Oh, I've had this. Specifically about art and media more than big events, though.
Like, I've had younger people project entirely anachronistic views on music or performances that were actively and explicitly the oppopsite. And it happens all the time about gaming. I think we're over it now and even Americans will openly acknolwedge this only happened to Atari, or in the US specifically, but that brief moment in time when everybody kept talking about the "videogame crash" and how videogames went away in the mid 80s is, to this day, the single largest bit of gaslighting I've personally experienced. It felt like I had jumped dimensions.
There was this one big political event where people tried to recontextualize a specific thing in history, but it's very country-specific, so going over it wouldn't be super helpful. Just know that even people who are roughly my age were clearly misrepresenting the intentions of specific historical figures in the context of a political movement and I spent a couple of years just begging people to read specific books written by specific people because man, it got weird with the revisionism for a bit.
There’s a video that tries to tell you the entire history of video games, and I love how, after a lull of bad things hapenning, they stop, go back a couple years, and start talking about PC Gaming, the european and japanese indie scene and so on and you just go “oh yeah, a world outside Atari”.
And even videos like that will obviously miss things and places but hey, I’m proud to say I did laugh when someone on YouTube made a joke at the expense of the “Dendy-ass” aesthetic.
Right, I remember living through the videogame “crash”. As a kid, I had no idea about it; I just wanted to get my hands on anything computer or game-related, and only learned that the market “dried up” and so on maybe a decade later…all that stuff only mattered to companies and traders - not one person I knew in the target demo knew or GAF about any of this so-called “crash”.
Oh, yeah, that's a fun one that I hadn't considered and was recently mentioned in the Atari 50 interactive documentary thing (which is great). Some of the developers point out that people were buying so many Atari games after the crash but a lot of developers had moved on, so the few people still making new Atari software became weirdly viable and sought out.
There are so many things on Know Your Meme that give me that feeling. Plenty of internet specific memes there that existed since the 90’s but are attributed to be from the 2010’s or later.
my grandad distinctly remembers walking uphill both ways. i just got done with a 48 hour youtube+wikipedia rabbit hole about routes children took to school in many different areas in that time period, one of which was the street he lived on. sure he was there and i wasn’t and sure youtube and wikipedia aren’t 100% guaranteed to be reliable sources but you have to see why i’m not quite as inclined to trust his firsthand account
I had a joke during Plamegate (the burning of CIA Operative Valerie Plame as political revenge which was a gross intelligence-co munity faux pas) that we had an opportunity to change the naming convention for DC scandals from -gate to -cake (from yellocake, the processed uranium the Hussein was allegedly obtaining in Africa for WMDS (nuclear weapons) even though he had no way to process the stuff into weapons-grade enriched uranium.
A lot more and better cake jokes could be made, I argued, so the press agencies should just agree to the new naming convention. It didn’t take.
Anyway, Bush got his Iraq war and once we had captured Hussein, Bush was cracking jokes about no-one finding the alleged WMDs, and we realized he sold the US a $3 trillion war without justification.
At that point I wondered how a Republican could ever get elected to the White House again. I was still pretty naiïve.
Apparently they’re teaching gradeschoolers that George W. Bush went into Iraq because of 9/11.
(The Iraq war had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.)
Also the CIA torture program had nothing to do with gathering intelligence. But that came out when Trump was pro-extra-torture, and his fans loved him for it.
I think it’s safe to say that he used the reactionary climate of the post 9/11 mentality as a vehicle to help jumpstart OIF. But if not a catalyst, it had nothing to do with OIF, you’re 100% right. We were taking big steps toward conflict and nothing that was used at that time to justify invasion would have been prevented in the absence of 9/11.
If you talk to most boomers and even a lot of Gen X they’ll say they remember that’s what happened. Saying anything else at the time would get you called a conspiracy theorist despite the obvious demonstrable proof that the Iraq war had nothing to do with 9/11.
Even mentioning Abu Grahib would get eye rolls and be meet with coruses of “you just hate America” or “you are one of those ‘blame America first’ people!”
I’m a young Gen Xer and IIRC it was clear to half the country that the whole WMD story was bullshit, but for a lot of people that bit of clarity came in hindsight after the initial invasion.
I used to joke that Dubya used 9/11 as an excuse to “finish Daddy’s work”, given that even after the Gulf War Hussein continued to reign for 10 more years. But when Halliberton suddenly started getting all these contract jobs securing oil wells, it was pretty obvious what was going on at that point.
