Getting mugged by reality is a definitive experience of Generation Y. The last cohort with personal memories of the pre-9/11 world, Ys have entered middle age in a state of deep confusion regarding their place in society. So far, the story of their lives has been “Stuff yourself on fast food, watch after-school cartoons, and play Nintendo.”
Is all that’s left for them dying alone and forgotten?
Not necessarily. I’ve argued before that fading out isolated, befuddled, and unmourned need not be Gen Y’s final fate.
It is true that the Strauss-Howe cycle is broken. Generation X were supposed to be the heroes we needed. Dereliction of parental duty on Boomers’ part destroyed Gen X’s vocation.
But some Ys are striving to fill their role as artists and mentors to younger generations. While attaining leadership positions isn’t in the cards, Gen Y seems to be working out its cultural calling: Preserving knowledge of what the world was like before the Internet and passing it down to Zoomers and Gen Alphas.
Gen Y remembers the promised potential of the worldwide web. It would decentralize commerce and politics to bring the world together. Having all the information ever just a click away would reinvent education and make people smarter, more capable, and more free.
As it turned out, the internet was mostly used for porn. A distant second use was for geeks to debate ad infinitum about corporate skinsuit IP ephemera.
And that was before the government colluded with Big Tech to kill the whole experiment and use it to bug everyone 24/7 for the intel agencies.
Related: A CIA Internal Matter
As society barrels headlong into a tyrannical era when the ruling Death Cult knows everything about everyone and uses that knowledge to control what they see, Gen Y’s living archive of the pre-internet age will become a precious resource.
The following are just a few reminders about how the world differed from Current Year when Gen Y was coming of age.
Less, but better, entertainment
Today, megacorp-owned streaming services offer constant access to pretty much any movie or TV show you’d want to watch.
But unlimited quantity has come with a steep decline in quality. If a film maker in the 1980s hated his audience, he at least had to play coy about it. Now, blockbuster movies outright attack their viewers.
The differences go beyond movies’ content and messages. People consumed movies in substantially different ways. The switch to streaming has wiped out entire distribution and exhibition channels.
Related: Blockbuster Bellwether
With movie theaters on the ropes, it’s hard to imagine a time when seeing movies in the cinema was still the default way to consume films. Theaters with more than a screen or two were still rarities in many locales as recently as the 1990s. If you wanted to see the latest entry in your friend group’s favorite slasher series, you went to the local theater. There, you’d enjoy the movie with people who shared your baseline cultural outlook.
Movie theaters were also the main option for rewatching movies. With video stores still in their infancy, most movies had longer theater runs. Even mid-tier flicks might run for a month or more. And popular films would be re-released from time to time.
That meant rewatching your favorite movie often depended on agreements between the studios, distributors, and theaters. That clunky arrangement left an opening that the video rental market arose to exploit. The weekend trip to the video store became a ritual in most families. Not even a rental membership guaranteed you’d get the movie you wanted, since each store could only stock so many tapes. Limited supply meant you had to come prepared with a second, or even third, choice. Snagging that hot new release meant staying abreast of rumors about which store had the exclusive and adjusting your timing to beat the crowd. But the element of competition added savor to each success.
Vidya was a social activity
Before the internet brought us MMOs and online shooters, multi-player gaming meant playing with your friends in person. Whether hanging out at the arcade or gathering in front of the console TV in your buddy’s living room, vidya had a physical and social element that’s been all but lost.
If you can recall any of the following:
- Pressing right on controller 2 so your friend could jump super high in Megam Man 3
- placing a token on the Mortal Kombat cabinet to claim your spot in line
- going for 100% in Metroid while a friend looked up the item locations in Nintendo Power
Then you’re probably Gen Y.
Communicating was harder, which was awesome
Related: Grandma’s Phone
The same tech advances that ruined social gaming also let you reach pretty much everyone at all times. Not only do we all carry cell phones, most of these are smartphones that multiply lines of communication a hundredfold. If someone’s not calling you, texting you, or messaging you on social media, chacnes are you’re dead or in jail.
In the old days, reaching out to someone required knowing his phone number and dialing it by hand. Getting a hold of your party meant calling while he was at home or in the office. If you missed him, you had to play phone tag with answering machines—or your moms or secretaries—and wait for the stars to align.
Sometimes you’d have better luck just dropping by your friend’s home or place of business. That degree of uncertainty made the neighborhood social hub, such as the local arcade, an invaluable resource for making plans and getting the word out.
All of these lines of communication interwove in ways that instant, reliable communication has all but erased from modern life.
