What made millennials trust technology?

[Bill the Piper]

In the post-WW2 period there was a lot of anti-technology sentiments. Beatniks and hippies wanted to go back to nature, 1970 anarchists destroyed computers and after the Chernobyl disaster anti-nuclear sentiments became mainstream.

And then millennials came, trusting technology as no generation since the GIs. I know this is what S&H predicted, but what specific reasons made millennials develop this way?

[pbrower2a]

(08-31-2019, 04:50 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: In the post-WW2 period there was a lot of anti-technology sentiments. Beatniks and hippies wanted to go back to nature, 1970 anarchists destroyed computers and after the Chernobyl disaster anti-nuclear sentiments became mainstream.

And then millennials came, trusting technology as no generation since the GIs. I know this is what S&H predicted, but what specific reasons made millennials develop this way?

The Millennial Generation, unless growing up in extreme destitution or in a culture (Old Order Amish) that rejects technologies of entertainment has lived in the most technologically-advanced world.  Although the technology of the 1980's (like VHS tapes and VCRs) is often so obsolete that it hardly sells at Goodwill, even that was remarkable at the time. Much of what we consider technological progress is in practice doing more with lesser inputs of material; mass alone demonstrates the difference between a now-primitive 25" monitor TV that one can hardly lift and a 32" LED TV that one can handle easily. 

Technology makes access to entertainment far easier, and in a mass culture like ours that matters more than does the quality of what is on it. Even so, the Millennial Generation has not had life as easy as any generation since at least the middle waves of the Silent Generation. It has responsibilities to economic elites that themselves show no responsibility except to themselves, people whose ideology is best described as mirror-image Marxism*. The people who really rule us, the tycoons and executives, want America to act as one big, happy plantation.  

If the sole purpose that the Master Class offers to the common man in life is to make people already filthy-rich even more filthy rich, then life is little more than a gritty struggle for survival. Such a world has high costs and low rewards, and the beatnik and hippie could get away with his way of life because life could be inexpensive. $3500 a month for a studio apartment in a society with too few jobs that pay $10K a month (I remember when a guideline on hosing costs was that nobody should get a mortgage loan. let alone pay 35% of income on rent)... the landlord is King in America and is the real whip-snapper in this One Big Happy Plantation of a society. 


*Marxism-Leninism begins with the observation that capitalism is a cruel, corrupt, dehumanizing, inequitable way of generating prosperity because the prosperity goes only to the economic elites -- and as the moral premise that such is very wrong. The mirror-image Marxist believes exactly what Marx said that capitalism is -- except that the mirror-image Marxist endorses what most people see as objectionable or even criminal.

[AspieMillennial]

(08-31-2019, 06:00 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(08-31-2019, 04:50 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: In the post-WW2 period there was a lot of anti-technology sentiments. Beatniks and hippies wanted to go back to nature, 1970 anarchists destroyed computers and after the Chernobyl disaster anti-nuclear sentiments became mainstream.

And then millennials came, trusting technology as no generation since the GIs. I know this is what S&H predicted, but what specific reasons made millennials develop this way?

The Millennial Generation, unless growing up in extreme destitution or in a culture (Old Order Amish) that rejects technologies of entertainment has lived in the most technologically-advanced world.  Although the technology of the 1980's (like VHS tapes and VCRs) is often so obsolete that it hardly sells at Goodwill, even that was remarkable at the time. Much of what we consider technological progress is in practice doing more with lesser inputs of material; mass alone demonstrates the difference between a now-primitive 25" monitor TV that one can hardly lift and a 32" LED TV that one can handle easily. 

Technology makes access to entertainment far easier, and in a mass culture like ours that matters more than does the quality of what is on it. Even so, the Millennial Generation has not had life as easy as any generation since at least the middle waves of the Silent Generation. It has responsibilities to economic elites that themselves show no responsibility except to themselves, people whose ideology is best described as mirror-image Marxism*. The people who really rule us, the tycoons and executives, want America to act as one big, happy plantation.  

If the sole purpose that the Master Class offers to the common man in life is to make people already filthy-rich even more filthy rich, then life is little more than a gritty struggle for survival. Such a world has high costs and low rewards, and the beatnik and hippie could get away with his way of life because life could be inexpensive. $3500 a month for a studio apartment in a society with too few jobs that pay $10K a month (I remember when a guideline on hosing costs was that nobody should get a mortgage loan. let alone pay 35% of income on rent)... the landlord is King in America and is the real whip-snapper in this One Big Happy Plantation of a society. 


*Marxism-Leninism begins with the observation that capitalism is a cruel, corrupt, dehumanizing, inequitable way of generating prosperity because the prosperity goes only to the economic elites -- and as the moral premise that such is very wrong. The mirror-image Marxist believes exactly what Marx said that capitalism is -- except that the mirror-image Marxist endorses what most people see as objectionable or even criminal.

