Uhh... I do both
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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The real brain melter was the societal culture shift.
I grew up witnessing "the end of history" with my own eyes. People were getting wiser and kinder year after year, decade after decade. It was like a feedback loop of positive changes, the only way was up.
Then 2010s hit and I'm still processing the 180 degrees shift. I read dozens of books about nazis, authoritarianism, societal memory, cults, fucking roman empire. But I still have cognitive dissonance every time I open news feed.
Facebook and unregulated social media. Up to now most governments in the world don't even have a clue or idea that the internet is a very powerful tool that should actually be regulated because there are very evil people who will always act in bad faith to manipulate others for power and control. The Golden era of the internet is definitely over, I think 2016 was a defined shift that will be recorded by historians.
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The real brain melter was the societal culture shift.
I grew up witnessing “the end of history” with my own eyes. People were getting wiser and kinder year after year, decade after decade. It was like a feedback loop of positive changes, the only way was up.
Then 2010s hit and I’m still processing the 180 degrees shift.
Fucking thank you! This has been hard for me to put into words. (I'm on the older end of Gen-X)
Holy shit thank you. You finally put it into words for me. The shift of 'the internet is the greatest tool for knowledge, to what it is now, some cancerous corpo bloated bullshit that ignorant people are harnessing just to find others to support their shitty beliefs. Been such a hard thing to watch and understand how the fuck we got here.
The shift of 'the internet is the greatest tool for knowledge, to what it is now, some cancerous corpo bloated bullshit
Spot on.
The worst part is that anyone who wasn’t around for the first 10ish years of the web has never seen how real and optimistic and grass roots and delightfully human it was.
We really lost a lot.
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Ah yes the people who ran their video games on DOS are being left behind.
Help son, how do I open this app?!? With my finger???
I understand that crypto is a scam that will rob millions of people of money they desperately need.
But what you said there is literally the end of my understanding of what crypto is. It has something to do with computers solving math problems, and somehow that’s worth money.
What?
the problem with crypto is that when you try to explain it, it sounds so stupid that someone else thinks you have to be explaining it wrong
but if you want explanation, this one is fine https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html and this https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html
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It's not "brain melting". Even watching the internet go from "this is super neat, and way cool" (For nerds) to "Well, it's ALL going through enshittification now" wasn't "brain melting", it's just what happens under capitalism.
Going from seeing nothing but possibilities when I heard about some new device or software coming out to dreading what they are going to remove or break has been one of the most depressing parts about my life.
Hell, I was looking to replace my 10 year old mouse last weekend and couldn't find one that was equivalent or better. I even asked people who were more into computer shit than me and I felt like I was taking crazy pills reading their responses. I ended up just fixing the problem myself rather than replacing it.
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I feel both cuddled and attacked
elders
1990
I got to be alive before mobile phones and social media.
Worth it!
I am immeasurably grateful that the entirety of my youth is not on record.
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I stood in line for VHS tapes. I also know that the blockchain is slow as hell and that cryptocurrency is glorified gambling for people with too much money - and I had a friend in the early 2000s that was trying to make a Bitcoin exchange.
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I don’t expect them to understand crypto. No one expects them to understand crypto.
I expect them to understand FUCKING FASCISM.
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Crypto? Yes, I know what a pyrimid scheme is.
Most of the kids I know who have this attitude would also call IT if they accidentally opened the Command Prompt or BIOS.
To be fair, us elders had grifts and money laundering too, so crypto is nothing functionally new.
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Noone is expecting you to understand crypto, but I hear this about modern technology in general all the time and I just don't buy it. It's only brain-melting if you've spent your entire life being deeply incurious. There are 80-90 year olds who understand this shit just fine because they bothered to keep up.
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Nobody is expected to understand crypto. Same with the stock market and generally the economy. If it was simple and see thru you couldn’t run this many scams.
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Apparently I'm an elder.
The shifts in tech were easy.
It's the repeated economic punishment, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and political dive bomb this country has put us through that's been tough.
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But crypto is borderline useless that consumes more electricity than the entire AI industry while enabling alot of illegal activities and money laundering. I was quite susprised when my drug money found their way into normal people's lives.
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Im still not convinced that crypto is worth it. It seems like just about everyone either loses money in crypto or makes very little, chasing a dream laid out to them by some youtuber who is part of the very small group to make any nice amount from it. Just seems too volatile and sketchy
It's a decentralized pyramid scheme. It's a way for the rich to syphon money from the gullible and gambling addicts.
That's all there is to it, it's not really hard to understand.
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everyone either loses money in crypto or makes very little
And this is why people misunderstand crypto. The point isn't to make money, and it never was. Profiteers have twisted it into that to make a quick buck from pump and dump schemes, but it shouldn't be considered "investing" in any sense of the word.
Cryptocurrency should have two primary uses:
- Facilitate transactions - needs successo widescale adoption by merchants and fast, cheap transactions
- Store of value, like a bank account
BTC transaction costs are way to high and slow for #1, so it's unlikely to get enough volume of regular transactions to even out valuations. The lightning network helps, but I think it also has problems. And unfortunately, coins with lower transaction costs that should scale better either get banned (e.g. privacy coins in some areas) or don't catch on.
I'm still holding out hope that it'll stabilize and become useful for transactions, but I'm not putting any significant money in until that happens because I don't see it as an investment.
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As an elder millennial, I respect gen z and alpha for coping with modern society. It may just be a fond remembrance, but things seemed much simpler then. Creative jobs weren't threatened by AI, the tech didn't exist for corporations to spy on people, the US.. well let's not get into that.
I at least got to experience a decent time in history and built up enough context where I understand what is going on in the world today. That of course leads to irreconcilable sadness with where things are going, but at least I got to experience a wild culture shift.
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Before 1990?… fuck you.. I have kids born before 1990… elder my ass … I probably understand crypto better than you do…
I’m not bitter. Not at all.
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It’s not that brain-melting. Taken one day at a time, the shift was very gradual.
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