good and turned it into a money printing machine. Acknowledging that you the worker are a skilled person worth investing resources in, rather than an interchangeable component in the money printer, would give you power they're not comfortable with you having.
> These are the things you're supposed to do on the evenings and weekends.
Hmm, I wouldn't say so. In many countries it is illegal for an employer to prescribe what their employees should do on evenings and weekends, including up-skilling. Handing out promotions based on what an employee does outside work hours would quickly lead to labor disputes and penalties.
I don't deny that employers have this expectation, but it's often another case where if they actually enacted it, it would result in fines. And even in countries where this doesn't matter from a labor law perspective, a continuous improvement grindset culture (where employees work to improve for their work duties on a significant percentage of evenings and weekends) would often lead to morale loss, employee self-neglect and burn-out. Imagine how it would feel to have responsibilities after work (spouse, kids, parents, community commitments, chores, etc) when everyone is grinding to get ahead. You'd have no career prospects, too - a recipe for disengagement. Once again, a company would not actually want the consequences of enforcing this team value.
A better value would be that the company should provide improvement opportunities for their teams (conference tickets, time off work for professional certificates, etc), but same as before - they wouldn't want the real consequences (additional time off work) for having the team actually live such values.
I don't think anyone in most companies truly meaningfully lives those values, nor do they work with these values in mind. They may be slightly swayed towards doing something in line with the values ahead of their next performance review, but beyond that - not really. And that's best for everyone, including the company.
> I don't deny that employers have this expectation, but it's often another case where if they actually enacted it, it would result in fines.
Right - it's left "between the lines". In the US - salaried employees don't have any protections here AFAIK, so even if it became formalized, they wouldn't get fines.
>Honestly, I'd love it if companies took the tack of giving employees projects based on the skills they want them to develop, instead of the skills they already have.
Has your manager actively asked you what you want to work on or do?
Not sarcasm. Where I work, they talk a big game about "we don't want know-it-alls we want learn-it-alls", and "upskilling" and all that.
But we don't get any dedicated time to actually do that training during business hours. The implication of course is that managers expect it to happen on evenings and weekends.
> It is my understanding that about 50% of the cultural values companies prescribe to their teams are values they don't want to see adopted.
Sure, same here. What I don't understand is the idea that such pervasive mendacity and self-delusion should acceptably characterize a kind of culture that anyone is expected to regard as worthy of respect.
I realize it has a lot to do with the difference between organizational desiderata and organizational incentives, or put otherwise between asserted and revealed preference. Still, this is a problem in design susceptible to methods of analysis and adjustment recognizably derived as much from engineering as sociology, and it is not a novel field; I first learned of it from books published in the 1960s. The regression in ambient knowledge since then is remarkable, not to say shocking.
I think it's thematically consistent with the lack of rigor in this field. I've been told countless times to deliver provably broken, bug-ridden shit on the premise that "it's better to deliver quickly and iterate". Similarly, I've gotten the management stink-eye from discovering (and proving by fixing it) something that was running totally broken in production for years. When nothing matters, that is when companies can get away with producing garbage, the way they go about producing it also degrades.
So I'd say the amount of attention and rigor applied to values and management principles is roughly commensurate with the amount of attention and rigor applied to product and engineering concerns. That is to say, just barely enough to get by. Yet somehow we print money...
Because that's what it's come to be about. We aren't here to serve our users, our bosses or each other. We are here to serve money and personal ambition, with "meritocracy" inhering solely in whether one serves one's own ambition or another's.
Finance is a cancer in the body of the industry. This is why we say so; this is what it does.
I once heard, in a different century, that the "modal restaurant script" differed between the US and the UK in that in the former, the waitstaff asks the diners a bunch of (to a cultural outsider) overly prying questions, while in the latter, the diners ask them of the waitstaff. Still true? Never was?
UK: the diners aren't asking questions of the waitstaff unless things are very quiet, nor are the waitstaff asking you either. You might have a bit of "where have you come from today" in the more rural pub destinations. Tipping culture is basically "high end only" or a service charge sneaking onto the bill for larger groups.
Australian who has spent time living in the US: yes, the difference is still true today between how waiters at an Australian restaurant and servers at a US restaurant interact with customers.
Waiters wait. If you need anything you make eye contact and they come over.
Servers are overly friendly and will interrupt conversations to ask if the food is up to standard, etc.
I've always thought it was due to tipping. Servers need to be active and show they're being attentive in order to get tips.
> Servers are overly friendly and will interrupt conversations to ask if the food is up to standard, etc.
The median American in any restaurant with chairs not bolted to the floor can be assumed to operate on roughly the level of a marginally clever, but ill-parented and intemperate, four- or five-year-old child. Even nice places have to deal with this, because neither the child nor the American recognizes any such distinction.
The waitstaff need you to convince them they won't deal with this with you, which you can quickly and easily do by dressing appropriately - I know, but an American would need to be told - and comporting yourself in the correct fashion you described. A place worth eating at will recognize this and leave you pretty much in peace thereafter.
I'll take even the worst, unkempt dining experience at a deep south waffle house over the treatment that europoor Parisians give to those who don't speak perfect french at even high end restaurants in the heart of Paris. Also, foie gras, traditional veal, and many other European delicacies are disgusting (ethically).
Coincidental, even the ghettos of Baltimore/Detroit likely have a higher GDP per capita than most of continental Europe, and this is validated by the increasingly hilarious US-euro monetary exchange rate.
I'm comforted by seeing lots of snapbacks and "SUPREME" printed on clothes by the five-year-old minded Americans around me, because the alternative is hollier-than-thou European mentality of 1. requiring money to use public bathrooms, 2. not giving water by default at many restaurants (and being too poor for ice when asked for it), and 3. spitting in the food of/protesting the existence of the expats/tourists/immigrants who bankroll your entire nations existence in the first place.
Reap what you sow. Watching the UK get flung deeper and deeper into its recession as a result of one of the most hilariously stupid and preventable economic self-pwns ever (brexit) is especially delicious to watch. Reminds me why we threw off our tyrannical monarchists in the first place.
> higher GDP per capita than most of continental Europe
I once read that the cost of university alone in the US explains a large part of this difference. (I cannot evaluate that claim, as I am not a trained economist.) In many European countries (there are 50!), university is nearly free, when compared the the extortionary rates in the US.
Brexit was a product of democracy, as sad as that is. Your own country is just barely holding on to it's democratic status, in the eyes of other first world nations. I wouldn't be so quick to throw stones. The US GDP doesn't seem to be getting it's citizens much in return, it's a very poor measure for a country's success and prosperity.
The dumbest thing about this post is the usual grouping of "europeans" all together as if it's one country with one set of rules, cultural values and expectations.
It's also interesting to think about it when you say bothered.
I'm super american, born and raised and now living in the western Midwest. When the wait staff talk to me, I'm genuinely interested in hearing about them. I like meeting new people, even if those people are being paid to meet me. I legitimately enjoy learning about the lives of the people I meet, even briefly.
I don't think it's a bad thing, but it is most strongly a Midwestern and Southeastern thing, and I'm from the South. Boston might give a different answer.
I'm also Australian I experienced an overly attentive waiter recently when I was eating at a steakhouse with a few friends. It felt like every 5 minutes they would come up to the table interrupt the conversation to ask something like "How are you enjoying the meal? Can I get you anything?" It was a little bit jarring because of how frequently it occurred. I don't mind once or twice but the frequency in this case seemed excessive.
Possibly it was because it wasn't very crowded and the junior waiter was trying to look busy in front of their supervisor.
Historically, in the United States, the barbershop was a meeting place. It was a place you went to talk and relax. It's weird in the modern society of fast cuts and what not.
But barbers tend to go into that business because they like talking to people. And you're right, every barber I've ever had has pried into my life. But I've also been more willing to share life experiences with barbers, and listen to their experiences than any other profession. Not sure why.
I think for many men this may be the only professional they engage whose job involves touching the body and doesn't presumptively involve pain. (Not everything a doctor does will hurt, but one wisely assumes anything a doctor does might. This does make a difference, I think.)
"Intimacy" is a word and concept much misunderstood in this culture as relating only to sex, but at root it has to do with the passage of social and personal boundaries; its root intima refers to the inside of something, and so "intimacy" more usefully describes a spectrum of closeness or a point thereupon.
In that frame, the work of a barber is very slightly more intimate than that of many professionals. I don't know whether it's for having helped create that context - nobody makes you sit down in the chair - in which folks feel a little easier about speaking of things they never ordinarily would. But if I wanted to explain the "barbershop effect" I think it's something I would want to investigate.
After a tip from hispanophone colleagues in California, I started going to their hairdresser: it was Monday only, $5 or $10 instead of $30, and that was because the girls only took 5 or 10 minutes instead of 45. That was when I learned that the traditional barbershop package consisted of, say $10 worth of haircutting and $20 worth of rag chewing.
> barbers tend to go into that business because they like talking to people.
There's someone on staff at my local grocery who once told me she likes working the register because of the human contact, so whenever she's there and there isn't already a line I head for the register instead of the self-checks.
I hadn't understood the social power of smoke breaks until my welding instructor admitted he had been convinced for the first week or two of class that I was a tweaker because, given a bunch of rods to weld, I'd disappear into a booth and not come out again until I'd welded them all[0], no matter how many smoke breaks the other students had taken in the meantime.
