The 3 Generation Curse of the Internet

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

If you're familiar with the 3 generation curse of wealth, you'll know it's a phenomena in which the first generation of a family fortune creates the wealth, the second generation stewards it and the third generation squanders it.

Before I get into my personal hypothesis, I want to first give an example of the 3 generation curse of wealth. For my example, I'm talking about the Vanderbilt family. Cornelius Vanderbilt started the way most industry captains do, in poverty & undereducated. Cornelius knew he wanted to own a boat from a young age and dropped out of school to work on his family farm, and he struck a deal with his mom to turn some rump acreage into a functioning corn field in exchange for a hundred dollars. Cornelius was unexpectedly successful and got the loan he needed to buy his boat. Cornelius wasn't a retard and didn't just hang out on his boat like a trust fund baby, he used the boat to transport people and goods for money and started drowning in cash, then he expanded his boating business into a fleet of steamboats and quickly became the owner of the worlds largest shipping company. Then the Civil War started, and during this time was when trains started gaining traction in the shipping market, and Cornelius sold off all his steamboats to get into the train business, thus giving him a ground-floor-to-lunar-floor return on investment. By the end of the Civil War, Cornelius Vanderbilt was the richest man in the United States and a billionaire by today's standards. But he's not done yet, because as it turned out, Cornelius still had competitors who were cutting into his pie. He retaliated by erecting a barrier on the only bridge to New York, which he happened to own. Blockading his competitors from entering New York caused them all to instantly start hemorrhaging money and selling stock at cratering values, at which point Cornelius bought it all for himself and suddenly held one of the first monopolies with the first hostile takeover in history. The Vanderbilt family fortune was now at one hundred million dollars in yester-century's money. That's generation one.

Now, with any multi-generational fortune, there's always two directions generation two can go, either struggle to maintain the wealth or growing it exponentially. Out of his three sons, Cornelius chose William as his heir since his other pick George was too busy being dead & Cornelius Jeremiah Vanderbilt was considered too insane to handle money. As it turns out, Cornelius chose wisely, as William was of the latter disposition and not only grew the family wealth, but grew it explosively. William would sell some of his stake in the railroad company and put it into government stable bonds, allowing him to double the family fortune from one hundred million to two hundred million in a fraction of the time it took to build. That's generation two.

However, William didn't pass on any business sense to his own descendants whatsoever, over the years the growing Vanderbilt family became a shadow of its former self in proportion to the amount of people spending the family fortune, blowing it all on parties, mansions and expensive clothes in an overt obsession with impressing other old money people, thus ending the Vanderbilt family fortune. That's generation three.

Now how does this reflect on the Internet? Well, we have the first generation of netizens who built the Internet in the first place, these are the people responsible for all the infrastructure and software which was necessary for building the Internet up and out overall. These people were the professionals of their respective industries before Internet service provision was ever a profession. These are your educated, genius Gen Xers and Boomers who collaborated to carefully structure the world's most important communications system in the world. That's generation one.

Now we have the Millennials who currently hold the torch for the most part, admittedly there are probably still a lot of the old guard still keeping the machine up to shape but the way Millennial tech bros view the Internet is notably different from how the previous generation of people view it. Gen one of the Internet probably view it as a revolution, Millennial tech bros seem to view it as a given, a utility, a tool, something to be used cynically & without any respect as to the grandiosity of what the Internet is and what it means for mankind. This attitude seems to generate a certain air of irresponsibility, or rather veiled malice in feigned responsibility such as taking down gossip forums over "imminent threats to human life." For the Boomer techs and Gen X techs, the Internet is the object of pursuit, for Millennial tech bros, the Internet is the subject of pursuit. In other words, if the Internet fails to serve the Millennial's agenda or even obstructs it in some way, the Millennial techy will smash through it to achieve the end of taking down any notion of a "consent accident."

