repost, but it's been a while
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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As Gen X, I think I've seen all these cycles over and over again, media makes ostensible "role models" that people pattern themselves after, then the pattern changes suddenly as it does and leaves a generation stuck without direction as new role models take the stage and make all the previous adopters resentful of society.
Yeah, I feel like we can draw a direct line between Musk and the typical 90s-00s antihero. He's acting like Light Yagami from Death Note, not Picard.
I'm mostly responding to "I thought FOR SURE that these lessons being seen by everyone would lead to a brighter future of mutual compassion and understanding between people.", because those lessons were seen, but then portrayed as fuddy-duddy optimism by the media of my teens. The message got switched from "lets work together to figure out the solution" to "collaboration is a waste of time because the protagonist is always correct", and I think that was combined with latchkey kids being normal, and it fucked up multiple generations.
Oh in this regard, I blame internet counter-culture not being taken seriously enough in the early 2000's, those times that we thought all these "ironic nazis" were a fad that would wash out like so many times before, this scene is where people found each other and started creating online movements out of the general, passing angst that everyone feels now and then. Depressed teens finding each other did more to kill Picard than any other media.
When Somethingawful purged their low-effort users and those users went and formed 4-chan that led directly to much of our current cultural norms, it seems to many like a footnote in internet history, but that led to the formation of several fetid fandoms and subcultures that went on to get signal-boosts from foreign powers looking for every opportunity to play both sides of our nation's potential stress-points. And they did this to great effect, this is where we saw jokes and memes turn into political movements.
I don't know if we could have done anything at the time, maybe if hosts of popular forums and boards and social media were not paid off immediately by Russian bot farms to let them rampage around, maybe if government stepped in early and nipped this interference and passed some kind of legislation against hate-speech on the internet, maybe we could have saved Picard.
Yeah, there are deffo other factors. Edgelord culture, kids raising themselves, school IT being stupider than the students, and so on. Like, my high school IT department blocked all the .com domains and only allowed .gov .edu and .org. That directly led to my entire class discovering 4chan at the same time and somebody hacked the projector to show anime tiddy during class.
But I really feel like the media influence can't be ignored. Like, a lot of antiheroes from that time period were edgelords, and I know a lot of my classmates saw them as role models.