It's a pity that when we realised the cancer sticks[1] aren't so healthy, we just got rid of them instead of trying to replace them with an activity that also allows colleagues to down tools and socialise for a well-determined short time.
(in the Old Country, anyway: over here, many businesses have a coffee break/round of snacks at ~9 and ~16)
[0] apparently one of the prereqs of becoming a welding instructor is knowing all the places in a booth lazier students will attempt to hide their unwelded rods
Some people are against that, even if only for purely pragmatic (as opposed to moral) reasons. This is another one of those "People who've never really known [otherwise] tend to make a lot of assumptions they're not equipped to recognize" things; being in a fortunate enough position to absorb the potential blowback of a lie is not unlike the privilege of being in a position to absorb the blowback to any other choice/decision that carries some risk that that seems minor to the average person but is potentially disastrous to someone who can't absorb it.
And then there's you have to keep track of the lies, and that most people prefer to think of themselves as not the kind of person who would ever, ever gossip - which isn't the same as saying they don't.
The moral consideration carries real weight, as you note; lying in a survival situation is one thing, but this kind of problem relatively rarely meets that standard. But even if the potential moral iniquity and certain hazard is entirely ignored, the policy as a practical matter simply cannot work for long.
They just define lying such that the shielding and misrepresentation they do don't count.
Nobody brings their "whole selves" to work, let alone their "selves." I had a lot of blue collar jobs as a teenager and still pick up the occasional shift at my uncle's shop for a call-out. They're guarded but somehow also make professional office life on the west coast rn look like a pearl clutching competition hosted at a flooded blanket factory.
I think the central takeaway of this essay is dead wrong, you should aim for the exact opposite. The fewer labels or identities you have yourself, the more strongly you hold on to them and the more fragile your personality. If the only thing you identify yourself by is your job and that gets taken away from you in a downturn, never to return, what's left? A lot of people who are in that situation and don't have other selves to identify with struggle strongly. On the other hand, people who identify with more facets of what makes them them have a lot of options to fall back on. You're not only your job, but you're also a parent, a child, an athlete, a hobbyist, etc. Even if you stop being one of those things, you keep being all the rest, and that gives fortitude and resilience.
If your self-image includes the structure of the world around you, or the behavior of people other than yourself, you'll run into problems.
I enjoy working with computers. I happen to work at a particular company doing computer things. Only one of those is an innate "what makes me, me" thing. Even if computers didn't exist, I'd still probably tend to gravitate towards things that are fun for the same sorts of reasons.
And if you hit a physical or health issue that takes that away, or dramatically reduces the amount of time you can spend on it?
This isn’t hypothetical; I have worked with people who’ve had to quit this form of work for the following reasons: Carpal tunnel that prevented using keyboard and mouse, brain injury, neck injury that made it impossible to sit at a computer (or desk), long Covid and “brain fog”. I imagine that vision impairment might lead to the same.
If any of these were to happen to me, would I still have my sense of self? Are we more than our love of technology?
You say that, but it happens all of the time. Its immensely painful of an experience. Painters who lose their sight, musicians who damage their fingers, car lovers who get too old to drive... That's just the fragility of life and people deal with it in different ways. Some people overcome it, some don't. I think it's important to recognize that reality and still choose to love those things knowing full well it could all end tomorrow. Identity is composed of so many things, some we have control over, some not. Of course it's going to be a messy endeavour
I’m not suggesting that we should “pull back” from the things we love for fear of the potential pain of losing them. What I am suggesting is that the worth of a person is not in what they can do. Their identity should be more than the things they enjoy or are good at.
My grandmother is 100 years old. She has led an incredible life filled with all kinds of achievements. Her passion for reading, learning, languages and art, have all shaped me. She’s blind now, and basically deaf. She can no longer read, which is very painful for her (I can read to her when I visit). How much value does she still have? To me, as much value as she ever did.
I've imagined this future, and I did think of one possible workaround that may or may not be feasible: morse code. One of my motives for learning it is, you can "copy" morse code by any of your senses except taste. I've imagined where I may be blind, or deaf, or even both. As long as I have the sense of touch somewhere about my body at the bare minimum, and can move a finger, I could communicate via morse code. I know it sounds kinda stupid, but it's comforting to know I have that "last resort option" in my back pocket.
You would need someone who understands Morse to notice and interpret. The same dexterity can also operate a pen, and this is the option I have more often seen used.
Neither is likely to be a much richer channel than the other, I think.
I think you probably need more dexterity (and grip strength) for minimal successful communication with a pen than with Morse code, especially if you wind up trying to do both without visual feedback.
The odds of those around you noticing is something you have some power over, if you're thinking about it ahead of time.
All true, but a pen still can be legibly used in at least some such situations. I've seen it done.
I'm not saying not to plan around Morse, just that it's a little early to assume there must be no other hope - and always too early to place much faith in being able to exert control over circumstances where, more or less definitionally, this is not a reasonable thing to expect.
That probably sounds scary. I can't help that. Dying is a scary topic, I imagine likely much more so for actually doing it, which I as yet have not. But I do know some things about how to handle fear, and one is that it helps a lot when that doesn't come by surprise - when you don't have to start totally from scratch to build what equanimity is available.
Less so than any one specific response, what I'd focus on trying to prepare for is that. You can't really know what tools you will have available in such a moment. You can't really know you will have any. Whatever there is, though, you'll have an easier time to recognize and use for being able to better see past that fear.
Probably my loved ones, or a subset thereof, would make the effort to learn. Otherwise there's software that can parse it (so people can read what I send) and software that can produce it (so people can type words and generate morse code I can receive via whatever means). :)
This is way off in a tangent but that's kinda why I think a UBI won't lead to mass unemployment. So many people self identify with their work that it's almost always the first question when you're getting to know someone.
By the time I was old enough to work, I had recorded dozens of my own songs and made countless websites for fun. I made computer graphics and learned tons about computers and could fix them for all my friends and family. These were all forms of "work", valuable to others (to varying degrees), and I received zero payment for any of that. People like to do things, particularly things that benefit those they care about. Not everyone is like that, but we don't actually really need everyone to be like that, IMO.
Aside from the strong selection bias, you've also been raised in a culture that both works and values work.
Now imagine you're a third generation UBI recipient. Your parents never worked, and you're surrounded by people who don't even "work" in the way which you describe it.
At that point, I have very little hope, even for people predisposed to it like you.
>Your parents never worked, and you're surrounded by people who don't even "work"
I'm not sure that's a guaranteed future. Even today we offer subsistence living with welfare and food stamps, and nobody ever brags about not working because they're on the dole. Even if UBI is better than the current welfare system, it's not likely to be enough to support a middle class lifestyle. People will still work because they want to get ahead in life.
Yeah, this is why I still wear a KN95 mask everywhere. Losing my sharpness or ability to code and work deeply with computers would not only trash my career but utterly shatter a huge piece of my life. I'm acutely aware that one day the depthful involvement in tech (among other things I enjoy) may end, so I absolutely try to make the most of it and mitigate threats to it.
>> The fewer labels or identities you have yourself, the more strongly you hold on to them and the more fragile your personality.
Conversely, being beholden and holding onto identities that have no bearing on your success or direction in life which you believe does in fact determine those things seems equally dangerous, no?
Respectfully, I disagree. Every label or identity is yet another pigeonhole to be stuffed into and a thought-terminating cliche that reduces the complexity of one's life into an overly simplistic symbol which fails to represent the totality of one's being. Better to dispense with such coarse-grained oversimplifications and reject the notion of labelling selves entirely.
> You're not only your job, but you're also a parent, a child, an athlete, a hobbyist, etc.
You're actually none of those things. In the words of Alan Watts, [0]
The principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with
reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth, and our names
about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, with ourselves.
You are neither a job, nor a parent, nor a child nor athlete nor any of these things. That which can be named and labelled is not reality; it enters into the sphere of representation and takes us a layer of abstraction away from the base reality of what you are, of which we cannot really speak and must treat in silence (see the Tao, or the Tetragrammaton).
We exchange these names of ourselves, ideas of ourselves, language describing ourselves, with others, hoping that the full reality of ourselves will be communicated, in whole and not in part, to others, who will actually see past the symbols and recognize the selves to which they point. In actuality they conflate the symbol and the self, the representation for the reality, falling victim to the deception of Baudrillard's simulacrum, of images that "mask and denature a profound reality."
Hence the injunction of the philosopher Kwaw to the daimios of Japan in Aleister Crowley's parable Konx Om Pax [1] to call themselves "the Synagogue of Satan, so as to keep themselves from the friendship of the fools who mistake names for things," while advocating not a "Satanist" way of life, but rather a Taoist one seeking the equilibration of opposites to achieve first inner personal harmony and then outer societal harmony.
A postmodernist would see the label "Satanist" and immediately conjure up images and notions of evil and "the adversary," confusing the name with the actual thing, the deeds and the philosophy of the synagogue, never bothering to inquire beyond the label and the name into the nature of the thing itself, letting their priors and biases make uninformed snap judgments for them. A modern instantiation of Kwaw's tactic can be found in The Satanic Temple, who advocates not for "evil" (whatever this word means) but for the advancement of rationality and reproductive rights. Yet this phenomenon extends far beyond The Satanic Temple and religion and extends to all of life more broadly, and this simplistic reduction of the world into one-word labels and mental filing cabinets is what lends to the exact same tribalism pg notes in his essay.