But at the very least, Millennial tech bros have a working concept of how the Internet works and how to maintain it. What about Zoomers? Well, Zoomers are projected to be the most tech incompetent generation yet. For one thing, Zoomers don't use towers or laptops, they use smart phones. The majority of them probably can't type on a keyboard. But surely some of them will go into tech as a job and learn the ropes of how to maintain things, right? Zoomers were growing up during Covid lockdowns and mask mandates, and have to be taught what facial expressions are in a classroom setting. Older Zoomers struggle to choose anything on a menu at a restaurant because they're so anxious as to what to pick from the list of food items to try out of a fear of cost & possible regret, giving them option paralysis. This shit is called "menu anxiety." Look it up, it's real. These are the people who were babysat by Spiderman Elsa videos on Youtube, they're all some blend of LGBTQ+ and have generalized anxiety disorder.

So what does that spell out for the future of the Internet? People like to argue what predicted dystopian novel we're living in, be you a 1984'er or Brave New Worlder, I think I've found a book that much more fittingly describes our modern society, a book called "The Machine Stops."

In The Machine Stops, published in 1909, E.M. Forster predicted just about every ill of the modern Internet; Zoom call meetings, NEETs, armchair intellectuals, atomized families, assisted suicide, smart homes, Youtube essayists, climate hoaxes, cancel culture, scientism, top-down censorship of new ideas, the touching grass meme and most important to the story, the machine which supports it all breaks. In the book, the "Machine" is both a global life support system and an object of worship, it controls and regiments every facet of daily life, it runs all the utilities & provides all the oxygen, food and water. Do you need to take a shit? A toilet deploys from the wall. Are you sleepy? A bed deploys from the other wall. Are you hungry? Chicken tendies descend from the ceiling like mana from Heaven. You literally have no reason to ever leave your fully automated room whatsoever. The only "currency" which people have is a social currency of new ideas, the conception of which is basically a universal hobby since there's nothing else to do but Zoom meetings and Youtube style essay lectures.

Then, bit by bit, the Machine starts to fail, furniture no longer deploys from the wall on demand, the Internet malfunctions & the utilities stop abruptly. That wouldn't be a problem, since the Machine is capable of self repair, except for the fact the repair mechanism is also broken. So what solution does this planet of armchair intellectuals obsessed with ideas apply to fix the various problems with the Machine? They don't, they don't know how to fix anything and just put up with all the malfunctions and outages.

The problems with the Machine only compound from there as eventually the very ceiling keeping everyone from going up to the surface collapses and crushes everyone in this global cave city. The only people who remain alive are the people who were already canceled from society and relegated to wandering the planet's surface as a death sentence for breaking political taboos. Truly, industrial society was a disaster for the human race.

So is this the future of the Internet? Left to its own devices and suffering under Zoomer neglect as nodes run until they break, never to be fixed or replaced? Will we live to see the Internet die of incompetence?

Oh by the way, here's a free audiobook of The Machine Stops, you should totally listen to it.

 

[HyperboreanRightsActivist]

Gen X and boomer tech tards skewed autistic, but were still pretty sociable people. Same with millennial tards.

Zoomers are so incompetent with tech, that the only ones going into tech are code-obsessed hyperautists who live, eat, and breathe tech, and can't talk about anything that isn't tech related. Because society has grown around computers, he who controls the computer controls the people.

As a result, future generations will see a bifurcation in society: retard niggercattle tech illiterates and the psychopathic sycophant technocrats who control them. (And people wonder why governments have taken such a dystopian bend as of late?)

Thanks for listening to my TedX talk

 

[Gremperor]

the first generation of a family fortune creates the wealth, the second generation stewards it and the third generation squanders it.

This shit is so common I've always wondered why rich people don't artificially put their children through hardship to stop them from becoming spoiled, a good chunk of them are sociopaths so you'd expect that from them.

 

[Shadfan666xxx000]

This shit is so common I've always wondered why rich people don't artificially put their children through hardship to stop them from becoming spoiled, a good chunk of them are sociopaths so you'd expect that from them.

