this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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This makes me wonder how many "teenage edgelords" that bought into "the manosphere" would've been able to go to such an extreme if they'd been forced to access every website through a shared family computer, in a room that others frequent, the way many Millennials had to do at their age.
Relatively-guaranteed privacy only happened on rare occasions (I came from a large household), and I had to share the one computer with all of my siblings. My parents weren't the type to go out of their way to monitor my internet activity, but just knowing they or my siblings could appear at any time, look over my shoulder, and ask me what I was looking at, made me think very carefully about what I put on that screen.
We wouldn't have been able to entrench ourselves 24/7 in toxic muck the way people can today.
I hadn't thought about it until reading your comment here but I accidentally raised my GenZ kids this way. If I hadn't done this I never would have seen my eldest heading down the misogynist edgelord path and intervened.
The only decent computer in the house was in the living room, and they had clunky retired elementary school computers in their rooms running Linux and Open Office so they could work on homework (no internet, USB drive to save homework and send from family computer). It wasn't because I sought to keep them from using the internet privately, it was because we couldn't really afford better.