Ascribing labels to one's self limits your degrees of freedom by circumscribing your capabilities and characteristics within the bounds of the label. For if I am P, then I am not (not P) and immediately I have entered into a dualistic discourse of "me" and "not me" or of "self" and "other." Now you are beholden to a past, a history, and limited by that which you have identified with, rejecting what you are not yet but could at one point be. The very clinging to what scraps of "identity" one has accumulated around one's self is precisely what leads to this fragility of personality once those identities are forcibly taken away.
Ironically postmodern ideologies admit of "non-binary" sexualities that reject simplistic dichotomies and labels, but fail to extend this mode of thinking to other domains of life that would benefit from the same treatment; instead they insist on fractionating all of society into discretized identity groups and factions instead of recognizing the unique individuality of each human being, failing to acknowledge that continua instead of hard dichotomies exist and reality is not so cleanly divided. These ideologies purport to have moved beyond stereotypes and assuming everyone had the same lived experiences growing up, and yet continues to do exactly that with simplistic filing away of people into labelled cabinets of "identity."
All abstractions are leaky, including abstractions of self. Postmodern (Facebook onwards) social media has enabled a new era of idolatry; where once we erected statues and idols in a vain attempt to capture the ineffability of gods, now we publish online profiles and reels in a vain, narcissistic attempt to capture the ineffability of the self.
Crowley against Crowley? Good grief, this is why no one who knows anything has any use for that damned old self-promoter of a fraud. People read him as if he had anything to say other than on how to impress bored socialites, and here we end up with somebody who doesn't even seem to realize he has constructed an argument against postmodernism that requires a postmodern reading to work.
You'd be happier with the neo-Orthodox, I suspect, some of whom at least are not total charlatans. You should read Paul Kingsnorth in particular, who gives a much better account of the ideology you and he share; I would not normally make such a recommendation, but you'll believe what you believe in either case, and at least from him you'll see how a consistent account of it may be given.
Any quasi-public forum it's probably best to leave controversial and nuanced opinions on things unsaid especially under your real name. (But even under a supposedly anonymous handle, it's probably worth asking if you really need to post this.)
I'm not sure what could be going unsaid here. The schizophrenic dad, absent mother, limited and erratic money for food, no adults to do the shopping and cooking, and mentions of programming blogs and escaping poverty all paint a clear picture. It's an open account and I don't feel the need to pry or ask questions about the exact conditions of the household, which were presumably not good, but I don't see anything vague.
Your comment, on the other hand, raises my curiosity in exactly the way that you seem to be against. I have no idea what you're trying to warn me not to do.
Early in the history of the thread it looked like there would be a turn toward the sort of "Why didn't he just...?" questions that often tend to arise. They're not more useful in this context than any other, and it was that waste of effort on points uselessly missed that I sought to deter.
Ooh, now I finally understand what kind of thing one would want to avoid. The original comment could perhaps have been more concrete by saying something like (for stupid, privileged people like me)
> People who've never really known anything but stability in their lives tend to make a lot of assumptions they're not equipped to recognize, so it's usually just better not to create the opportunity [for them to ask "why don't you just ..."].
Skimmed a dozen sub-replies that were sorted above this but now I finally get it
Well, I've never pretended I don't also join these discussions to learn. Thanks for helping that happen!
Bad enough to have been made to learn a lot of things most people never get close to knowing. Explaining some of that knowledge so those people don't need to go through it to get the benefit isn't actually harder, but it can feel that way. It isn't really a case of not being fairly met in the middle, but it can feel that way easily too.
One other note: I've intentionally not used the language of privilege, and I did not call you stupid. If you're anything I'm not in this connection, it's fortunate, and that's not blameworthy nor something I would ever hope to see change.
Indeed the entire point of trying to talk about it at all lies in the hope of making it possible to understand some things about what going through hell can do to a person, without needing to find out firsthand.
Prose seems like an easier medium than the less overt and direct forms of art where such matters are more often openly discussed. I begin to imagine I haven't simplified the task as much as I thought, though, by this assumption.
On that basis I can also recommend Strange New Worlds s2e9 "Under the Cloak of War," which is the most nuanced and honest discussion of the experience of past trauma I think I've ever seen on TV. That it looks up front like a war story is a metaphor that pays off in the last act with a pane of frosted glass. Read it knowing that, and maybe I don't need to say anything else at all.
> People who've never really known anything but stability in their lives tend to make a lot of assumptions they're not equipped to recognize, so it's usually just better not to create the opportunity.
Having fell hook, line, and sinker to the conceited and holier-than-thou notion that (progressive) people have been enlightened beyond assuming things such as gender or shared lived experience or even race, I can corroborate the claim that silence is the winning move here. Unfortunately as others have noted downthread there are many who like to, and will insist upon, prying in this post-privacy era of the Internet.
People like to pat themselves on the back for having been educated beyond making such assumptions; in reality they still have the blinders on and are still constrained by the tunnel vision that their own upbringing has imposed, not even capable of comprehending that other ways of growing up and living can even exist, and presuppose that everyone visited the same waypoints in life at the same time and in the same order. The framing of one who has grown up in privilege is fundamentally different from one who struggled through adversity; si duo idem faciunt, non est idem.
This is why I don't mind making the recommendation. You seem angry in a way I think I recognize. It feels righteous because of the injustice in which it originated, but it also embodies and perpetuates that injustice. Act on it without grave reflection and it will always lead you to do harm.
I want you to read Kingsnorth because I hope that may lead you to see the error in abandoning all hope of the world. He is as clear in it as anyone I know. That is extremely attractive and I want you to think hard about where it leads.
People with different life experiences should just be quietly written off due to the faulty assumptions they might make out of ignorance.
> If you feel you've noticed an odd ellipticality in accounts like these, the vague sense of something going unsaid, it's this. If that's all you've noticed, better not to pry.
In what context? Work acquaintances chatting over coffee at the office? Parasocial public discussions on the internet? Intentionally public discussions? Friends talking all night over drinks?
You give the impression here of having taken something I said quite personally. I hope I may be forgiven for not yet really understanding what or why. Likewise, my responses may be somewhat less on point for the distraction.
The account under discussion is attributed public speech on the Internet. In other contexts, other conventions apply. There are about as many such contexts as there are kinds of relationships between humans. That's about as general as I can really make it.
If you're asking for a recommendation, it would be twofold. First, if a question seems like it might be taken as nosy, try to find a way to reframe it, or don't ask it at all. Second, when someone seems to persistently misunderstand something you're saying or asking in a more personal than professional context, consider that they may be intentionally deflecting a question or subject which they consider inappropriate to address in that setting.
I'm talking about behavior. What motivates that behavior isn't relevant.
A nosy question is nosy because it demands an answer to which the querent is not entitled. Whether that undue desire is motivated by curiosity, prurience, arrogance, pity, or simple fascination - and I have seen all of these, sometimes in combination - has no bearing on the effect of the question on the one so asked. The vice inheres in the asking, because that forces the choice between refusing to answer and arousing the ire of jilted entitlement, and giving you an answer you have already done much to suggest you are not prepared to understand.
Within acceptable error, everyone who ever tries to have this conversation from your side proceeds from here to umbrage at the idea their behavior within it is in any way either predictable or discreditable, owing to the purity of their intentions.
> A nosy question is nosy because it demands an answer to which the querent is not entitled.
Jesus, is this really what you meant? I can't imagine how barren my life would be if I restricted my interactions with others to only include things to which I was "entitled."
It's not an "all the time" thing, but an aspect of how human relationships work. Like everything else there, it's contextual. In the context of public conversations and professional relationships, it's reasonable to consider there exists a threshold of intimacy beyond which further inquiry is improper.
That shouldn't be a tremendously controversial statement, I hope. If there's a variation on it here, it is only that "improper", again as with anything in human relationships, is contextual and not always obvious, but that there can exist subtexts in a conversation which indicate when it verges thereupon.
I wasn't trying to straw-man you and I agree with this more verbose phrasing. There's a vibe in some related comments that suggests that the proper way to manage your work affairs is to interact through some narrow "proper" API, in which nothing is sought nor proffered, that we exist to each other as callable services only.
I try to generally be polite and treat people the way they seem to want, but I'm not going to live some meek life terrified that someone might take offense at my over-reach. If I'm going to screw up, my defaults are set for errors of commission.
> If I'm going to screw up, my defaults are set for errors of commission.
There have been times in my life where I said the same.
> I'm not going to live some meek life terrified that someone might take offense at my over-reach.
This isn't about that. This is about the wrong assumptions people make, much more easily than they realize, based on someone speaking knowledgeably of things very far beyond their own experience. Those assumptions easily motivate harmful behavior.
> There's a vibe in some related comments that suggests that the proper way to manage your work affairs is to interact through some narrow "proper" API, in which nothing is sought nor proffered, that we exist to each other as callable services only.
This is a cold and mechanistic view of the thing. I would rather say that some relationships more easily bear personal intimacy than others, and a basic aspect of human social competence lies in knowing which are which and avoiding the imposition of undue strain on those relationships that can't support it.
So what you are saying is that people have some hangup on saying ‘I don’t want to say’ and instead say all kinds of vague stuff that I might want to clarify, and that I should recognize that and just let it go?
I’m not quite sure how to distinguish that from people unintentionally being vague.
Not everyone takes "I don't want to talk about that" easily. A '...with you' is always available to be inferred, and a weak ego easily takes insult at that. If that weak ego belongs to someone who signs your paychecks, now you have a problem.