Imagine it’s some long-lost Saturday in the 1980s. You want to see the new Schwarzenegger flick with your pal Kevin. So you ring his house, and his mom answers. She says Kevin’s not there, and she’s not sure where he went or when he’ll be back. Your next move is swing by the mall and pop into the arcade, where Kev was likely to show up at some point. After a few rounds at the six player X-Men cabinet with a couple of other friends, Kev would walk in, and the four of you would grab an Orange Juluius before proceeding to the mall’s movie theater.
Nobody could track your moves. No one was breathing down your neck. Big Brother was busy with the Russkies, and helicopter moms were a decade in the future. Adults extended kids a modicum of trust a and gave them a degree of responsibility.
Post your pre-internet reminiscences in the comments.
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The last time I remember having fun with multiplayer gaming (that wasn’t couch play) involved a bunch of using our 360’s as a makeshift LAN party and playing multiplayer Left 4 Dead. That was the last era gaming had any sort of communal attachment. Even more or so with the Wii being almost entirely offline, that generation felt like the end.
Since then gaming has been detached from the greater whole of social life and it’s weaker for it. Online multiplayer is never as fun as playing in the same room as other people. Never.
But single player games could be the same. Many times a bunch of us would rent them and play together, taking turns on levels and offering suggestions to get through tough spots. Not much to that now when everything is “cinematic” with yellow paint and obvious hallway level design everywhere with no real difficulty to speak of. You and your buds finally working together to beat Vile and watching Zero die is not the same when everything is just handed to you.
Part of having so many choices for entertainment also means everyone goes into their own little niche and never comes out again or interacts with each other. We won’t even meet each other when finding it because of online streaming and shopping cutting off that avenue completely. If you grew up in the ’00s, you never got to experience anything different. That’s just the way it used to be.
What it is today I have no idea. I went into the city a little while back and there was about 1/3 of the people out that there used to be. It’s like everyone just disappeared.
The challenge factor is another loss inflicted by the switch to 3D. Because interactive movies emphasize the player being passively told a story rather than overcoming challenges for stakes with skill.
“Nintendo hard” is a trope for a reason.
From what I’ve seen with the game industry, I see two main problems.
On one hand you have what I call ‘tech fetishism’, which is my (admittedly crass) way of describing the mindless obsession with things like graphics. I don’t really have a gripe with most modern innovations, more about how they’re used. Game developers in the past looked at new technology as a way to make new experiences, so the way innovations were incorporated often served an actual game-related purpose.
What’s happened since the rise of 3D graphics is that things are now revolving around very surface-level aspects, which is how you get the whole obsession with ‘realism’ in terms of graphics. With 3D, I’d argue it’s almost inevitable that this constant focus on ‘making things look more realistic’ (which in some ways is just a natural human tendency) would override attention to gameplay. It basically ends up as an obsession with the tech itself, not what it can be used for.
As an analogy: those constructing medieval cathedrals didn’t do it because they worshipped their hammers, they did it because they worshipped God.
You also have this idea of ‘normies’ having ruined gaming, which makes no sense at all. It’s basically another variant of what Cowan talked about on his blog with this idea of the supposedly filthy ‘casuals’. It just shows (at least on the AAA level) that you’re dealing with an industry that has turned inward and looks with scorn on people who simply seek fun experiences and who refuse to engage in blatant tech worship.
It just comes down to a disordered way of thinking, really.
I remember just plowing through our older set of Encyclopedia Brittanica. Internet was still in its infancy so that encyclopedia and trips to the library were still a window to a wider world.
That takes me back. We used to have a full set of blue-and-red leather bound encyclopedias on the bookshelf in my room growing up.
Younger people will say that LAN parties are obsolete because of online multiplayer.
But let me ask you this: after you get done playing with friends online, do you order a pizza, play some impromptu card games, and just shoot the breeze while watching whatever anime/anime movie that someone brought over? Because all of those things were constants at every LAN party I went to. Sometimes, if it wasn’t the wee hours of the morning, we’d actually decide to do something outside or hit up some other location in town or the next town over. It really was a social experience.
I remember getting upset when I found out that Vista actually made it considerably easier to set up LANs than XP, but it didn’t matter because even by that point LAN parties were on life support (since local multiplayer was basically no more and even “LAN” options usually required connecting to an external server.)
Convenience is the silent killer of our society.
Either that or we were all psy-oped into thinking staying at home to play online was a better option than going to LAN parties or driving to a buddies house to play games.
“Adults extended kids a modicum of trust a and gave them a degree of responsibility.”
That’s a big problem with society nowadays. Kids aren’t learning to fend for themselves, and thus when it comes to solving their problems when they grow up, they haven’t had practice with the safety net of parents and thus lock up.
Of course, you also can’t just throw kids off to the wolves. First you have to guide them on how to figure things out for themselves. And that requires parents who are involved with their kids. Which is also pretty absent.
