Wtf is wrong with zoomers? - An analysis

[Caesar]

What's less made up then Christianity?

The Greene County Conspiracy.

 

[DerKryptid]

What's less made up then Christianity?

Nothing

 

[Mr. Giggles]

I'm bored, so here's my two cents on this issue. Of course, here's the obligatory "not all zoomers, I'm pretty sure most of them have never heard of Chris or 4chan, most of the ones who have are probably just as appalled at this situation as we are, blah blah blah". But, it does seem like zoomers make up most of the weens today, with Bella, her clique, and the Teen Troon Squad being some good examples.

So, what went wrong? At least for Bella and her clique, it can be summed up like this: They were autistic enough to take early 4chan, ED, and the CWCki seriously.

They probably came across this side of the internet and began reading ED and the CWCki at a relatively young age. They read ED pages about the raids and antics of early 4chan, the anarchic internet hate machine producing lulz after lulz after lulz. They read about Anonymous, the L3G10N final boss of the internet that anyone can join, and who wouldn't, seeing how they were generating lulz everywhere while also fighting against the forces of evil online?

On the CWCki, which up until a few years ago was treating the trolling as seriously as possible (because "it was real to Chris. It's also funnier that way"), they read about the funny shenanigans that "the Internet's most beloved and most hated autistic manchild" was getting into. They read about Clyde Cash and the Miscreants getting praise from the internet for getting the lulz from Chris. Shit like Chris-Chan: A Comprehensive History (which some weens, including Bella orbiter WCT, have stated is how they learned about Chris) or the various references that had surfaced on more mainstream platforms didn't help either.

Probably because of severe, untreated autism, along with shit parenting, they took all of that seriously. They honestly thought that there was some glory in trolling, and they wanted that glory. Bella wanted to become the next Clyde Cash. The Chess Club wanted to become the next Miscreants or Anonymous. They thought that sites like 4chan and the Kiwi Farms would praise their trolling efforts, just like the trolls of the past. They wanted to join the likes and gain the respect of oldfags like Cash, Liquid Chris, etc. as the "best trolls on history".

However, the reality of that era of the internet is quite different. I think this post on the old internet sperging thread the internet explains it well:

Bella you're a cringy newfag and absolute poser. If you were around for early 4chan, you would know that we weren't some super sekkrit hacker club that sperged out about politics 24/7. All we were was a bunch of basement-dwelling teenager losers that got a kick out of being contrarian edgy lil shits. If you were around back then, you would've been called a massive faggot and relentlessly mocked. Just like KF does today, just with more gayops and calling your dads phone number. This "we are legion" shit was an edgy joke, and only newfags like you who came in the wake of, or after, Operation Chanology would ever think otherwise.

We were just some retarded fags having fun on the 'net, and caring about being seen as oldfag is the gayest thing there is. All it means is that you wasted too many days shitposting instead of going outside, there is no glory to it. And people like you are what makes most chans nowadays so gay and annoying. Tryhard.

You could say the same thing about Chris-Chan trolling as well. Chris's trolls, including Clyde Cash, were just some random people on the internet who thought that messing with an insane manchild would be funny. The Miscreants was a joke that developed because some of Chris's trolls were obsessed with Metal Gear Solid and thought that it would be funny to portray themselves like the Patriots. Both Chris's trolls and ED thought that treating retarded internet drama as SERIOUS FUCKING BUSINESS would be funny. Marvin admitted that the classic era trolls cherry-picked which information would be released publicly, in order to paint a funnier picture of Chris and the trolling. It was all a joke.

A joke which, ultimately, I wouldn't expect anyone back then would've predicted that some (outside of Chris) would be autistic enough to take seriously, just like how they probably also didn't expect Chris's Oedipus complex to evolve into full on incestual rape.

But, here we are.

 

[UNDERSTAND UNDERSTAND]

RIP yesterday
I don't think this topic is relevant to Isabella. People like the TTU Chess Club have existed for all of history and the only difference now is increased accessibility for input/output of information and stimuli, with decreased technical skill requirement.

But I've got another take I don't think I've seen here yet.
People have been talking about central-broadening of the Internet but not as much about the effect that has on moderation.
Many social spaces on the Old Internet were isolated from one another and directly moderated by owners/hosts, small teams of user-moderators, and userbase-democracy. What you could say in one space was dictated by the collective morality of these groups, which was often on display within the space. If the users weren't happy there was realistic capacity to call the mods faggots and/or leave for greener pastures.