As someone of the younger generation, I think "raised by the internet" these days is extremely toxic and non-productive not at all what the author here is talking about in this lovely post.
When someone says "I was raised by the internet", I immediately think: social media addiction, 4chan and other online obscenities. But this is completely based on my own personal experience.
My point here is not related to this lovely post at all, it's just that I always have associated "raised by the internet" with negative connotation.
In the long long ago before social media and amongst a certain type of people, the answer to “where are you from?” would be something like “the internet”, and the connotations were positive.
It meant that you were from a small shitty place that nobody ever heard of, but you had transcended those humble origins to become a being of pure information, sharing thoughts, philosophy and maybe code with other similar beings, and that physical location was irrelevant and really the whole idea of it was quite vulgar.
I suppose we are still sharing thoughts now, but times change, and the real struggle is transcending the vulgarity of the internet and going back to meatspace.
Hmm. These days if you don’t like discussing where you’re from, there’s no equivalent answer that immediately reveals interests, while pushing back on the presumption of getting a real answer. Being from “the library” is maybe closest in spirit in terms of being infotropic and on an autodidactic mission, but urban people will think you are homeless, and rural people will think you are a weird librarian.
I think the problem is that there is a huge number of people now whose only contact with the Internet has been social media. For them, that is where the Internet begins and where it ends. They'll use Reddit and not call it a "website" but an "app," because they have "installed" Reddit on their smartphones.
It doesn't help that most online forums have become subreddits, and that Google will show Reddit results over random forums. It makes sense because, understandably, Reddit can be assumed to be always safe, while a random forum might not be, but in the long run it it just gives Reddit an unfair advantage over smaller forums that could just as safe if not better than their subreddit equivalent, killing those forums in the process.
Now things are getting even worse as subreddits become Discord channels. That's why I root for things like Neocities and Tumblr to succeed.
in the modern age of Forums not being as popular, Discord (rip IRC) communities seemingly occupy this space now - they can be quite cozy, and give off a lot of the old vibes
Not even close. Discords owns your data and once the so-called-Discord-groupchat (server my ass, is NOT a server) closes down, you are out.
WIth Usenet your posted data and articles/discussions could be in your hard drive forever.
With Jabber and IRC you could bring your chat client, anything. Heck, even MSN/AOL supported several clients, both graphical and terminal, such as AMSN, tmsnc, Gaim/Pidgin, Miranda IM...
> you were from a small shitty place that nobody ever heard of, but you had transcended those humble origins to become a being of pure information, sharing thoughts, philosophy and maybe code with other similar beings, and that physical location was irrelevant and really the whole idea of it was quite vulgar.
I truly think that postmodern (Facebook onwards) social media destroyed this ethereal, noncorporeal aspect of the internet by forcing users to identify as the social media profile. Bandwidth and compute on the early internet were not sufficient to exchange HD pictures and video at the volume we deal with today, and so the early internet was a primarily literate medium, with all the characteristics and benefits of literacy that entails: an affinity for autodidacticism, learning, information exchange, rationality. It seemed to exist on an ideal plane, where we dealt not with people but concepts, and characteristics such as geographical location, ethnicity, skin color, accents, and even sex simply were never even part of the picture to form a basis for discrimination - all one could see were your words and your pseudonym, and they could be judged on their own merits irrespective of whatever postmodern notion of "identity group" authored them.
The internet was not hi-fi enough to be confused with reality, and this detachment from the messy particulars of meatspace was well-suited for the exchange of ideas along the "information superhighway." It's only when people started posting pictures and videos of themselves that we saw the culture war heat up and begin to divide people along lines of identity, for the cold rationality of what was once a literate medium had now regressed to an audiovisual medium of spectacle, soundbytes, and shorts; no longer the meritocratic marketplace of ideas where all users were treated equally and ideas could be expanded upon at length, of words and concepts responding to other ideas and thoughts, the internet is now where talking heads spew 15-second invective at one another and people are judged on their appearance, accent, sex, or any number of other dimensions orthogonal to the quality of the ideas they express.
> Being from “the library” is maybe closest in spirit in terms of being infotropic and on an autodidactic mission
Illuminating, how you chose "the library" as the nearest neighbour and not "the cinema" or "the radio." I empathize very much with the OP and finding not only refuge from a chaotic living situation but also a way out towards gainful employment by drinking from the firehose of freely available information that was the early Internet; again being a primarily literate medium it was my library-from-home where I spent more time amongst documentation, or crawling through obscure technical fora just soaking up any and all information I could, than I did talking to my friends, family, or even people in general. There were innumerable days of my life (even still true to this day) where I spent more time writing bash and talking to a computer through a terminal than I did speaking English to another living soul.
I hate that this comment is at the top of the page - that may be what you think but even if those exact sites, the chans, are the places a young person is spending their time that doesn't mean it's a problem necessarily.
I'm an adult and I spend about 80% of my time in front of screen and so do all of you.
I'm reminded of a Bible verse something about a log in your eye. That's what this is.
Or maybe it doesn't so much. Matthew 15:17 says that it's what comes out of your mouth that matters, and by extension your posting. Jesus is watching your 4chan posts.
I’m pretty sure the author of the post would have had a similar trajectory had he been growing up now. People who are innately curious and self motivated will always find a Linux networking tutorial. Even if it comes in a form of a TikTok video and not a bunch of burned CDs.
There is an upper bound to the amount of information that can be easily conveyed through a TikTok video, and given the platform's focus on short-form content, it is not very high; likely, it is much, much lower than a book or manual or other form of written documentation.
The media we use today constrain the density and quality of information they can convey, and not in a positive fashion.
Oh yeah no doubt. I'm more talking the specifics of the phrase "raised by the internet" and what it would mean to me, without the context of the article.
That is a very fair assumption nowadays. I was not raised by the internet simply because I could not afford to even have it in the home until I was in my early 20's. Still remember the weeks after youtube being launched! The internet was that thing I had 30 minute chunks of from the local library. So it was always at arms length. Something that felt like a negative then might have been a positive in a way. The internet was this very positive force, a tool not an obsession for many.
I do worry about those nowadays that are "raised by the internet". I see the stream of influence that social media is having and I have to remember than for many people, this is all they have ever known of the internet. There is no other context. Many viewing this stuff are smart folks, but when that stream of media becomes like the air, many can be tugged in all manner of directions and now even realize it.
In the same manner of drugs, try not to turn them into a diet. The internet is a wonderful tool but a questionable 'way of life'.
"When someone says "I was raised by the internet", I immediately think: social media addiction, 4chan and other online obscenities."
Yes, that is definitely personal, there are many other types of internet upbringings.
Take a look at the most viewed videos on youtube and you will be enlightened into a more recent type of internet upbringing.
The most popular category of videos on youtube are baby videos. Parents literally leave their 1 or 2 year old toddlers with their ipad. Those kids won't go into 4chan, it's a new generation.
Yeah, truly revolting what gets the views on YouTube and TikTok now. Given how young the kids are who are so often given unfettered access. Too many parents wear their “clueless about technology” badges with joking pride and put no effort into learning how to set up effective parental limits.
I know what you mean and it makes a little bit sad. I loved browsing through the early web, learning stuff and break things. Especially in the seedy underbelly, IRC chats and all of that.
But now, I'm happy that I am not an adulescent boy being constantly bombarded with the manosphere crap and all of these influencers. I pity the younger generation, they don't know what was taken from them. I mean, the helpful internet is still there, but hidden behind so much bullshit.
I faced nothing like the hardships the author did, but I'm nonetheless deeply indebted to people who took a young Linux nerd with an upbringing that was "no fun" under their wing and ignited a lifelong passion that became a very interesting career and a very interesting life.
So I'd like to add my gratitude to that of the OP to the wonderful mentors I've had over the years. I don't see eye-to-eye with all of them in 2024, but that in no way diminishes the tremendous debt of gratitude.
This is the kind of debt that's paid forward: when and where I can I try to pass some of this treasure along to younger hackers.
Thank you for a moving personal story @jimmyhmiller.
I grew up in a rural part of the United States. First got online in 1996 when I was 8 years old. The best thing that the Internet gave me was a way to talk to strangers from around the world and make friends with people who I would have never had a chance to interact with in person. In my 20s, it lead to real life friendships with people I had met online, which is really cool. I have used Couch Surfing to make friends in places I was traveling through. Lived in Australia for a while with a group of friends I met online.
I also grew up in a rural town, in Norway. I think internet made me more of a "world citizen", empathic to all kinds of people, than I would have been without. A small town can be quite unwelcome to those not like us.
But I wonder if some of that is lost now to those being "raised on the internet"? That things are too big. There were small forums, behave, as you know the avatars of everyone and they become your friends in a way. But on reddit, everyone is just faceless, I will never chat with the same person there again. So no sense of community, don't learn to feel empathy for others in the same way.
I also wonder how my choice of games affected this. Playing WoW, you had to behave, get friends, join a guild, and spent time with those. I got friends I've visited in other countries, and learned much about life elsewhere through this. But my irl friends playing FPS shooting games on xbox live? Mostly swearing and trash talk, never to see the players again after getting a new random pairing.
Yes. Leaving a small town IRL to visit a more appropriate small digital town where people share interests but might be from anywhere was exactly what everyone I knew on early internet bbs/irc/mud was doing, basically. Presumably if you were in a larger city, you could already find people IRL with your interests somehow, even if the interests were obscure. Identity was anonymous but persistent and it was still a small town, so you couldn’t just be an ass all the time or you’d be ostracized.