Its strange because I remember there was initial talks about going to Afghanistan to search for Bin Laden, but then suddenly the discussion shifted to the whole bullshit WMD story. IIRC the assigned UN commission that was supposed to do their annual inspections for nuclear and chemical weapons, found nothing during their visit to Iraq just a few months prior, but those chucklefucks in the WH kept pushing the narrative anyway. The Whitehouse did such a half assed job of getting their stories straight, I was sure someone was going to fuck up at some point, but the media kept pushing the assigned narrative and the public bought it.
Oh I have a “documentary” for you…But I’m convinced Bush Sr was there when JFK got, got and Prescott was part of a soft coup against FDR, so I’m pretty sure Bush’s are just terrible in general.
I am aware of the coincidence of Bush Sr’s alleged position at the time of the assassination and his relatively quick transition to high profile politics that came after
Like when someone starts working at your company and starts bagging out the process and whomever built a project they really really wanted to work on and it turns out it’s you who set it up.
for reasons such as budget cuts and you had to make it work and you managed to make it work on nothing but bubblegum and tape and here this person is saying how you did it wrong without knowing youre the person who achieved something really great against impossible odds.
I just walked away and worked somewhere else that had a better pipeline. I’ll let them figure it out the hard way. They can beg management how they need more money to achieve even half of what I did. Fuck em. I’m too old to debate for myself when I already achieved a lot to get them there.
Or: you explain it to them. If they are not a complete asshat you might even be able to teach them something and you cant blame newcomers for peaking on the dunning kruger curve.
No one owes you knowledge. I can walk out and work elsewhere. So You’re not my job. you could ask questions and be respectful to others as much as you expect it. Treat others as you want to be treated. Or not. I’ll just leave. And I owe you nothing for your Entitled attitude toxifying the workplace.
rudeness mixed with wild assumption is the unskillful calling card of an amateur.
Again: if you are faced with budget cuts criticism does nothing to fix that. Only ideas can. If you have time to stand and do nothing but criticize, you had time to help. If you didn’t then you’re not part of the team and should be shed for the health of the goal. Or have it your way: remain shitty and lose all your valuable players and lose the project. We owe you nothing.
Growing a culture that welcomes and engages criticism leads to better results. Creating a culture which is defensive and fragile to criticism leads to bad products and stagnation. The “in versus out” tribal mentality you articulate is unhelpful.
Happens to me with Venezuela. I lived there before and through/ during the glorious revolución bolivariana and here come the champagne leftists from 8 thousands kilometers away to tell me that it wasn’t real socialism, that apparently I am a CIA agent (where my money at?), that I didn’t got held at gunpoint many times in my life there for attempting to escape the country as many others and that the government didn’t murder my family members haha. Yeah it’s not funny at all
I would assume something along the lines of - autocracy, authoritarianism, and corruption do not describe what socialism portends to be.
That said, I did read something the other day about how Marxist Leninism in reality relies on the concept of an authoritarian that creates the framework, stays in power to enforce the will of the worker, and gradually relinquishes power as it is no longer required. Interesting.
I know enough about socialism to know that it is as homogeneous a concept as a bloody Mary from a gentrified cafe. Someone saying they know more about socialism than another simply because they lived through one of the scant few representations of it has about as much reason as someone saying they’re an expert in capitalism or patriotism because they live the US. So, I can appreciate the perspective that someone from a socialist country can offer, but it in no way defines socialism as an ethos, IMO.
Being the victim of American propaganda does not make you an employee CIA agent. But the fact is that America is fundamentally responsible for most of the problems in Venezuela, both via CIA meddling, and letting our capitalists decimate their economy for their own personal gain. Its the same story across almost all of South America. Sometimes it’s staging coups on their elected leaders, sometimes it’s leveraging the power of a fruit company in order to rewrite their laws to be favorable towards said fruit company.
Listening to Behind the Bastards has taught me all I think I need to know to understand where the blame lies for the economic shit of the last 100 years in South America.
Or maybe your grandfather just had a perspective that was skewed by either wealth or propaganda. From context in going to guess that he attributes a lot of the negatives caused by capitlaists during the cold war to simply being fundamental facts of socialism/communism
I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt actually. You’re the one saying he isn’t merely the victim of propaganda. Its entirely possible he was just an idiot. Or a massive piece of shit. Most of the people who were “driven out” of communist countries were just business owners who were trying to hoard all the food they grew, during a famine. So yes, now that you bring it up, it is also possible your grandfather was just a massive POS, rather than a victim.