The quality does matter. The internet is a way of escaping the current culture and finding your own. Then the mass media can't control you as much if you're wise.

[Bill the Piper]

(08-31-2019, 06:00 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Millennial Generation, unless growing up in extreme destitution or in a culture (Old Order Amish) that rejects technologies of entertainment has lived in the most technologically-advanced world.  Although the technology of the 1980's (like VHS tapes and VCRs) is often so obsolete that it hardly sells at Goodwill, even that was remarkable at the time. Much of what we consider technological progress is in practice doing more with lesser inputs of material; mass alone demonstrates the difference between a now-primitive 25" monitor TV that one can hardly lift and a 32" LED TV that one can handle easily. 

Technology makes access to entertainment far easier, and in a mass culture like ours that matters more than does the quality of what is on it.

So for millennials, technology = entertainment? Sounds plausible given what they write online I'm an Xennial myself, so I can partly identify, in 2003-5 I could spend hours watching bare-bellied girls dance on MTV music videos or playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
Older generations' fear of technology was about fears of mass destruction (Hiroshima) or totalitarian control (Big Brother). By the time millennials arrived, these fears have been shown to be exaggerated.

[AspieMillennial]

(08-31-2019, 04:50 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: In the post-WW2 period there was a lot of anti-technology sentiments. Beatniks and hippies wanted to go back to nature, 1970 anarchists destroyed computers and after the Chernobyl disaster anti-nuclear sentiments became mainstream.

And then millennials came, trusting technology as no generation since the GIs. I know this is what S&H predicted, but what specific reasons made millennials develop this way?

How people use technology is what's not to trust not the technology itself. I like using the internet to search for things and to learn, for information. I don't trust lab meat however or a lot of the advances people seem to be pushing for or the lack of privacy people seem to want. Social media also has me iffy and how people are willing to trust strangers online more than their own thoughts and experiences. I see technology as a tool that can be used for good or evil. Some technologies I choose, others I eschew.

[Bill the Piper]

(08-31-2019, 06:33 AM)AspieMillennial Wrote: How people use technology is what's not to trust not the technology itself. I like using the internet to search for things and to learn, for information. I don't trust lab meat however or a lot of the advances people seem to be pushing for or the lack of privacy people seem to want. Social media also has me iffy and how people are willing to trust strangers online more than their own thoughts and experiences. I see technology as a tool that can be used for good or evil. Some technologies I choose, others I eschew.

I should have said computer technology. Every saeculum has its core technology: the Great Power Cycle had mechanical engineering, the Millennial Cycle has computers and for the next cycle it'll probably be biotech.

[pbrower2a]

(08-31-2019, 06:31 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(08-31-2019, 06:00 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Millennial Generation, unless growing up in extreme destitution or in a culture (Old Order Amish) that rejects technologies of entertainment has lived in the most technologically-advanced world.  Although the technology of the 1980's (like VHS tapes and VCRs) is often so obsolete that it hardly sells at Goodwill, even that was remarkable at the time. Much of what we consider technological progress is in practice doing more with lesser inputs of material; mass alone demonstrates the difference between a now-primitive 25" monitor TV that one can hardly lift and a 32" LED TV that one can handle easily. 

Technology makes access to entertainment far easier, and in a mass culture like ours that matters more than does the quality of what is on it.

So for millennials, technology = entertainment? Sounds plausible given what they write online I'm an Xennial myself, so I can partly identify, in 2003-5 I could spend hours watching bare-bellied girls dance on MTV music videos or playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

Mass low culture fills the role that Karl Marx attributed to religion: the opiate of the masses. It is the surrogate of real life. If you can't get sex because you are broke and ugly, then there is pornography.  If you can't go anywhere because the landlord so bleeds you that you are stranded in a tiny apartment except when working two jobs to pay him off when not paying off loan-sharks, you get to witness the witless antics of 'celebrities'. If you have the dubious opportunity to live in a low-rent area, then you get country music to confirm reality. 

OK, I admit: such high culture as opera and middlebrow culture as Broadway musicals are also fantasy. We need some fantasy, especially if life is mostly awful because we are poor, hate our jobs, and find life sheer drudgery if we aren't working and not diddling with a video game or watching something idiotic on the idiot screen.  We must admit something else: the secret of happiness in much of life is stupidity, so mind-rotting entertainment helps make people politically docile. With leaders like Donald Trump, one needs to be stupid to be happy if one isn't filthy rich.   

Can't we do better? Or must we debase ourselves to fit the current nastiness of life?

Quote:Older generations' fear of technology was about fears of mass destruction (Hiroshima) or totalitarian control (Big Brother). By the time millennials arrived, these fears have been shown to be exaggerated.