Good point. I also made friends on an RPG, Phantasy Star Online, and was active on a fan board. The message boards I posted on were in the thousands of users, so everyone knew everyone and I didn't want a poor reputation.
20 years later, some of my closest friends are those I met in 97 in a MUD. I have other friends, of course, but it's notable that friendships have endured entirely online for twenty years.
Some of those friends I've talked to every day, or every few days, for decades, but I've only seen once or twice IRL.
I played non-Steam CS in early 2000s and made friends there in a foreign country. Years later added to Steam, and continued staying in close contact. A decade later we both ended up at the West Coast and still chat daily to this day.
We even worked on projects and started some companies along the way.
Hell yeah, I still chat regularly with a couple friends I met online in like 1999. One of them I talk with almost daily. Surprisingly the whole "extremely online" approach has meant some really solid long-lasting connections. :)
I was booting Linux while sleeping in a car, and in and out of motels, eating from food banks, with drug addicted parents, as a teenager. There was something to "the internet" back in the day as a way to cope when faced with that sort of situation. The author is not alone. We were blessed to have a computer through it all.
I hope "kids these days" have the same opportunity with their phones.
Spoiler: They don't. The phones are hostile to experimentation and the social media apps they will use to kill time are designed to get them stuck in an infinite loop of watching pointless "content" and as many ads as possible.
> designed to get them stuck in an infinite loop of watching pointless "content" and as many ads as possible
Wouldn't TV have been the equivalent in the era OP is talking about?
Going on the internet and seeking out coding tutorials, as the article describes, is a choice most people didn't make back then; it's the most nerdy of kids doing this outside of school. While an addiction takes that choice away or makes it much harder, most kids are not addicted (~90% aren't in UK, ~55% aren't in India, for 11- to 14-year-olds per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problematic_smartphone_use#Pre...)
If you have a credible source on phones in 2024 providing fewer learning opportunities than computers in the <2000s, either anecdotal (kids who you observe are otherwise curious but don't seek out non-entertainment content) or by looking at a large enough sample to have some measurable difference in the population, I'm interested. It sounds like an assumption based on the (justified) negativity around social media as a concept rather than an actually observed effect
Yeah. This hurts how true it is. I’m an early-mid millennial, very modest social class so I got some access to dial-up at age 14 and broadband at about 16. We were just explorers back then. The sophistication aimed at us was no fancier than that of the Saturday morning cartoon ads. I’m sure the people at Yahoo and AOL wanted us to use their IM program and watch some of quaint banner ads. But most of the Internet then was exploring knowledge and fandoms, and connecting with those around the globe who spoke your language and also loved what you love. Most of the most fun social activity back then for young people spun out of places like music chat rooms and music/band forums, because 14-year olds believe their music taste is the deepest and most personal thing about them.
Contrast to today: kids now, many from near birth, are test subjects in a million experiments every day, designed by hostile bots and even more hostile humans to addict them and feed obsessions all in service of revenue optimization. The biggest experiment of all is the meta one: what will happen to this generation raised in this unprecedented way?? Btw — nothing would make me happier than Gen Alpha being super successful. So I hope I’m Old Man Shakes Fist At Cloud here.
As a kid I was out of the house for 12 hours a day playing outside. Although my parents were both working and we had food on the table, we were a pretty poor family. They were both exhausted after work and I yearned for their attention but I guess I could see that they were tired and suppressed my own needs. I became very withdrawn never speaking about my emotions or myself. Then age 10 my mother died and father became withdrawn alcoholic, basically in one fell sweep I lost both my parents. Computers and the internet were my only refuge. Be it pirated movies I could watch or play games.. I was there. At some point I became a really good competitive gamer so that gave me an opportunity to socialize a bit. I moved to a different game and crushed it there and made more internet friends. I got diagnosed with a lifelong chronic illness at that time (Graves Disease) but I still kept surviving. I was alienated from most of my real life friends because I couldn't relate to them. I was in a constant physical and emotional struggle and they were in the seat of stability. I wasted a lot of time but slowly I learned. At some point I realized that games aren't going to be a good financial support so I started learning programming and here I am in my mid 30s with a few years of coding experience(without a job currently and struggling). I can boldly say the internet has saved me, other people where I live and had nothing succumbed to street gangs and drugs. I know that I'm behind many peers I have in terms of life achievements but I also know where I come from and take pride that I've been able to survive up until now. I have stopped walking before thinking it's over but every time I have the strength to sit back up and start walking again.
We are going to see a lot of children (and adults) raised by chatbots. Asking them for advice, confiding in them where real people don't seem safe, etc. Through the looking glass! Still, definitely better than asking Reddit for relationship advice
One of the things that bit me is one of those anti-system videos where they tell you not to speak to police or whatever. Turns out it's better just to say "hi officer, yes officer, no officer" than spending the night in jail for absolutely no reason other than "the internet taught me how to react to police answering questions."
A more harmless example is when I read that the best way to clean cooking oil spills was to add salt to absorb the oil. Didn't work, leaves more of a mess.
I got rid of a fine but just being nice, acknowledging my mistake to the officer and apologizing without the intention of getting away without my well deserved fine.
Human nature may be to help. It is always a risk to talk to officers. If you are being obstinate, prepare for someone with an authority complex to sit on you. Be also ready for that same person to sit on you for no reason and twist anything you say into a problem. Just don't give them ammo against you.
Biggest thing I missed is that I don't live in the US.
Even if I lived in the US, and the times I visited, I'm still disregarding most of the recommendations. It feels more like these people are making political statements of what should be and recruiting me and other viewers to help move towards that ideal.
Especially they want regular citizens to do this shit so that everyone has plausible deniability. The issue is that I strictly want to differentiate myself from criminals, in my experience any of these movements or technologies like Tor, cryptocurrency, pool me with people doing really bad shit.
If I'm in the US with a visa, and someone asks for my ID, I will show it to them, I will not shield illegal immigrants by refusing to show my visa. I will no longer do that in my country either, I literally thought "what if a Venezuelan was walking down these streets and the police stopped them, I must shield them by not revealing my identity" Fuck that, not my problem, here's my ID, officer.
Similarly if police ask me what I'm doing at 2 am, I will now tell them that I was working and there was an incident with the server at 2 am. I will no longer shield criminals that may be up to no good at 2 am in my neighbourhood, i will make the cop's job easy.
If my bank asks me for documentation of my business I will give it to them. If my ISP wants to see what servers I'm contacting for my porn, they may check my DNS requests and see that it's not a child pornography distributor. That's fine.
It's ok, take your tinfoil hats on. Use your judgment instead of listening to online extremists with an agenda. (Getting regular people to act like criminals so that criminals associations and behaviours can appear as legitimate)
"First they came for…" by Niemöller wants a word with you.
By not doing your social duty of providing plausible deniability wherever possible, you are recklessly endangering your future self, and everyone else you care or not care about.
Being scared to not stand up for your rights is understandable. On visa too. If I was in Mexico, I'd probably pay the bribes to dirty cops myself.
The advice is like not plugging in a random usb stick into your computer or wearing a condom. Risk vs reward. There is real risk unfortunately talking with police in the US.
The point of that video (by a lawyer and a cop, really, watch it if you haven't for those in the US) is that you open yourself to real legal risk talking to a cop. They can lie. They have pressure to perform, are often in potentially dangerous situations, are often jaded and assume you are guilty of something, the role self selects for bullies and weeds out those deemed too smart. Everyone and anyone can be a target depending on the officer. I have had positive experiences with a couple cops. I have also tasted lots of negative experiences.
We got pulled over and all of us were separated and the cops grilled us, lied about finding drugs on other passengers, tried to get each person, including minors who were isolated and now alone, to admit to illicit activities. We were completely straight edge and had nothing to hide.
Ah yes, the classic "I have nothing to hide". Just know that you are being cowardly if your response to an authority figure exceeding their legal authority is to immediately capitulate. Go ahead and make your life easier in the present if you must, but don't pretend the moral high ground; someday the shoe may be on the other foot.
It is worth considering why, if it is such a social good, you are not legally compelled to explain yourself to a police officer to their satisfaction on no more than a whim.
Conversely, it's better to spend a night in jail because you exercised your right to remain silent, than five years in prison because you accidentally confessed to something.
In terms of climate adaptation, yes. If you're fearing large language models (which have been barely useful for a handful of years now; by the time the first kids grow up in an LLM world, they'll almost certainly have improved again), so far I'm seeing people get a lot more customised answers automatically as compared to being thrown in at the deep end and having to use a combination of partially-applicable answers, reference works, and own judgement. Whether judgement will suffer or if the false confidence of LLMs will only improve it, I have only the past to reference, such as Socrates' worry that the invention of writing would introduce forgetfulness because memory would not be practiced anymore (which, ironically, we now only know because someone else wrote his words down)
Regardless of which future you think more likely, it seems a bit early for a "for sure"!
If OP was 12 today, in 2024, would he have gotten into Linux? Or would he have been sucked into watching endless MrBeast videos?
It's easier than ever to get started understanding and building software... but at the same time it seems easier than ever to get distracted by the modern internet.
I wasn't raised (as a technologist) by the internet, but by cassettes, floppies, magazines and books. But we share at least one experience: the horrors of ndiswrapper.
20 years later, I recently tried to install Ubuntu on an old Intel MacBook Pro that I got somehow, and I realized that in 2024 you still can't install Linux on a laptop (at least, on laptop of a certain popular make) without jumping through hoops, due to, IIRC, lack of support for the particular Wifi chipset this computer uses.