Hahaha sure dude. Whatever you say. I’m sure you know much more about the trials and tribulations that happened before you were born than the people who lived through it.
I’m super happy to be living in this country after having read about my ancestors experiences. He took a risk by coming here, but we all have benefitted from it.
Yeah, that kind of thing can happen when you actually research history rather than ask one person. There’s a reason anecdotal evidence isn’t given much credence.
Why are those your only options? You already ruled out researching what the actual truth is? Don’t take my word for it, prove me wrong. If I can be proven wrong, I want to know. My evidence is empirical, but 2nd hand. Better than anecdotal, but not proof in itself. Your grandfather’s journal is primary, but anecdotal. Would you rather be right, or be correct? I’d rather be correct.
Oh, my research into the matter was propaganda? Is all of the rest of the actual data propaganda too? You have anecdotal evidence, which I have no doubt your grandfather believed was true, but which does not necessarily mean it is correct. The fact is that the vast majority of those who fled the USSR citing persecution had very much done something worthy of persecution. Most commonly, withholding the means of production from their workers.
If I am wrong though, show me the proof. Anecdotal evidence is useful for verifying knowledge, and for creating hypotheses. For proof though, actual data is required.
X/Twitter post by user brittany wilson @sameoldstory reading “One disorienting thing about getting older that nobody tells you about is how weird it feels to get a really passionate, extremely wrong lecture from a much younger person about verifiable historical events you can personally remember pretty well”
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This seems to happen all the time now. I sometimes leave comments on forums, or youtube about my direct work experience only to angrily get shouted down now in the replies. TBH I just delete the post or the comment after a while, especially if other people there dont interject and correct.
Its a pointless battle and a little skill or a little history will be lost as a result.
People wont see it, though. It makes no difference it being there or being shadowbanned by the algorithm system… the difference it makes is one to my personal mental health in not having to deal with some quite irrelevant and nasty people.
Yeah, sometimes when a comment gets wildly misinterpreted or goes wrong due to early attention by people with bad attitudes, I leave it up… other times, I get sick of repeated replies by abusive people and just block people and delete it. Reddit voting in particular (and some Lemmy lately) goes with trends, like if a post starts to get downvotes, people are more likely to downvote it, especially if it’s ambiguous. People trying to interpret it will choose a negative interpretation if it already has downvotes, like the other downvotes are a sign “other people determined this was bad”. Even worse, there is a certain behavior where people reply to someone who has been downvoted to try to correct or chide them, like it’s their opportunity to act superior and talk down to someone.
I can remember the first time a young person tried to tell me about some Booth fella was the one that shot JFK.
And I was like oh no son, you’re severely mistaken. It was Lincoln that assassinated Washington, I was there on the banks of the Potomac and watched the whole thing unfold.
That’s the Wright Brothers’ plane! In Kitty Hawk in 1903, Charles Lindbergh flew it 15 miles on a thimble full of corn oil. Single-handedly won us the Civil War, it did.
I think zoomers are generally great, but they really underestimated how much of a Wild West the Internet was back in the day, when everybody has their own Angelfire or Geocities website with bad HTML and clipart gifs and people blogged on their LiveJournal and wrote bad fan fictions on forums and all that.
You just kinda learned to be tech savvy for things like “Don’t open random links” and “don’t believe everything you read on the Internet” through trial by fire or having to explain why you broke the computer, and it’s not exactly a skill that you forget. So it’s kinda weird for them to assume that they are better at tech just because they are younger.
I do like this place, gives me nostalgia of the Wild West of these early days. Needs more bad fanfictions here though.
There are even fewer of us that remember the totally text based forums and IRC that was in many ways the innocent Garden of Eden era, before Eternal September happened. I was very much a child, so I’m not really nostalgic about that era of the net, since it was far more of an echo chamber in many ways back then, but it was “safe” and “innocent” back then. You had to verify sources even more, since the majority of sources weren’t available online, but the vast majority of people using it were not only fluent in at least one human language, they were also fluent in multiple programming languages, Assembly being far more popular than than it is now. This is when you could trust any link. The false actors hadn’t managed to infiltrate the protected Geek Sphere, quite yet.