It is fortunate that those who got the nukes got scared of what they could do. The first two uses of nuclear explosions on enemy cities were possible only after some convoluted thinking after a nation was demonized for what its demonic leaders did. Maybe now we recognize that the subjects of a totalitarian state like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Thug Japan, Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Baath fascist nightmares in Syria and Iraq are not at fault for the crimes of the states that they follow. I am tempted to believe that had the D-Day invasion failed and kept Nazi Germany alive and killing into late 1945, then some German cities would have been nuked -- and the pretext would have been the Holocaust. It is far easier to nuke a country whose leaders imposed the Bataan Death March than a country that is clean of such immoral conduct. 

I recall that the world got less complacent about nukes after the Soviet Union and Western countries started having international conferences between their scientists. Their nuclear scientists might visit Paris or Copenhagen and decide that nuking a place so magnificent would be a horrific crime. Ours might visit Prague or Leningrad and decide that nuking a place so magnificent would be a horrific crime. The university that had the research that made the nukes that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki possible (the University of California at Berkeley) became a center of anti-nuclear sentiment, and the father of the Soviet H-bomb (Andrei Sakharov) became one of the leading dissidents in the Soviet Union. 

Let us remember also that one of the points that got the Soviet Union to negotiate a halt in the escalation of nuclear arsenals and missiles for delivery was that the deal could keep Soviet satellites from getting their own nukes. Soviet diplomats could go to the puppet leaders of countries of the Warsaw pact and warn them to sign the nuclear treaty that the USSR wanted or face overthrow. In 1989, Romania seemed to have a nuclear program in its early stage.  

At the least science has some standards of intellectual integrity, one of which is to not stifle basic truth. A totalitarian regime in America might have stifled a calculation of what a nuclear blast centered upon the Loop of Chicago would do -- or could it? 

.............  

As for the technology of tyranny -- it isn't all that sophisticated. The red-hot poker pointed at the rectum is hardly a sophisticated technology. The FBI proved far more sophisticated in breaking conspiracies than its contemporary counterparts in the Gestapo, the KGB, and the Mukhabarat. If it can't beat confessions out of people, then the FBI can track phone conversations, paper trails, and spending patterns to nail people who do certain crimes. Being more sophisticated than the cleverest crook is one way of causing smart people with sociopathic tendencies to not do horrible things to people.    

Behavior marks the totalitarian order. If one looks at Lawrence Britt's fourteen warning signs of fascism:




most of these traits well define not only Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Tojo, Antonescu, Szalasi, the Greek colonels' regime, Pinochet, Videla, and Montt (and regrettably Trump) but also many 'socialist' regimes as well. Saddam Hussein and the Kim dynasty, anyone? Ceausescu? Castro? It seems to fit Iran under the Ayatollahs very well. 

.......

We have a greater menace from technology -- its capacity for numbing our consciences and consciousness, its potential for destruction of human bonds, and its use as a surrogate for thought. I wish people would use the technology of the Internet to latch onto great literature, art, and music that people could share.... but people lack the sophistication to go beyond noticing what is 'cool' and 'neat'. A gang rape as sexual entertainment? A beheading video? A rehash of Nazi-style racism? No thanks!

Maybe cat videos are not high art, but that is harmless. I would rather that people use the Internet to attach to great music, discover the canon of old literature, and seek great art. This said, what is wrong with the old-fashioned ice-cream social, playing a board game as a family, telling ghost stories and eating 'smores around a campfire, and doing some painting or origami? Technology is at best a way of doing other things that used to be delightful and enriching. One can obviously never hear a live performance of Pablo Casals playing the cello suites of J S Bach, but we have recordings. 

Knowing what to do with the technology is even more important than having it. Access to child pornography is unwelcome. Geezers like I can show people where to look for some worthy use of time and bandwidth.

[Hintergrund]

For the Millennials, the internet and PCs were part of the world for as long as they could think. For the Xers, internet and computers were something new and cool and to make money with. For everyone older, well, they struggle with it and need help from the younger ones. (Exceptions prove the rule.)

[pbrower2a]

(09-01-2019, 01:08 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: For the Millennials, the internet and PCs were part of the world for as long as they could think. For the Xers, internet and computers were something new and cool and to make money with. For everyone older, well, they struggle with it and need help from the younger ones. (Exceptions prove the rule.)

...and that is the essence of it all. The technology has always been around and available. 

Even the games available to Boomers who got computer access were very different -- low in graphics and comparatively heavy in text. Around 1975, computers started being used for word processing.

[sbarrera]

(08-31-2019, 04:50 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: In the post-WW2 period there was a lot of anti-technology sentiments. Beatniks and hippies wanted to go back to nature, 1970 anarchists destroyed computers and after the Chernobyl disaster anti-nuclear sentiments became mainstream.