There are so many laptops that Linux works great on right out of the box. I've used it on brand new models straight from Dell/Lenovo/HP etc and it's worked out of the box. It's weird to me that you call out Linux for not running on one proprietary machine and expanding that and saying you can't install Linux on any laptops. It's simply not true.
I find it has improved heaps in recent years. Even Debian (a fairly conservative Linux distro) supports Intel wireless chips right out of the box and I understand it has support for other wireless chips as well. It's gotten to the point sometimes Linux has better support out of the box than Windows does! Windows for example struggles with USB-C data but works perfectly on Linux.
ay bro! my old man berated me because i installed linux on our desktop and couldn't connect to the internet via modem. today, i am only willing to install linux on thinkpad laptops and some well-known-to-work pc.
Kinda like me modulo the internet, I relied on Debian Sarge docs at 17-18, self taught. The DVD and the accompanying book/magazine was more than enough to deeping your knowledge.
Also, no project it's pointless. A Gopher/Gemini client in JimTCL with a basic cli interface a la cgo/gplaces? Go for it. A simple IRC client with a simple thread in the backgroup looking up for PING messages from the server ? The same. It wont be a killer application, but it wll be fun and you will learn a lot.
Yea it was a similar situation for me. I definitely wasn't in poverty, but my family was a mess. I mostly hung out in my room on the internet and got away from it.
a beautiful post. it's really nice when we get posts like this here, just personally i find it very meaningful.
> But sometimes the employees there would give me the employee discount, I guess they realized I needed it.
that is such a heart-warming thing.
i would maybe argue the following point in the article:
> People whose work was not aimed at me in the slightest.
idk. i think that part of the point of being open is being open to possibilities. obviously no one can see the far-reaching consequences of their work when they set out to do it. but sometimes, people have hopes, i think, that their openness will create possibilities just like this article is describing.
> resources like w3schools,
i remember a long time back - maybe 15 years ago - i would occasionally read w3schools, and i had a coworker who would kind of turn up their nose at that site, they were kind of a snob about it. i knew enough then to realize it wasn't the best site for everything but out of insecurity after that person said that, i stopped reading it too. but it helped me, too. and i'm glad it helped you. i am starting to re-revise my opinion of that site.
I guess I could say I found ogrish or liveleaks traumatizing but it wasn't the site, it was human beings. I felt I had a responsibility to understand what humanity was capable of, because I only had vanishingly-minor hints of it growing up in a nice conflict-free region of the world. Honestly, being exposed to the stuff on those sites gave me a better understanding of what people might do to each other (or to other life forms). It was rough to see some stuff, but I am actually thankful I was able to access that kind of stuff at that age and learn more about what humans are. I don't know if many people relate to that mindset, but I never once had a sense of "I wish I didn't watch that". Each was a learning experience.
To Jimmy. I feel for you, man. No kids should went through time like you did. THank you for becoming a good citizen & contribute to the great time of computing.
I have spent most of my life (in years and percentage of the day) running a youth group, mostly targeting the underprivileged. Small [as in we officially mentor about 25 children a year], but powerful.
The number one thing you can do for a youth is convince them that they are capable. Believe in them, and give them challenges that you know they can achieve. Give them time, empathy and encouragement.
The worst thing you can do for them is pity them, discourage them, explain that because they are black / women / poor / etc they are destined to a life of being in second place.
I was raised by the internet, too. I first started using computers at around the age of 5. A lot of my childhood years were spent in places that still exist today. My family was poor and computers were my only escape, just like the article says.
I can't help but feel like I lost something through doing that, though. It certainly didn't help my ADHD to teach my brain that it's possible to live life through only instant gratification. And it certainly didn't help to always be connected to so many people that now I can't seem to do anything alone.
It's fascinating how someone can feel like they've been "raised by the internet," almost as if it’s a parent in this digital age. I'm curious to learn more about how that experience shapes a person!
The internet is important in my formative year, taught me a lot, including how to program. You could say that my intellect is formed by the internet firehose.
I would like to say that my experience is largely positive, but it's hard to say that without the internet, I would actually be more capable. There are many things that the internet does well, but building young adults able to deftly navigate the real world is not one of them.
That said, the internet once again is now a source of information on how to be a responsible adults. However, there's no doubt that the internet is also a source of toxic information without good judgement and ruthless filtering.
This is a fascinating train of thought, I'll bite!
Makes me think of intellectualization...
> In psychology, intellectualization (intellectualisation) is a defense mechanism by which reasoning is used to block confrontation with an unconscious conflict and its associated emotional stress – where thinking is used to avoid feeling.
> Like rationalisation, intellectualization can thus provide a bridge between immature and mature mechanisms both in the process of growing up and in adult life.[14]
> Donald Winnicott, however, considered that erratic childhood care could lead to over-dependence on intellectuality as a substitute for mothering;[15] and saw over-preoccupation with knowledge as an emotional impoverishment aimed at self-mothering via the mind.[16]
It's certainly a form of dissociation, but I think in the case of the author, and others with a similar sentiment here, it's more conscious and intentional, than unconscious.
Surely a conscious choice to escape into intellectualism/information at a young age could lead to training of your thought processes/patterns such that it does become an unconscious act. Regardless of choice, I think it's an interesting parallel to draw, still...
It's said in the same way as how the environment you grow up in shapes who you become, the internet being (one of) your primary environment(s) due to escapism or just amount of time spent in it.
I had way more conversations with random people on internet forums, IRC, etc. than my parents while growing up, and learned orders of magnitude more from those interactions... but they didn't feed, clothe, or house me so I would never claim I was raised by the 'net.
> they decided to openly and freely share their work.
I LOVE this story. Thank you for sharing it. It's stuff like this that makes me crave the Web 1.0 (and early 2.0) days. This makes me want to support Mastodon, and Vivaldi, and other federated and open systems. I'm as guilty as anyone, allowing social apps like twitter & Facebook to take me away from writing on my hand-rolled blog. I need to get that puppy back up and running. I need to share more. Be the change I want to see in the Internet & Web.
As a self-taught developer who ended up making a living from this, I can only join the author in thanking all the people who shared their knowledge online during the 90s and 00s
I can’t say that I did. I’d blame “being raised on the internet” as a consistent contributor to a lot of negatives in my life. Certainly, I picked up a lot of the rage from people in the IRC circles I ran with, and like a parrot exhibited it in my personal life. Beyond that, the general degradation of IRL social skills.
I can say my life took a significant upturn once I extricated myself from that community.
I’d say the thing is that the internet is filled with a lot of negative places, filled with people who literally can’t operate IRL. If as a kid you’re sucked into them, it can be detrimental.
There are online communities for all kinds of addictive activities. They offer perfect validation, and it's easy to lose track of how little you're actually doing in the real world or how few people you're interacting with face-to-face. Some people stop trying to meet others locally once they find their intellectual and emotional peers online. This can go on for years, and it's not something I'd recommend.
I interpreted this piece as focusing on how information is being made more accessible. People are taking complex textbooks and university-level knowledge and turning them into understandable tutorials and examples. Anyone who can break down and share complicated information has a valuable skill that really helps others.
> I can’t say that I did. I’d blame “being raised on the internet” as a consistent contributor to a lot of negatives in my life. Certainly, I picked up a lot of the rage from people in the IRC circles I ran with, and like a parrot exhibited it in my personal life. Beyond that, the general degradation of IRL social skills.
I had an experience far more in line with the article. I grew up in extreme poverty, incredible isolation and within a very abusive family. So abusive that a big chunk of my childhood was spent in dealing with courts and police with eventually an apprehended violence order being taken out on my behalf against my parents to try and bring an end to the abuse. Extracted from the abuse but not the isolation I was headed to a very dark place.
The interent was world changing for me once given access. It opened the door to another world, to the ability to socialise without stigma, learn and grow with people that in comparison to what I had experienced, were quite normal and well adjusted though of course, not perfect by any means.
My time on it as a youth opened the door to a world that would later become my ladder out of that life and the foundation of my success as an adult. A ladder I would never had access to without the internet. I credit it for effectively having saved my life. I would be in a very different place now were it not for that exposure and experience. Where most of the people I knew as a youth are today, which is not at all a pleasant place.
Todays internet is not the same I feel, and that is also not to say that it could not instead have been a detrimental place or experience for some even then. Perhaps if you have a more normal upbringing, one in which you do not face such extremes than it may only bring negatives instead of positives, but for many, it's a hatch to exposure of things you may otherwise never get to experience as others do.
very soon you will notice that a chunk of the people you encounter have a weirdly serene cadence and way of speaking. people who are raised by AI companions will definitely have a particular way of speaking and even thinking.
“When I look back and think about those times, I'm amazed but how much I owe to people who I never met”
So much has changed:
I read a post on a forum the other day, some kid asking questions about PyTorch.
Rather than getting help, the poor soul was berated for not using “they/them”…
We moved away from building our communities on shared interests, towards building them based on shared sentiment, which has to be proven by behavior.
Unfortunately joining such a community is much more difficult.