Then CompuServe happened, and it was no longer a refuge for us computer geeks, all of a sudden there were business people looking at our ideas. They didn’t like them much at all, to say the least. AOL followed and further saturated the net with people who had no idea what they could do with it. This is when us netizens started warning to check the link address before you clicked. Back then, you could easily keep a database list of the false actor domains.
Then the late 90s and mostly 2000 happened. That’s the Wild West you’re talking about. All of a sudden, you HAD to have antivirus programs, you needed many programs such as adblockers that wouldn’t exist for another few years, IRC and Use.net had been piracy hubs, but all of a sudden Napster and Bearshare made those archaic forums unnecessary. Metallica did their thing, accidentally creating a bunch of Metallica fans that would never buy anything by Metallica, but they had access to their entire discography. Hell discography downloads became a thing about this time. Don’t download the entire discography of The Kinks. That shit contains literally 40 to 120 gigs of MP3s across 40(?) albums, depending on compression quality.
I’m a Xennial being born in 1980 and on the net as early as late 1986, early 1987, my father was in the industry and literally helped code parts of UNIX, while he was in The Navy in the early 1970s. I’ve been shown evidence that we were the first household in a multi-state area, thanks to the meticulous data keeping of The Baby Bell that we were part of, that had two dedicated phone lines far earlier than anyone else except my father’s colleagues, all of whom lived multiple states away from us since my father has been remote working as much as he can since SSH was adopted as standard in UNIX. He rejects all technology that he can. He claims that it is all based on extremely faulty programming, and we can’t trust it.
There have been several periods as the net gets bigger, and I don’t doubt that we will look at right now as a “special time” in the future. I’m not sure if that will be because we finally found the limits of LLMs or if it’s because the net will evolve into something that is closer to the spirit of “a place to find the truth through facts,” which is what it started as.
I’m in my 40s, a project manager at my company and half the time when I can. Tech support I have to send them the goddamn tech support article that I want them to follow.
Plus I have to train all these kids in their 20s on how to use outlook and various other software programs that I’ve been using for 20 years now.
To be fair, there might be an issue with the discoverability of these articles. Restructuring the documentation may lead to less of those issues. Though there is always someone who just opens a ticket before reading anything…
Oh, man, I both agree AND think this post is one of those things.
See, people around Mastodon keep saying "everybody is nice, like in the early Internet", and my memory of the Internet is full of drive-by porn and gore, weird political takes, illegible websites and malware.
Apparently some study recently flagged zoomers as being worse than even boomers at spotting online threats, with millenials being best, and that checks out to me for the reasons you list.
We had to be good at spotting online threats. There were no systems, ai, or algorithms to detect child porn or extreme violence. If you were lucky there were mods. You had to be smarter. I still remember in detail the first time I watched a video of a child cutting a man’s head off. Plus if you broke the only family computer, may God gave mercy on your soul. That’s why I became as good with technology as I am, I broke the family computer and had to have it fixed before anyone woke up. Computers just work now. Remember when devices wanted the same memory so you had to somehow remap it. It was the wild west.
To many of the users that claim Lemmy is like the early internet, I often see the year 2010 thrown around. Like, are you serious kid? I’ve been on the internet literally since 1991. I’ve seen some shit. Shit you wouldn’t believe.
I’ve seen things… seen things you little people wouldn’t believe. Sharing software off the shoulders of radio waves, bright as the EM spectrum… I rode on the back decks of BBS with a bell 103 and watched 300 bps content glitter in the dark near my Tannhäuser monitor. All those moments… they’ll be gone.
I don’t think Lemmy is like 2010 reddit culturally but more like traditional forums though, since on most instances, the regulars all kinda know each other and their admins as well as their personalities, whereas you rarely recongnize any username on reddit unless they are one of these novelty accounts like Vargas or shitty_watercolour or poem (there are exceptions like Unidan or Wil Wheaton but they are rare) and everyone just kinda blends into a blob there.
Maybe they mean early social media. That term is somewhat misused, though… social media didn’t start with Facebook or Twitter, it began with Usenet and then forums. And yeah, it wasn’t halcyon days back then. We had the same abusive behavior like trolling, alts, bullying, spam, egos and arguing.
See, people around Mastodon keep saying “everybody is nice, like in the early Internet”, and my memory of the Internet is full of drive-by porn and gore, weird political takes, illegible websites and malware.
People looking at the past through rose-colored glasses? You don’t say.