And then millennials came, trusting technology as no generation since the GIs. I know this is what S&H predicted, but what specific reasons made millennials develop this way?

I think a lot of it is that their life experience taught them *not* to trust people, at least not as a collective for solving problems. Democratic government isn't working very well, but smartphone apps, on the other hand...

[pbrower2a]

(08-31-2019, 06:33 AM)AspieMillennial Wrote:

(08-31-2019, 04:50 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: In the post-WW2 period there was a lot of anti-technology sentiments. Beatniks and hippies wanted to go back to nature, 1970 anarchists destroyed computers and after the Chernobyl disaster anti-nuclear sentiments became mainstream.

And then millennials came, trusting technology as no generation since the GIs. I know this is what S&H predicted, but what specific reasons made millennials develop this way?

How people use technology is what's not to trust not the technology itself. I like using the internet to search for things and to learn, for information. I don't trust lab meat however or a lot of the advances people seem to be pushing for or the lack of privacy people seem to want. Social media also has me iffy and how people are willing to trust strangers online more than their own thoughts and experiences. I see technology as a tool that can be used for good or evil. Some technologies I choose, others I eschew.

I know people who will not eat anything that was cooked in a microwave oven. It is the easiest way to cook, and the fastest, and it is possible to design entrees that can be presentable and tasty. If the alternative is a high-fat, low-nutrient hamburger, then I might prefer the boxed entree out of the freezer compartment.  

People buying stuff on line are largely buying what they used to buy in a brick-and-mortar store -- often Montgomery-Ward, Tower Records, Camelot Music, Musicland, Blockbuster, Borders' Books, Waldenbooks, Mervyn's, Radio Shack... and I might soon add Sears to the list. I have bought video, music, and books from the Big A... stuff that I might have bought at an entity now defunct. Social media is excellent for doing such banal things as exchanging recipes, and the banal stuff is harmless. Of course, devious people have found ways in which to hijack social media for political ends. OK, so the Russian FSB has created such fronts as "Tenn GOP" that one can access from Tennessee without being able to find operating in Tennessee, which is much like the Communist fronts that parroted the Soviet line on foreign policy without identifying themselves as Communist. Rumors and myths, including the most egregious of all (the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion that claims a Jewish plot for world domination and exploitation) did not need technology any more sophisticated than a printing press when such was how one got books.  

People still need solid tests of truth, which means that they need more (not less!) formal learning, especially of the liberal-arts variety, to be able to discern sense from nonsense. People will need solid knowledge of history to be able to reject the mythologization of history. Just because something so sordid as Holocaust denial comes through sophisticated technology does not mean that it is valid. People need to know enough psychology to recognize manipulative deceit when it happens and economics to recognize that there is no such thing as a free lunch. People need a moral compass so that they are appalled if they are offered the lure of child pornography. We do well enough in operating the devices of technology; we are poor at deciding what to get from it. 

I recognize that the ease of spending money is no excuse for spending it foolishly. We have foolishly decided that monopoly and trusts are good for generating profits by gouging people and that those who wax fat from such are somehow admirable -- as shown in our political choices. We seek mindless entertainment instead of uplifting culture. We fall for demagogues like Trump this time with the potential of falling for left-wing mirror-images of him some time soon.

[pbrower2a]

(08-31-2019, 06:33 AM)AspieMillennial Wrote:

(08-31-2019, 04:50 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: In the post-WW2 period there was a lot of anti-technology sentiments. Beatniks and hippies wanted to go back to nature, 1970 anarchists destroyed computers and after the Chernobyl disaster anti-nuclear sentiments became mainstream.

And then millennials came, trusting technology as no generation since the GIs. I know this is what S&H predicted, but what specific reasons made millennials develop this way?

How people use technology is what's not to trust not the technology itself. I like using the internet to search for things and to learn, for information. I don't trust lab meat however or a lot of the advances people seem to be pushing for or the lack of privacy people seem to want. Social media also has me iffy and how people are willing to trust strangers online more than their own thoughts and experiences. I see technology as a tool that can be used for good or evil. Some technologies I choose, others I eschew.

More: listen to this and feel enriched...





Well worth the time. 

Or read this:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5200

(I think that Donald Trump makes Kafka more relevant in America... although I could imagine expanding upon it. A little twist on the saying, "once black, never back"? It's not about sex. It might be about a white woman who starts having to assert that she is not "the Maid" after she gets some strange malady). Read this novel and your imagination might get some stimulation. 

Between YouTube videos of great music and Project Gutenberg, and maybe a couple of art sites one can be rich in ways that many people are broke. 

The Internet does not so much innovate as refine and give access cheaply. You do not need the disc or the dead-tree edition.

[Hintergrund]

Furthermore: You can rely more on technology and esp. hard science than on the blah-blah of narcissist Boomers and neurotic Silents. I think that way, and I am not even a Millie.