It wouldn't necessarily work. Raising your kids to think and act like the middle class and save up money carefully in that way isn't at all like the strategies you would actually use to manage large amounts of wealth. The problem comes down more to the assumptions the second generation makes in assuming that the third generation would eventually just "see" the process in front of them without it being pointed out. The second generation and its pitfalls often revolve around not realizing that they need to tutor the third generation carefully and that they also need new lessons on top of that.

 

[herefortheactualthreads]

This is literally me reading this thread right now.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

, E.M. Forster predicted just about every ill of the modern Internet; Zoom call meetings, NEETs, armchair intellectuals, atomized families, assisted suicide, smart homes, Youtube essayists, climate hoaxes, cancel culture, scientism, top-down censorship of new ideas, the touching grass meme and most important to the story, the machine which supports it all breaks

almost like all this is a constant or that we've been in a holding patten as a society. I mean thats what the nazis were claiming about a century ago, but surely we progressed past socialism and assisted suicide and abortion right?

also not to be mean but its a very western outlook, even our views of the apocalypse or post-apocalypse is based on our own imaginations of what we project it to be vs the realities we saw in de-colonialized africa or asia or post collapse warsaw pact countries or post-mao china. The intellectuals will always be squawking and the retards that don't know how to fix cars will always be there too. the types of weirdos that would go into coding or engineering will still go to those places even if it meant being forced to cut their cocks off and shove dildos up their asses. Somehow despite genociding anyone with a college education in china back in the 1970s, they found a fuck load of engineers to rebuild the country.

Its quite hilarious you also use the Vanderbilts because it took roughly 6 generations for them to finally stop being "the elite" and even then, anderson cooper still had the mansions and private education and ivy league background of such a person, and making $10 million a year isn't exactly slumming it. the family overall went from the richest to one of the top 10000 richest. his own mother was the "spend thrift socalite" you talked about too and she still had $200 million left when she kicked it. 3 generations is more of a meme and just a bullshit explanation used for people who just got lucky in business. Henry ford's another great example, the 3rd generation is technically the best one of the entire group, same with Wegmans. The main reason people use 3 generations is because its thematic and the symbolism of it all. Like generations.

Beyond that you seem to use the vanderbilts but use a 100 year timeline and then proceed to explain that it works for the internet which was hilariously small and worthless 20 years ago. Those great coders that can fix shit are still there, they just aren't working at the big companies. Just because Palmer Lucky doesn't wear high heels to his google job doens't mean he ceases to exist. the internet will keep going, the only difference is if people are desperate enough and understand the problem they'll stop letting the cunts in hr give indians and niggers the jobs and finally start hiring the white men that build the internet to fix the internet. People born in the 90s aren't going to quit trying to code up cool shit just because you think they will, and im sure there are plenty of zoomers out there helping with the thing that will replace the internet.

you idiots really think every person born in the 1970s or 1980s knows how to code. You have to understand the population is more like a Roman Legion, 85% of people are dipshits just doing their job and don't have the ability to think in the higher levels you need for western society to function. The other 15% are duking it out but if shoved into a field like coding could probably figure it out.

 

[Audit]

This shit is so common I've always wondered why rich people don't artificially put their children through hardship to stop them from becoming spoiled, a good chunk of them are sociopaths so you'd expect that from them.

Intelligence isn't that strongly heritable. Even if you assume the first generation was made of genius businessmen, you'll eventually get enough retards in the family line to destroy the fortune. Each passing generation becomes more and more detached from the actualities of accumulating and maintaining wealth and more obsessed with the expenditure of it for hedonistic and ideological aims.

This also applies to the internet. The ones who use it nowadays just view it as a way of promoting faggotry on tiktok or playing video games. The reality of what makes it work is lost on them, and they wouldn't even care if you tried to explain it to them. Genius boffins still show up but they're sequestrated in places like google to keep the lights on and niggercattle revenue flowing.