Spoiler: vidya puzzle piece 1

Acting up in a FPS browser-era server could get you votekicked or summon an admin. If a server is shit you go somewhere else.

Now, a far greater number of users are crammed into a smaller number of social outlets. Forums are overshadowed by Facebook groups and Reddits which still have local-scale administration, but the Owner is so far down the line that local user input no longer matters and ultimate morality is straight from The Top, breeding a general Internet culture that administration is not to be questioned, which then bleeds back out to smaller spaces. Add that many spaces which were once small grow to a point that the older style of moderation is difficult to maintain.

Spoiler: vidya puzzle piece 2

Nowadays most equivalent games are run through automated matchmaking with little-to-no ability to choose who you're locked up with. As servers are no longer individually hosted, moderation is either bureaucratically distant or entirely absent.

So then, so many people being terminally online feeds it back into a world where there is no longer distinct social isolation between people, skewing people entering the Internet deeper into the mindset and creating a feedback loop.
And that's what the fuck is wrong with zoomers specifically, though ultimately it's a speeding-up of what travel, transmission, and recording tech has been doing already for millennia.

 

[transcendental vintologi]

Yes, there were a few, but most of those people with extreme political behavior would usually flip flop between these view points like they were moving away from memes gone out of fashion. The kind of people who post arrows all over the political compass to show where they are on it now.
A "I was a Nazi, but then I was a libertarian, but then I realized why that doesn't work so I'm a communist" type of thing

Most people I knew in school had a "shit's fucked so why should I care" view of politics, or a "that sounds boring lol" view of politics, aside from when everyone was into Trump memes in 2016.

I knew some over the top doomers about climate change, probably has something to do with how things like the Sunrise Movement and similar NGO's target teens because if people are convinced fighting for you is fighting for the survival of mankind, you hold a lot of power over them. I want to protect the environment too, but I don't think we're going to boil off the face of the earth unless Karen stops driving an SUV and we establish a carbon negative technocracy. I don't know those people anymore because the majority of them happen to openly like porn to much.
Wow...
I just noticed that anyone I still keep in contact with from high-school and college falls into the "non coomer" category
No matter what labels people are using or fall under, what REALLY split our friend groups is coomerism, or as some call it "sex positive"

While most of the people my age I talk to don't have extreme beliefs that older people would see as shocking besides hatred of journalists, there are a few people I know who have are more extreme but they aren't coomers. Since they can shut up about sexual things, its possible for us to maintain friendly relationships.
I don't mind a well placed sexual joke as long as it's actually funny and the person making the joke can read the room, but some people think as long as they are making sexual jokes, they are being FUNNY and having a good time with their fellow funny adults.

A LOT of porn obsessed as well as terminally online people I met in college, had strict parental controls enforced prior to going to college. They were told the internet is BAD. But now that they have their first taste of open internet, the thing they have been envying and craving for a decade (haha finally pr0n amirite), some of them become monsters with it, and cannot put down their smart phone, and have no idea how to separate their online and offline stuff.
Anyone who's dad punished them as a young teen if they got caught looking at porn or using all the bandwidth on roblox had a MUCH better relationship with the internet than someone who's non confrontational parents just filtered out web traffic. I think it's because they got an immediate and early internet->IRL consequences training.

I've had the experience of trying to reconnect to someone from high school on behalf of someone else, and then they are posting porn on their discord server or telegram chat in the middle of a normal conversation, asking them to rate the tits-and-dicks-out porn...
"HAHA it's ironical plus none of us in the chat are miners anyway don't be a fag lol"
Told that person why they shouldn't bother getting back in touch with the weird kid and they agreed.
How fucked up is it that I know that person's real name, and he wouldn't see the problem in that?

Spoiler: this reminds me of another weirdo

btw this reminds me of a "personal lolcow" of mine was a nerdy looking kid in a class I was in, he would think of himself as an "epic /b/ oldfag" despite not remembering 9/11 and his parents never spent time with him because they were highly involved in local business and politics. He would read the (new at the time) shrek copypasta out loud to terrorize the rest of us and make unwanted sexual remarks about female classmates. Saw a girl try not to cry because she had to sit next to him. There were... a LOT of drama causing "sagas" with this guy and even if I was inclined to write a whole book on this dude, I can't get into them without accidentally narrowing down where I was and what I was doing during them.