Yeah, the early Web was ass. No Wikipedia, no Internet Archive…oh, and it took forever to download anything.
Not that there was anything much to download. But there was a good FTP site FAQ floating around. (for those that remember what the original FAQ files were)
Fuuuck you just made me remember the first time I encountered Wikipedia. It was a recommendation from a teacher in my first class of middle school to read some articles about the topic before writing an assignment. It was a literary life changing moment for me. All this knowledge… for free?
Before itunes really caught on and ages before something like spotify would rise up, millenials cut their teeth on kazaa, limewire and a host of other p2p services trying to get digital copies of our music and movies. Is this really just a low quality pirate rip or is a virus laden exe? ONE WAY TO FIND OUT!
The early days of Napster were actually good. Things started to suck by the time it got to Limewire or Gnutella, with “hotphotoofgirl.jpg.exe” and whatever. BitTorrent improved the situation.
I remember when Napster would let you browse the music folder of ANY computer running Napster. I have so much music still I downloaded from our universities intranet back in 1998 that way.
It was like if you were on a corporate network and everyone shared their music on the server shared folder. Was mind blowing even on 10base-T.
Nothing has come close to repeating g that aside from hoarding music on my own computer.
The one time it was a Pam Anderson nude was when I tried to download the music video of Linkin Park - Papercut, turned out to be the intro credits to Barb Wire on loop
Kids on lemmy these days telling me about 9/11. Dude I was in school that day. I remember it quite well. You weren’t even in your dads balls yet. Stfu.
I was in English class and that teacher also taught an elective on Film History, so she had a big screen TV in the room (big, for the time and for being in a classroom…It was probably a 40” tube). A couple of the adjacent rooms came in and we watched the second tower get hit with Katie, Matt, Al, and Ann.
I was at an Evangelical Bible college, my first month away from home. People genuinely thought it was the end times and Jesus was coming back that day.
“I am alive during the invasion of Ukraine, therefore I must know more than someone who spends massive amounts of time researching it 20 years from now.”
Not assuming what they’re saying is well researched, they’re probably not- but being alive during an event doesn’t exactly make you an expert on it just because you watched the news.
It’s honestly the equivalent of saying that because you lived in a country you know more about the sociopolitical status of it and why it got there thab someone who doesn’t. Like when people say “you never lived in X type of country, so you have no idea why it was so bad.”
I’d trust a sociology professor from the UK about why living conditions in America are so bad for the average working class person much more than a MAGA conservative nutjob who believes in the deep state trying to replace white people. Just like how this post doesn’t really prove that just because you were there means you’re an expert in that event or why and how it happened.
It depends on what you want to know. A UK sociologist could absolutely explain the school to prison pipeline better than a maga nutjob, but they won’t talk about how the crosswalk light has been broken in town for two years, but the cops have new cars.
To be clear, the sociologist is more important for being well informed about a subject, but the individual stories are more interesting for me every time.
I absolutely don’t doubt that individual accounts will have useful lessons to learn. But personal experience will always have personal biases. People will literally change the way they experience reality to facillitate their world view, which is why the sentiment of this post is stupid af. Just because “you were there” doesn’t make you any more of an arbiter of truth than someone who wasn’t. At most it provides you with the advantage of a perspective more directly affected by said events.
I don’t disagree, and I know that what a history class wants to know isn’t likely coming from a random person’s account.
I do think that’s why I thought history was boring in school though- I care very little about the date of the signing of the magna carta, but I would have loved a rogue priest writing about how he thought things changed. Literally, if all he cared about was that they now had to pay less taxes or got less support, that would be cool to know. I know that learning about appeasement is important, but I got much more out of memoirs from people during the holocaust. Reading about one of the imprisoned Jews being really irritable in (I think) Night was a revelation for eleven year old me- I’d only previously read about them being afraid and meek, and that wasn’t the full spectrum of emotions, so it felt shallow comparatively.
My sister teaches at a historical magnet school, and one of the things they do is group events differently, so you might learn about the magna carta, blair mountain, and occupy Wall Street together, to look at power in collectivity, for example. I hear about this and see the value, but it does feel subjectively wild to include occupy there. I think the proper way to voice that is through a light hearted tweet, not rejecting immediately any differing view.
Individual experiences definitely have biases, but time and time again history textbooks have also been shown to have significant biases. Not to invalidate them, but any source will have a bias, and you can have a bias yet still be accurate.
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