I had plenty of experiences with similarly useless debates as a teenager on the internet twenty years ago. Think of providing code examples with indentation that the reader didn't like. At least being more inclusive is a more worthwhile goal than finding the perfect indentation, but yeah, neither answers the question at hand
Could it be that you now recognise the uselessness of such a response whereas, when you were younger, you didn't know any better and took it as-is? Because I think that's almost certainly the case for me, rather than that it is an exclusive feature of modern times that some people berate others on minor-to-irrelevant points
Of course nothing on the internet is new, it just assumes a default culture and philosophy which is less prominent in real life. It would be interesting to pin early internet to a particular demographic. Is it 90s stem graduate students primarily in the US? Middle class engineers?
The earlier you go, the easier it is to pinpoint a single demographic (although not sure what's the point in doing that).
But from '95 on, I'd say it's pretty misleading to point that to US or middle class engineers. Even in 95, it was already available to non-ranked university students in peripheric countries, and not just for those studying at engineering faculties. Although most web content at that time was related to porn (90%) and jokes (9%) and some other content (1% - probably stem and engineering?), but I don't know exactly in what philosophy that content is considered prominent and default.
From 2000, it was accessible and even not too expensive for most middle class households by landline. From that time on, it was more about which demographic is not yet present... I think you had to wait e.g., another 10-12 years for mobile-first minors and for the idle retired people.
We have to differentiate between the "young Internet" that existed before Eternal September and the internet that existed afterwards, which is just "young" relative to most current users.
The former was definitely an elite monoculture composed of primarily young, white, nerdy American college students and faculty. It would be correct to say internet culture, for better or worse, comprised the common interests and affectations of that culture.
Nor did I say that it was. You've assumed an equation between "not just one demographic" and "the general population" where none exists.
There are histories in my bookshelf downstairs that I can recommend here. If I don't happen by before the edit window closes on this comment, I'll mention some titles in a reply.
It is a remarkable reading of my comment, in which I identify where black-and-white thinking has led your analysis into error, that can mistake that criticism for the error it describes.
It really isn't a simple question you're asking, is the problem. If I thought it needed less than a book to answer, why would I be about to recommend books?
I think the response was an uncharitable reading of my comment. Obviously you get 10 people together and you have all kinds of demographics even in the same neighborhood. The question is about which of many are dominant, or which are simply missing. I didn’t think that needed to be said.
> It really isn't a simple question you're asking,
I agree. I apologize for miscommunication and if you have any books to share please do.
It needed to be said because that question makes no sense in the situation of which you ask it. That any demographic or mix of same would necessarily be "dominant" in the context of early Internet culture, indeed even the unitary integrity the phrase "early Internet culture" grammatically implies, is an assumption. As long as you keep that, no history I can recommend is going to help you, because read with that assumption they will also make no sense. (I'll still recommend them, of course; just that I don't see them doing you any good this way.)
The scare quotes are because I honestly do not understand what you mean by that term here; I think you and I might be speaking across an ocean, too.
its interesting that martin scorsese and chris rock both claim that they were essentially raised by television sets. i would say that i was co-parented by a television at least. i would say that it contributed to a blunted, unrealistic understanding of the real world and human relationships. my world view now is that children shouldnt watch television or movies and that they should be immersed in real human relationships. especially those disney movies that have really dramatic, tear jerker scenes. i think that is way too much stimulation for children and that their heart strings should only be tugged by things that are real. those powerful emotions play a role in human development and you shouldnt mess around with that too much.
What's a growing kid to do when they start encountering situations outside the training distribution? At least with movies and novels they'll have a few synthetic data points instead of just nothing.
Yep, same here. People sharing and me wanting to learn saved me too. It kept me (mostly) out of trouble, and ended up with me having a successful career in IT, software development, and hopefully soon, security.
"The twenty-first century baby is destined to be rocked and cradled by electricty, warmed and coddled by electricity, perhaps fathered and mothered by electricity. Probably the only thing he will left to do unaidad will be to make love."
You can take this literally. I remember that for a while it was quite popular for families to live stream their life for that blog money. Always found that fad weird and creepy.
I never heard of anyone doing that in my own circles, but know of such youtube vlog families, which makes me think it's probably around one in a hundred thousand (that would mean thousands of people from the USA or around a thousand in Germany, which would be like two orders of magnitude above how many people are successful doing it, which sounds about right)
>I learned computer stuff fixing and tinkering with barely working computer.
Being relatively young (born after 2000), I wouldn't be here were it not for the Core 2 Duo HP machine I got in 2014-ish after my father fired some people from his company and was left with surplus machines. It ran a, at that point, 6? year old install of Vista with all the HP bloat, had 2 gigs of RAM, a 160GB HDD, no internet connection and came with a 5:4 display to match. Christ did I love that machine. I spent hours in front of it. Getting games to work. Getting pirated software off the web (downloaded on our "main" family PC that I still used to play Minecraft over the network with friends), onto a 2 gig pendrive, often in parts and copying it over. Learning how archives work in general. How to re-install Windows, partition a drive, modify the OS visually, install language packs, struggle heavily to get .net 3.5 on Windows 8 without the net... That's the exact moment I fell in love with computers. Well, I most likely fell into obesity at that point as well, but ignoring that it's all been positive. Then I got the Internet and it went down quickly.
For better or worse, I too was raised by the internet and found kindness in random strangers. I try and return the favor today, in Discord servers and what not
used to be one of the “sharers,” maintaining a fairly popular blog, writing tutorials on platforms like DZone and CodeProject, answering questions on StackOverflow, and creating open-source projects that collectively amassed millions of downloads.
At one point, I decided to monetize one of my open-source projects by creating a commercial fork. That’s when a group of people, none of whom had contributed to the project in any way, started a witch hunt over a few super trivial lines of code they accused me of “stealing” from contributors. Despite having the full support of all actual contributors, the backlash from these outsiders left me drained and disillusioned. So I stopped sharing my work and contributing to open source altogether—and honestly, I’m happier for it.
To all the Jimmy Millers who genuinely appreciate the goodwill of creators: be aware that there are people who will leech off it or even destroy it.
To be fair this viewpoint should be included as well talking about being raised by the internet. People can have so very different experiences with the computers.
Some kids were, some kids weren't. I don't know how I ended up hacking with Linux and programming, while many others spent their time watching series and playing Nintendo. Not to say it is somehow a bad thing.
I sometimes wonder how much of a difference being raised on PC-s vs phones or tablets is there.
I am young enough that when I grew up phones started to become mainstream, and anecdotally people that started using PC-s before phones developed greater interest in technology later on.
In a way computers allow you to break stuff and learn how to fix it. Phones put you in a sandbox with a hose of internet content.
My kids get a fair share of unsupervised tablet time.
And they seem to know 10x of what I did at their same age.
My son is 9, watching endless Geometry Dash tutorials, and making his own levels. He loves it, and he loves to show me his work.
Tablet time will become an extension of your home life.
If you have good discussions - encouraging curiosity, fostering creativity, challenging their approach "Why did you design it this way?" - the kid and the algorithms will follow that lead.
This is not being raised by the internet. Being raised by the internet is getting all your mores and morals from the internet. Learning how to do everything you know through YouTube videos. Learning appropriate responses to situations through forums etc. A lot of us are raised by the internet.
The writer of the article was poor when young but at some point got internet working on an old computer and suddenly they would have access to learn a lot about information technology, thanks to mostly freely shared info. What I wonder... would they have reached out back then not just for computer info but also for psychological support and a way out of poverty, would that have worked? And why didn't they?
It sounds like computers were an outlet away from the hardship - something the author could sink into. I didn't get the sense he was in practical problem solving mode, but more coping and survival mode. Lucky him that this particular form of coping led to greener pastures.
He seemed indeed in survival mode. It's indeed unfortunate that in such situations, people, especially minors, cannot find to reach out for a practical solution for, for example, cheap food (leftovers in shops?) or good advice in such situation.
Here in the Netherlands we have the Kindertelefoon (Children’s Telephone), a free hotline for children to call and talk about anything. [1] I never called when I was young, but I think it’s great that such an initiative exists.
Even for adults, there are such initiatives, such as the Luisterlijn [2] and MIND Korrelatie [3].
Have you noticed it's only in our cities you seem to really hear about the homeless poor? It isn't the corollary of overall population distribution that it might intuitively look like.
Oh, I didn't say we have nothing that we could call a system, just that there's nothing remotely similar. There are some people that some of those don't fail, and one on that list with so pervasive a documented history of child sexual abuse among its caretakers that I'm honestly shocked if they still answer the phone - although if I recall correctly, Boys Town also has a history for giving kickbacks to judges in exchange for remanding children whose unpaid labor the organization then can exploit, so I suppose it's worth some money to them to take the calls. I might misremember, though; there are so many such stories, it's hard to keep them straight without checking. Churches also answer much of what need anyone does, most places this being small, poorly resourced local evangelical congregations. These also, in the form of the revelations around the conduct of the Southern Baptist Convention, have this year seen the breaking of a major child sex abuse scandal which has not yet ceased to ramify. There is no general oversight or coordination anywhere, and for entry into "the system" to result even in safe, much less beneficial, placement, is much more than anything else a matter of chance. And you only hear about homeless poor as a city problem because those who can't make it to a city typically end up imprisoned or dead.
I was being a little hard on you earlier, maybe. If I'd lived a life in the environment of a northern/western-European style system of social welfare, it would also I think be easy for me to see something in America that looks vaguely similar and assume it must be much the same.
I took that as a rather arrogant sort of assumption, and might in that have earned the accusation of incharity that I earlier criticized. Specifically, I think I might have failed to account for how, to someone raised in a country that looks after its people, the situation in America might seem far too grim to easily credit. If I did make that error, I apologize.