I will mention the reason absolutely everyone started to hate him though.
One time his mother burst through the door of the office and started demanding to know who gave him access to twitter which he is NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE and started demanding answers on gave him a phone. His mother became convinced by him that someone was impersonating him online to make him look bad, which started a huge drama about the cruelty of kids, and even resulted in a local pastor creating sermons about cyber-bullying.

The uwu precious innocent and intelligent young man... just because he looks dorky... why are young people so cruel?

Once people figured out he was using his Nintendo 3DS and ereader browser and we had to deal with being interrogated and lectured over his actions, some people started bullying him for real. Also, LPT: apparently you can browse 4chan on an internet connected kindle.

I think he eventually got sent to some sort of expensive ranch type thing on the other side of the state for having weed, but I think his parents were looking for an excuse to ship the guy somewhere.

This whole thing might be a massive selection bias of some kind, but I really do feel like a giant line of porn acceptance has separated me, and my fellow 9/11 non-rememberers, and has affected which people I talk to, meet in person, and play games online with. I know friends also turn around, or at least cringe in disgust and try to ignore it, when someone invites them to a discord and there's a porn channel.

Unfortunately, I think far more people my age than my parents age (gen X) are severely fucked up in the head as well as being less educated with the same amount of educational qualifications. Even some of the non-porn obsessed people I know have a lot of mental problems, like worrying they aren't their birth sex because they don't identify with the associated gender stereotypes, having too much anxiety to function, or whatever causes people to use doordash.

It creeps me me out to visit random discord severs, even something called " 𝒞𝐻𝐼𝐿𝐿 FRIENDS SERVER " as a random made up example will have multiple porn severs and people celebrating turning 18 so they can talk about the sexy sex with the adults, while there's random 14 year olds in the chat. If you want to see something horrible, look up the Gacha Life fandom. It's like half of this generation is groomed or something. I can't stop thinking about all the people in middle school who were bragging about having a boyfriend or girlfriend from minecraft. In one case was "totally a real vampire who secretly wrote one of Justin Beiber's songs and kisses me goodnight every night, and one day you will meet him and see".
I seriously wonder what percentage of zoomers were groomed?

It's gotten pretty late, sorry for any errors in this. I'm just doing a stream of consciousnesses kind of rant about comes to mind when I think of people my age, and becomes very obvious to me that I hate porn everywhere.

Besides the coomerism, the thing I really hate about many people my age is how much witchcraft goes on. At best, it's a sign of magical thinking and/or mental disorders being validated and encouraged over rational thinking which is very bad. At worst, these idiots are releasing a plague of demons upon the earth which is also worsening their mental issues.

Forgive me, I am about to sound like this coomer.

I don't know. I personally think of myself as a bit of a deviant, so this assessment seems too broad. There is something about the way porn is shared on discord that just strikes me as superficial. Of course, I am well capable of casually discussing such things in real life or online, but usually there's something more specific. Either (i) there is something specific about it like how funny/fucked up it is, (ii) I am LARPing, or (iii) in some rare instance it pertains to an extremely niche experience which can involve trying to dissect what the hell is going on psychologically. Despite not really minding degenerate shit compared to most people here, there is still something about nsfw channels that disturbs me deeply...

Like I said, the word here is "superficial". In these channels they are just posting porn they are into, and occasionally making shallow remarks about how much they enjoy it. I don't really see the point. On one side, most of these fetishes to me aren't that extreme. If you really wanted to, you can easily find someone on discord who is into loli or furry shit. Sure, maybe it isn't something you can't be as open to people irl about, but it's material that's far too common online to be remarkable. Like, if I wanted porn I can search it up. What sort of cartoons literally-who wanks to isn't particularly interesting to me. I recall some discord coomer telling me if I really wanted to find someone with a similar personality as mine, I should look to hentai servers or whatever. On face value, that seems like he was just assuming I was some sort of degenerate, but it felt like he genuinely believed you can somehow get to know people by using porn as a gateway.

It goes without saying that fetishes rarely actually matter, and at best might correlate to high openness in terms of personality traits (which doesn't say much). Also what fetish you are into doesn't really constitute a personality. Soulless NPCs which pretend it does are worse than degenerate -- they are simply uninteresting. With that said, there are select cases where it does make an interesting psychological topic as what I hinted at with (iii). This is when your fetish is either so profoundly fucked up, or fucked up in an interesting enough way, that it actively fucks with your relations with other people. For instance, autogynephilia can get so extreme that people experience extreme pain, or end up completely asexual outside of meta-attraction. Genuine alienation and/or repression motivating discussions are far more intriguing imo as there is an actual problem there that effects people's lives. Even then. How much time in your day is it really worth lol?