 

[herefortheactualthreads]

3 generations is more of a meme

yeah well Drachenlords granddad build the house, the father maintained it, and the lord himself destroyed it from the inside and sold it to the Government of Emskirchen to avoid jailtime.

 

[Saddam Hussain Obama]

so many words yes

 

[$5.3 Million Dollars]

A more contemporary example of the three generation curse might be JRR Tolkien and his rightfully choosing his youngest son, Christopher, to be the steward of his works. Then it all going to shit with the third generation with Christopher's son, Simon, being a hack author and having been close to being cut out of the inheritance altogether.

Unfortunately this problem is not one just found within the ecosystem of the internet and tech. Maybe some other people in other professions can chime in, but I've personally seen a large influx of new hires completely out of their element in HVAC and several other traditional trades. They're not as hands on and tend to be a bit more careless. The main thing in their favor is that they know how to work a basic tablet.

 

[BMO_]

I don't think that the mankind will reach a point where no one knows how to fix shit, but I feel like your regular normie won't know what a "computer" is.

I had multiple situations where a person tried to do X on their phone, failed and when asked if they tried to do X on their laptop/desktop said that they "didn't knew it was possible on a computer".

 

[Begemot]

Hard to say how many of these stereotypes are real or just what one wants to believe without looking at long-term data.

 

[Ultrapenguin]

Unfortunately this problem is not one just found within the ecosystem of the internet and tech. Maybe some other people in other professions can chime in, but I've personally seen a large influx of new hires completely out of their element in HVAC and several other traditional trades. They're not as hands on and tend to be a bit more careless. The main thing in their favor is that they know how to work a basic tablet.

I actually suspect tech might be less affected, it's just the most obvious because it's a daily thing and obviously most people here deal with computers.

For example I've heard auto shops are downright desperate for mechanics, because if younger people on average tend to not know computers, they sure don't know cars.

Even with other types of work, a lot of people straight up don't understand how jobs are supposed to operate anymore.
As an example someone I know runs a business, they had a younger guy who they hired recently, and after a while he just didn't show up for almost a week then came back like nothing happened. Which isn't even that surprising, the fact you're expected to predictably show up at a certain time for a job seems foreign.

Oh well, it makes it easier to excel at least. All you have to do is stay the same and the standards will just keep lowering around you.

 

[Phalanges Mycologist]

Zoomers are so incompetent with tech,

For the most part they know how to use UI's they don't know how anything works, they are onpar with the Boomers there they have a weird can use it quite competantly if it's what they know but quickly panic or break down if something doesn't work as expected or don't take well to change that's why it takes ages with slow and tiny nudges to make changes happen.

This shit is so common I've always wondered why rich people don't artificially put their children through hardship to stop them from becoming spoiled, a good chunk of them are sociopaths so you'd expect that from them.

They used to it was called Boarding School, seriously old boarding schools where hell.

proceed to explain that it works for the internet which was hilariously small and worthless 20 years ago

It was small but I'd argue against worthless, it anything it had more worth as most sites where independent and had a technical barrier to entry that made the information available to be more accurate and less under a central authority.

This also applies to the internet. The ones who use it nowadays just view it as a way of promoting faggotry on tiktok or playing video games. The reality of what makes it work is lost on them, and they wouldn't even care if you tried to explain it to them. Genius boffins still show up but they're sequestrated in places like google to keep the lights on and niggercattle revenue flowing.

It's not uncommon to not know exactly how something works or is constructed to make use of it but when it's something you rely on you should know it's function and maintinance a lot of people forget that last part.

I don't think that the mankind will reach a point where no one knows how to fix shit, but I feel like your regular normie won't know what a "computer" is.

Just to add context to that, most people don't know that a "Computer" was a persons job title, they where essentially living calculators who did everything from balancing a companies books, to calculating ballistics for Battleships and any other mathematical function.