Honestly, it’s just a whole-ass abdication of responsibility on all fronts for a prolonged infantilization of everyone.
There are many big game franchises which primarily started out as in person multiplayer. If online play was available, it was during the early days of online gameplay being abysmal. Now adays, when I take a peek at any game being made today, gamers complain about the online play in some capacity. I’m convinced you can’t make a game without having online gameplay as a feature or you’ll get a huge backlash.
To my knowledge, the only kind of games which still encourage an in person multiplayer experience would be fighting games. Online multiplayer has its place, but everything having to have something online is annoying. This hyperconnectivity and addiction to convenience will reach its breaking point in our lifetime.
I know may people who would love to swap back to a “dumb” phone because they are tired of the connectivity, distraction, and dopamine abuse. Yet for most day to day activities (especially most jobs), you need to have a smartphone for so going back is a practical impossibility.
I remember the days of hardline house phones. The only benefit to cell phones is that I can put it on silent throw it to some secluded corner of the house and walk away. If someone calls me, the whole house, including myself, won’t hear it. I won’t be bothered. Thankfully the only calls I get are typically spam calls. Rarely ever get texts, which is fine. At worst, my phone is a handheld gaming console which is a habit I want to break eventually.
My family only uses dumbphones.
I friggin’ LOVE being able to tell people “sorry, I can’t click on that link. Dumb phone.”
Saves so much mental clutter.
What kind of phone do you use that is compatible with modern networks? Most of the searches I do turn up phones that aren’t compatible or are low quality pieces of junk that don’t last long.
Nokia 2780 Flip.
Technically, you can access the internet with it. But it’s so tedious and diffucult you will never do so unless someone holds a gun to your head and demands it. You can txt like it’s 2005 again.
The service from US Mobile is under $10/mo for unlimited talk and text.
…and I’ve had the same handset for years. Signal’s a-OK and I can’t fault an $80 phone that gives me at least four years of service and has great battery life.
Good to know. I’ll look into it.
I also find it very gratifying to be asked for a QR code, and just… hold up my flip phone helplessly and say “Can you show me how to get a QR code on this? I can’t figure it out…” It’s delightful how uncomfortable this makes some people.
“t is true that the Strauss-Howe cycle is broken. Generation X were supposed to be the heroes we needed. Dereliction of parental duty on Boomers’ part destroyed Gen X’s vocation.”
It’s a been a while since I’ve read the book. I thought that the hero generations were in part created by the neglect of parents???
There have been two issues with Gen X standing up to be heroes. One is the unprecedented scales of the Boomers/aligned Silents. There may not have been a generation in history that has held so much social influence and outright political power for so long. The attitudes of the Boomers/Silents are not unique in human history. They are unique in sheer size and lifespan.
Anyway, I think of Gen X as the Prince Charles generation. By the time we have any sort of power/influence we’re going to be an old man. By then, time and lack of control will have shaped us into the image of Mom, and nobody will see a difference. They will be correct, too. It even is happening in pop culture where anyone above 45ish is a “Boomer”, even though the absolute youngest Boomers are 58 this year. Most are well into their 60’s/70’s and seniors.
The other factor is the failing of our own generation to break out of the Boomer box. Most of us knew their approach to life was wrong from a very young age. We did try to make it better in many instances, particularly with our kids. But most of us went all in on the double incomes, day care, no (or little) God, lots of toys, “tolerance”, rebellion against the man, etc, etc. If the following generations see us as “Boomer, the Depressed afternote”, it appears to this Gen Xer that we will have deserved it as a group.
Can’t think of any electronic game equivalent to when we were kids, got everybody together to play RISK, and my best friend’s brother was being an arse again about winning, so she’d turn the board over and leave…
Good times.
One of the things I miss most about pre-internet is the library. I mean, it’s still there but you have to dodge hobos now, you can’t just go sit and read in the air-conditioning all afternoon, you have to check out your books and leave. I don’t like taking my kids there.
Can’t even imagine a childhood where cellphones were ubiquitous. We barely used the regular phones– just rode our bikes around the neighborhood, dropping in on elderly relatives-with-cake, knocking on doors to see if Nikki, Cindy, Phillip, Amy, Eddie, etc. were available to play.
I don’t think the relatives-with-cake is a thing anymore. Most of their generation has died off, and it makes me sad that my kids don’t have anything like that. These were the people who won WWII, liberated the camps, and then came home and spent the rest of their careers as postal deliverymen. And they had cake like Catholics have rosaries. They might not use it themselves, but they definitely have one around the house…
I wrote about some of this in my recent post “The Computer’s Broken Promise,” which was about my experience as a kid in the 90s during the personal computing boom in the middle of the decade.
Sounds promising. What was the single biggest promise the internet broke, in your opinion?