Furthermore, using a channel eliminates the browsing experience, and with it any ability to narrow what you are looking for down. This contributes to the overall sense that I feel like porn channels are the McDonalds of degeneracy. It's just "I'm into dickgirls". Aren't we all? I also can't help but notice that these channels are always found in general discord servers. Note too that it's harder to find these things in significantly more niche communities, which makes me think that the sharper diagnosis isn't simply coomerism, but rather that everything social media touches just turns into a general homogenous slush. It gives anyone with even a vaguely sane mind the instinctual impulse that these places are just venus fly traps. It is almost as though there is some sort of large scale psychological operations going on to disperse interest so thin that everyone just turns into a vague memetic blob. Though, I don't think there is a literal conspiracy, but rather can probably be explained by general systems thinking. I'd guess there is a positive feedback loop between joining these death spirals, and the need to further add fuel to the furnace in order to cope with their reinforced feelings of lacking agency/identity. I'm only a "degeneracy elitist" (fucking lol) because I was always too much of a pathological autist with delusions of grandeur to not immediately note my soul being sucked in these spaces.

"sex positive" is also such a lame self-aggrandizing term for this stuff. There's nothing about sex that is innately good or bad, but people like to pretend they are genuinely taking part in something "transgressive", when it's just capitalism. I don't like hanging around people who indulge their energy into this stuff to be edgy, "spiritual", nor to make a big deal about cultural collapse (even though this latter reason has latched unto some grain of truth). I'd rather people just be casual about it

though ultimately it's a speeding-up of what travel, transmission, and recording tech has been doing already for millennia.

Fuck, just finished writing my post before reading yours. We have similar ideas, though you are definitely focusing more on the moderation side of things. The initial reason why I made my own speculations was because there was something irksome about memes in general. Most discord servers are filled with 90% memes, a lot of which don't even make much sense. It was just really eery. Little serious discussion just visual diarrhea. Porn is just an amusing subset of this. I think the explanation for all of this is far more boring and far more stupid than people usually expect. Changing even something as seemingly trivial as network structure or layout can have rippling effects on the nature of conversations

I'm getting increasingly sick of this quote because it actually has zero relevance to what's being discussed here at all. Contempt for authority and disrespectfulness have become pedestrian traits since the Baby Boomers were little kids; nobody is complaining about that at all. Its just a given.

This is different. What we're seeing instead is a clear pattern of dysfunction spread out across two generations. Its more clear with Zoomers, but its also extremely apparent with Millennials too. There is not a single person on this planet who can deny that there haven't been substantial changes to both technology at large and the way people live their lives in the last 30 years. We're talking about a whole generation of people that is being influenced and molded by forces far beyond their control, using tools that are much more powerful and pinpoint than anything previously possessed by any group.

Even if you assume the people behind that technology have the best of intentions, something that is ambiguous at best, any tiny error or misstep can and will have severe consequences. I think we're seeing those consequences in both Millennials and Zoomers. These people aren't tyrants, they're batshit insane, with erratic, unpredictable obesessions, a total lack of focus, and little to no real identity. Trying to sweep that under the rug with "oh boohoo every generation is mean and disrespectful" is almost willful ignorance on the part of anyone observing the situation.

I don't know about best intentions. It's rather everyone, fucking everyone, just chases after short term goals. I don't think a single human are capable of doing otherwise. We just gave monkey new toys, and monkey goes nuts. One particular thing is here is that most people inherit liberal ideology so much so that they no longer understand just how important labour and physical limitation is to human being. Technology abstracts from our capacity to take anything seriously. Who cares about being sexually conservative when we have birth control and ways to not only prevent contraction of STDs but also mitigate the effects of these diseases? Why take sex so seriously with the move to less physically intensive jobs diminishes the importance of sexual dimorphism to labour distribution. Oh wow, strangely, we start talking about a "gender" socially abstracted from sex. With our technology enabling us to sustain a ludicrously high carrying carrying capacity, now breeding becomes less of a big deal. People then slowly start to care less about sexuality. What does sex even mean when we get artificial wombs?