People might not think of a computer as a boxy looking thing sitting in the corner, or a server as pizza box looking thing in a rack but they might have so many of them in things and in ways we can't currently conceive like consider something you have on your person like a phone that's a computer in it's own right but there are multiple instantaneous ways seamlessly, you know the way you can do browser hand-off between mobiles and PC's / laptops now? Yea that but for a whole OS with preferences for type of device your actively using so you could go from a phone sized Interface, to and a desktop and it would just pick up where you left off without any disruption.

I'll also say that there will be a market for self hosted services or a hybrid service but only because there will be times an places where access is still not great or will be considerd too sensitive to have stored online but you need regular access too.

For example I've heard auto shops are downright desperate for mechanics, because if younger people on average tend to not know computers, they sure don't know cars.

It's cropping up more an more in a lot of trades, with Car's a lot of "Mechanics" today are just parts cannon techs but so are a lot of technical trades but cars are the ones that stand out to most people because they are the ones they interact with more often.

 

[BMO_]

Just to add context to that, most people don't know that a "Computer" was a persons job title, they where essentially living calculators who did everything from balancing a companies books, to calculating ballistics for Battleships and any other mathematical function.

People might not think of a computer as a boxy looking thing sitting in the corner, or a server as pizza box looking thing in a rack but they might have so many of them in things and in ways we can't currently conceive like consider something you have on your person like a phone that's a computer in it's own right but there are multiple instantaneous ways seamlessly, you know the way you can do browser hand-off between mobiles and PC's / laptops now? Yea that but for a whole OS with preferences for type of device your actively using so you could go from a phone sized Interface, to and a desktop and it would just pick up where you left off without any disruption.

I'll also say that there will be a market for self hosted services or a hybrid service but only because there will be times an places where access is still not great or will be considerd too sensitive to have stored online but you need regular access too.

dude, I just quoted an ad by Apple (and posted a pic from it). You're overthinking my post.

 

[WelperHelper99]

Older Zoomers struggle to choose anything on a menu at a restaurant because they're so anxious as to what to pick from the list of food items to try out of a fear of cost & possible regret, giving them option paralysis. This shit is called "menu anxiety."

That's when you just order the same shit as always if you can't choose. I refuse to believe my generation is that retarded

This shit is so common I've always wondered why rich people don't artificially put their children through hardship to stop them from becoming spoiled, a good chunk of them are sociopaths so you'd expect that from them.

Because it's painful and they want them to have it better. A common oversight

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

This shit is so common I've always wondered why rich people don't artificially put their children through hardship to stop them from becoming spoiled, a good chunk of them are sociopaths so you'd expect that from them.

Well, Zoomers were most certainly put through some hardship I must say, only problem is they were told it was for their own good.

 

[WelperHelper99]

Well, Zoomers were most certainly put through some hardship I must say, only problem is they were told it was for their own good.

I think you would find many of us don't believe that. Life has been unfair since September 11, 2001. We can do nothing to stop the hardship, simply endure. What else can we do, freak out? This is how its always been.

I'd like to make a disincincton between 1997-01 zoomers vs the rest. Most of us know what a PC or laptop is and can work a office suite just fine. We wernt born with phones in our hands like the later half. I would consider us if anything, to be a transitional generation. Analog to digital. The older half might be able to salvage what's left of the internet wealth. Might. We aren't used to winning. If you look at zoomer culture, failure is a very common trope for good reason. It's been down hill since, at best, 2008. We've just learned to live with it.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

I think you would find many of us don't believe that. Life has been unfair since September 11, 2001. We can do nothing to stop the hardship, simply endure. What else can we do, freak out? This is how its always been.

I'd like to make a disincincton between 1997-01 zoomers vs the rest. Most of us know what a PC or laptop is and can work a office suite just fine.

Are you sure you're a Zoomer? I was under the impression that Zoomers were still teenagers at the latest.

 

[WelperHelper99]

Are you sure you're a Zoomer? I was under the impression that Zoomers were still teenagers at the latest.

01. 97 to 2012 is the most recent bench mark. I very much am. Many zoomers STILL are teenagers. As I said, our generation is varied. I am what you would call a oldfag for my generation.