On further reflection, I'm sure I did. It was unjust and I'm sorry.
It never occurred to me until a moment ago to wonder whether your question read to me like it did because it came from someone who maybe has never had to doubt that everyone can always know who to call to get out of a spot like that, on a number that will always be answered.
Even now I can't bring myself to call that a conclusion rather than a surmise. Oh, if you tell me it's true I won't doubt, or even be surprised. But the idea still feels far too utopian to really credit. Intellectually, sure. In my own early life, though?
You don't have to feel sorry. I feel sorry that the situation in the US is what it is. That said, there's a lot for me to learn so I think asking questions and getting (sometimes harsh) answers is a way of learning that _sticks_ so to say.
Grossmütterlichgefälligkeit, I believe the word to be. I've learned some of my own best lessons that way. Here I think has been the opportunity of another.
> Have you noticed it's only in our cities you seem to really hear about the homeless poor? It isn't the correlate of overall population distribution that it might intuitively look like.
I don't see that claim anywhere in this comment chain though?
You keep reading me as if I mean to nitpick word by word and line by line. Please don't. I'm addressing the same questions the article does, and participating in the conversation to that end. Inventing minutiae over which to quibble does no one any good.
while it might have been theoretically possible.. it's not obvious to me that a kid growing up poor would know of that possibility, or know how to find that information.
Sometimes it's a matter of luck, like how he had met someone that knew about linux.
> What I wonder... would they have reached out back then not just for computer info but also for psychological support and a way out of poverty, would that have worked?
Joining someone in their hobbies is a much much smaller ask than having that same someone listen to (and maybe advise about) your problems, or having them provide career coaching / direct financial support.
One is "lets have fun together", the other is "please stranger, do me this huge favor".
> And why didn't they?
Knowing who to ask might be a bit much to ask of a kid. Even aside from asking for unreciprocated favors being generally not a thing most people do easily (or look on favorably).
I hope you are aware of your immense luck in life if you think a kid in a situation like this has agency of any kind, let alone access to resources to help them “escape poverty” as a minor.
You know why no-questions asked, free lunch programs for everyone are so hugely important for kids suffering from food scarcity? Often it’s because their shitty parents won’t even sign forms to get them free lunch.
Please educate yourself in what actual suffering looks like in this world.
Biweekly I work freely at an initiative in our city to help deliver food to the needy. I believe i know what poverty looks like. I'm not sure what this has to do with my question, probably it was ill formed, for which i apologize.
From how you all use the language, I suspect you and your critical interlocutors are speaking across the Atlantic to one another. Poverty in Europe looks a lot different from poverty in the US. It is not wise to assume much at all about one from the other.
You also failed in reading the article to notice that the author plainly did derive considerable psychological support from improving his skill. This was not explicitly stated but was trivially implicit, which I think not only for me may add to the sense you more pattern-matched on the article than read it.
For myself, I'm much more unfavorably impressed with your failure to notice the kid plainly was solving his own problems with computers and in life, and deriving from that success a stronger sense of personal agency which helped him approach the larger tasks that faced him.
It seems to me only a view of poverty which is paternalistic unto contempt could fail to attend this process which was explicitly described in the article, but then I am an American, and would not wish to risk commenting on a culture I don't understand well enough to form opinions about.
Like i wrote, the question was probably ill formed, but it is a question, not an opinion nonetheless.
I am a bit touched that it seemed like i did not read or understand the article, in fact i read the article in its entirety, as one of the first to comment, even to my surprise for such a compelling story. I understood he was getting support and feeling strengthened by his learning on the internet. I feel my questions seem to be taken as rhetorical. I feel it is still unanswered, even no hints towards how or why, only that 'i should not ask such questions'. I guess American culture is very different from European (can it even be seen as having a culture as a whole, there is so much diversity)... and hence my question not being appreciated?
Your reading comprehension is being interrogated because, in speaking of the article as though it did not say several of the things it says, you make such questions seem necessary.
You are being told that the question you asked is "not even wrong": it is without meaning and so not meaningfully answerable, because it could only be asked at all from such a fundamental ignorance of the American situation around poverty that to attempt to even explain the misapprehension would require more the scope of an undergraduate course than an HN comment.
I would not usually be so blunt, but in this case meeting an apparent need for directness seems worth the risk of a rude impression. If you need it put still more plainly, though, I'm afraid I cannot help you.
The idea that this man's past situation can reduce to "terrible parents" even as passing reference, is a better example than I could ever invent of why this conversation will end fruitlessly for you.
It isn't that I don't see the obvious and honest effort you're putting into trying to have it. I respect that. The problem still is, though, that you don't see the entire world of social support structures that have been so ever-present for you throughout your life that you're unable in any real way to imagine what a life in their total absence even looks like. And if that sounds like a description of a chicken/egg problem, that's because it is one.
For you maybe this is the first time trying to talk across that divide. For someone like me, it's usually anything but. It's hard to fairly blame us for getting to learn some idea of how that usually goes.
(That's why, for example, I know I'm probably coming off pretty harsh with this and am deliberately doing so anyway; if I tried to go easier, we'd just take longer to still end up in the same place.)
> That's why, for example, I know I'm probably coming off pretty harsh with this and am deliberately doing so anyway
You're not coming off as "harsh" at all. You're hiding behind unfounded assertions about me personally in order to avoid providing anything concrete to back up your rather sweeping claims.
Relying on ad-hominem attacks isn't harsh, it's what you do when you don't have anything better to support your position.
I don't know what to tell you. This isn't science we're doing; it's a conversation between strangers. Each of us only has what they see to go on.
It isn't going to help to say that nothing I've said is in any way critical of you as a person, but it's true. I'm not saying you're a bad person because you don't understand; I'm saying there are some things you need to have lived through or at least very near to understand what makes them matter, and the way you talk about them is the way I typically see people talk who have not done that. That's all.
I still don't understand what I said in the first place that you took so amiss. You came right in swinging from the start [1], and while I'm sure there was a reason, I don't think it has helped for me not to know what that was. Certainly being made to start from the back foot has not.
If it was about how I'd misread the other fellow, that's entirely fair; if so, that I have since apologized without reservation [2] might help get our own conversation closer to an even keel. Outside of that, though, as I said before, I can't imagine what it might have been.
> You also failed in reading the article to notice that the author plainly did derive considerable psychological support from improving his skill. This was not explicitly stated but was trivially implicit
There's a difference between happening to find psychological support in something, vs asking for it directly. I assumed the comment you're trashing was asking about why they didn't do the second and only the first.
> For myself, I'm much more unfavorably impressed with your failure to notice the kid plainly was solving his own problems with computers and in life, and deriving from that success a stronger sense of personal agency which helped him approach the larger tasks that faced him.
So what you're saying is that it's a great personal failing to wonder why he relied on this happenstance rather than looking for those things directly.
> It seems to me only a view of poverty which is paternalistic unto contempt could fail to attend this process which was explicitly described in the article, but then I am an American, and would not wish to risk commenting on a culture I don't understand well enough to form opinions about.
You are showing utter contempt for someone who understood a described situation differently due to what you assert must me incurable ignorance borne of living in a society not your own. This seems rather different from refusing to comment on other cultures that you claim to not understand.
I live in a wealthy area in the US, we have many food banks and social support services, and still there are huge numbers of kids suffering from food scarcity. It always comes back to the parents. Even delivering food requires said parents to give a shit, which they don’t —- whether out of pride or sociopathic disdain.
My state is one a handful that provides free lunches and morning snacks to all kids, regardless of parent incomes. It’s essential for these children.
You are still conflating your experience volunteering with full knowledge of the problem.
I don't have full knowledge of the problem. Hence the questions. It's a pitty i only get answers in the sense of "you don't know what you are talking/questioning about".
Your entire comment is strange and snarky but this stuck out:
> You know why no-questions asked, free lunch programs for everyone are so hugely important for kids suffering from food scarcity? Often it’s because their shitty parents won’t even sign forms to get them free lunch.
So its no questions asked but "shitty parents" still have to sign forms? Most states with reduced/free lunch programs have income thresholds. Regardless, if you let your kid eat that crap, you're a "shitty parent", because its literally choked full of sodium and fake ingredients. If I lived in one of those states, I'd be asking for my lunch voucher in cash to go towards real food.
Indeed. People tend to reflexively assume that income thresholds are a good idea because it prevents people who don't need the program from benefitting, but you've got to think about the cost to the kids whose parents won't do that particular piece of paperwork. Just give kids food if they say they need it. You'll also save money on bureaucracy.
This is a separate question from the quality of the food. I will note that if you give out cash instead of vouchers you are giving the kid something that others can and will take away from them.
I think what they meant was that if there are eligibility requirements and such, paperwork is required and some parents won't do it. So no questions asked solves that problem. That's how I parsed it, at least.
i can't speak for everyone, but as one of the people writing tutorials and faqs and helping people learn to do things with free software during the period miller is talking about, that is absolutely what i intended to do. and, from the number of people i knew who were excited to work on olpc, conectar igualdad, and huayra linux, i think it was actually a pretty common motivation
as a kid on bbses, fidonet, and the internet, i benefited to an unimaginable degree from other people's generosity in sharing their learning and their inventions (which is what software is). how could i not want to do the same?
underwritten by the nsf, the internet was a gift economy, like burning man: people giving away things of value to all comers because if you don't do that maybe it's because you can't. the good parts of it still are