I am a full doomer at this point to the extent where I don't even think any of this is an inherently surprising phenomenon. It could probably explained in an extremely aloof fashion. You just need to combine economic, technological analysis and human psychology. In every possible universe, if we didn't go extinct, we would have reached this point. I've chipped in at some of the details, but it's only a small fraction of the puzzle. You don't even need to point to particulate ideologies really. That shit is just a façade to distract us from the fact that the insanity is inevitable. I haven't reached him yet, but unironically maybe Baudrillard might have something to say here.

Of course it didn't just happen. shit built up. just like shit built up in the lead up to the revolutionary war.

I believe we are in the building faze now. everyone is pissed off for some reason or another. all it takes is a spark, and fuck it may not even start in the states hell we could see a new French revolution or something else. hell maybe Russia vs NATO will finally happen cause Israel decides to attack Iran.

I'm skeptical. Sure, people get angry, but it's never genuine. They just move to the next weekly controversy. There's no focus, and people are too complacent with their relatively comfortable lifestyle. Unless there's a real economic threat, I doubt a civil war will ever happen.

2. Multigenerational atheism.

I've seen too many larping zoomer theists and pedo catholic anime pfps on twitter to take this seriously without qualification. There are plenty of people that flock to religion and spirituality as another shallow fad to form their identity around. People like Jordan Peterson and other psychologists at UofT like the Vervaekians have tried to defend religion, but there's just something about their approach that seems off. Their reasoning for why religion is important is merely to give meaning to the human organism, and ignore the metaphysical justifications for believing in God of Christ (like seriously people. How about believing in God because it is the fucking truth, and not as a quick cure to nihilism). It's a very shrewd form of religion which one should be suspicious of

 

[L50LasPak]

There is something about the way porn is shared on discord that just strikes me as superficial.

On face value, that seems like he was just assuming I was some sort of degenerate, but it felt like he genuinely believed you can somehow get to know people by using porn as a gateway.

I've been unable to put my finger on the feeling of existential dread I get when I hear about porn channels in Discord and porn communiities in general, but this rather succinctly realizes everything negative I've ever felt about them. I'm impressed.

which makes me think that the sharper diagnosis isn't simply coomerism, but rather that everything social media touches just turns into a general homogenous slush. It gives anyone with even a vaguely sane mind the instinctual impulse that these places are just venus fly traps.

I mostly concur with this, though I think social media also may or may not cause new and unforeseen effects to emerge, but that kind of thing is largely conditional.

I am a full doomer at this point to the extent where I don't even think any of this is an inherently surprising phenomenon. It could probably explained in an extremely aloof fashion. You just need to combine economic, technological analysis and human psychology. In every possible universe, if we didn't go extinct, we would have reached this point. I've chipped in at some of the details, but it's only a small fraction of the puzzle. You don't even need to point to particulate ideologies really. That shit is just a façade to distract us from the fact that the insanity is inevitable.

I pretty much agree with this sentiment, the only reason I used the "best of intentions" pretense was just to point out that even in the most positive circumstances that are possible the situation is still horrendously fucked.

 

[No Batty Boys in Jamaica]

Not that much actually. It's just that thanks to social media and the surveillance state, there are more opportunities to fail spectacularly and publicly. Before the internet, it was possible to skip town and start a new life. Not anymore.

That and people spending too much time on the internet not learning important skills they don't teach in school, like how to spot a decent liar, how to tell if a member of the opposite sex is into you, how to sense a garden variety psychopath/BPD psychobitch. Something like 1 in 20 people are psychopaths, bordelines, or pathological narcissists, but few are masterminds. You can sort of sense it based on their facial expressions, especially the eyes and the way they smile. It's not 100%, but if someone has a weird vibe, one should be cautious. Zoomers spend too much time online and don't see enough of those people in person unless they're getting abused by one.

 

[UNDERSTAND UNDERSTAND]

Most discord servers are filled with 90% memes, a lot of which don't even make much sense. It was just really eery. Little serious discussion just visual diarrhea. Porn is just an amusing subset of this.

Yeah I think a lot of that's down to visual stimuli setting off different responses than reading or listening to equivalent information. This is close to what people have been complaining about with TV for decades already. (And TV/cinema are arguably creeping ever closer to truly being A/V soup.)
I gotta be careful not to tangent into 5 different things here 'cos I've got a lot of words around media and how it's produced and consumed. Keeping as short as possible, it largely ties in with my last post's remark on input/output of stimuli, and how our media ecosystem is geared towards meeting baseline entertainment standard for as large an audience as possible.
i.e. something that can set off base stimulus responses in 20 people is going to be more successful than something that 5 people find deeper enjoyment in but doesn't stimulate the rest at all.

Radio can't have dead air, and TV newsreading is often accompanied by unrelated stock footage representing the current paragraph. (I see you've already brought up Baudrillard.)
A constant feed of low-tier memes and porn in a Discord is just people creating the constant flow of stimuli for themselves. People enjoy being stimulated constantly, and the degree of stimulation is less important as long as it's as often as possible.

Why take sex so seriously with the move to less physically intensive jobs diminishes the importance of sexual dimorphism to labour distribution. Oh wow, strangely, we start talking about a "gender" socially abstracted from sex.

I think this is mostly right but the angle it's coming from bugs me. The majority of human sexual dimorphism is on the female end. No other known species is as dimorphic as humans; in nearly every other mammal species the difference amounts to testosterone making males a little bit bigger, but females are almost always quite close in physical ability.
What humanity has done in its divergence from being mere animal is relegate our women to the role of sexual objects. Men being better geared for physical labour isn't dimorphism. It's that we already shifted women out of that role millennia ago 'cos their societal value was better making babies, and from there the only traits that matter (excepting wide pelvises for our giant baby heads) are what facilitate attraction. Always-on tiddies don't even do anything but denote "this person is a baby-maker," and we've always been coomers.

Most "masculine"-leaning women are merely opting out of feminine societal constructs
But with men it's more a mix of opting-out of masculine constructs and chasing fetishism for themselves.
It gets a bit deeper but that's all I've got time for right now.

 

[SomethingWittyandBadass]

I think honestly that Zoomers feel invincible becasue they always get away with dumbass shit. They became smug about anything that transpires in front of their lives. And when I mean anything; I'm fucking serious. They love this idea that they can never be fucking scared because they always pull out the "I'm tramatize uwu". I saw one twitter thread discussing on how parents take pictures knowing full well the kids don't like it when they get their picture taken.

Clothed kids who pretty much have the money to even have internet access bitching and complaining about pictures. That alone kinda seal the shit that was going on, kids are fucking spoiled and smug and they want to be heard despite the fact that they never earned it. And they definitely never worked for it. I honestly think that society is getting to the point where we are giving too much freedom. When I was a kid, I was a fucking scared kid because I didn't want to get my ass beat if I fucked up. That shit actually stayed with my ass at one poiint where I stopped fucking up in school and I made sure that I was doing what I was supposed to do.

The moment when the 6 year old had their tablets because the parents didn't wanna deal with them. That was the moment when we fucked up. That was that moment.

 

[Fareal]

I'm old. I think it's very hard for the earlier millennials to understand the long term and deep effects on the zoomers of being the first generation to have been significantly impacted by attention and engagement science. We mostly did our early neurodevelopment in an era where attention sciences - the design of addiction - wasn't the highly resourced, major industry it is today. And it's still developing.

Zoomers have grown up with devices in their rooms and in their very hands that are designed to hold their attention and engagement for as long as possible. We don't actually understand yet how that impacts human neurological and psychological development, because our species has simply never lived like that before. Our species has evolved right up until about now for periods of short, full attention and engagement when the predators and other threats come, and long fucking periods of low stimulation and boredom and repetitive low dopamine reward shit like tilling fields inbetween. We simply don't yet understand how little human minds develop in the equivalent of a handheld Vegas casino floor.

It is quite possible that effects seen in lower mammals - the more early stimulation an infant receives, the more that is needed to elicit dopamine responses in the adults - is also happening to us, but we aren't going to know until our current children and young adults are several decades older.

We did something very serious and fundamental to our kids when we handed them smartphones full of social media apps, and we don't clearly understand what we did yet. The people who understand it best are all in private industry refining their knowledge of attention and engagement science, and they aren't saying shit whilst they make bank. This is probably our most cutting edge field of scientific research right now, and we are using an entire generation of kids as the field test.

If we are lucky, they aren't significantly damaged by this. If we are wrong, this is the equivalent of the cigarette companies first figuring out how to market cigarettes to kids.

 

[HunterHearstHelmsley]

I've seen too many larping zoomer theists and pedo catholic anime pfps on twitter to take this seriously without qualification.

Do you think people who aren’t mentally deranged are on Twitter? You could make the same statement about literally any group of people if you judge by what you see on Twitter.

What qualification would I even need to make? Developing an interest in religion is not going to make you perfect Christian? It won’t cure somebody instantly of their unhealthy obsession with pornography and politics? Reactionaries on Twitter aren’t representative of all people?

People like Jordan Peterson and other psychologists at UofT like the Vervaekians have tried to defend religion, but there's just something about their approach that seems off.

Again, these people aren’t really representative of religious beliefs. It’s like asking my grandfather to tell me about China. In terms of YouTube intellectuals, there are plenty of actually religious people who are capable of ‘defending the faith’, as it were, without the need to rely on depressed agnostic nihilists.

 

[Greasy Spoon]

I recall some discord coomer telling me if I really wanted to find someone with a similar personality as mine, I should look to hentai servers or whatever. On face value, that seems like he was just assuming I was some sort of degenerate, but it felt like he genuinely believed you can somehow get to know people by using porn as a gateway.

That sounds like a very typical immature approach to friendships/relationships, in that your most suited friends or partner would simply be someone that has the most shared interests. An analogy would be the old teenage cliché of requiring a partner to have the same tastes in music/film/TV etc. All that's of course absolutely superficial shit that has no bearing on an irl relationship, but as people that are probably young and terminally online they haven't figured that out yet. The obvious difference being that it's now degenerated to porn tastes, those millennial consumers have been replaced by zoomer coomers.

 

[nertz]

Yes, I'm sure it's not all zoomers. But Bella and her orbiters are egregiously bad at this given the circumstances of her background.

But as a whole, the internet they grew up with is very different than ours. Ours is still around obviously, but it's less accessible and their generation doesn't learn to deal with it like we had to.

They grow up on the commercialized and partitioned internet, only accessing it via apps and when they do figure out where to go to get out of that closed loop they're in way over their heads and don't know it.

 

[Unabashed Hermaphrodite]

Yes, I'm sure it's not all zoomers. But Bella and her orbiters are egregiously bad at this given the circumstances of her background.

But as a whole, the internet they grew up with is very different than ours. Ours is still around obviously, but it's less accessible and their generation doesn't learn to deal with it like we had to.

They grow up on the commercialized and partitioned internet, only accessing it via apps and when they do figure out where to go to get out of that closed loop they're in way over their heads and don't know it.

Maybe this should be in the oldfag thread but,

God damn do I miss the days when you could just type in something random and find some hidden nugget of silliness.

Everything being so interconnected now sucks yes, but it can help a LOT sometimes. Just don't have anything to hide and that would be fine.

I think so many using app games and shorter attention span stuff may be contributing but at the same time really don't wanna come across as 'back in my day' Im not THAT old. But yeah I've seen too many kids get in way too deep by just playing a kids game now.

That part was always around, it's just easier to find and warn kids about nowadays imo.

 

[Fareal]

Yes, I'm sure it's not all zoomers. But Bella and her orbiters are egregiously bad at this given the circumstances of her background.

But as a whole, the internet they grew up with is very different than ours. Ours is still around obviously, but it's less accessible and their generation doesn't learn to deal with it like we had to.

They grow up on the commercialized and partitioned internet, only accessing it via apps and when they do figure out where to go to get out of that closed loop they're in way over their heads and don't know it.

Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It is now thirteen years old. I recommend it to everyone and anyone with an interest in the architecture of the user experience of the internet. He was also frighteningly prescient in much of what he had to say about the walled garden effect of apps and sites-as-services.

He made it available for free; you can grab a PDF here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46889025_The_Future_of_the_Internet_and_How_to_Stop_It

 

[Dom Cruise]

Did anyone ever read The Infinite Jest by DFW? The premise of the book is there exists a videocassette with content so entertaining it basically makes you a zombie if you watch it you are just a helpless slave to it, just staring blankly basking in “entertainment” and forget everything else about your reality and needs.

I think he predicted the internet and smart phones, same concept, his metaphor just used old technology.

DFW was a boomer prophet.

He also predicted society becoming totally absurd, but reality makes Infinite Jest look tame.

Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It is now thirteen years old. I recommend it to everyone and anyone with an interest in the architecture of the user experience of the internet. He was also frighteningly prescient in much of what he had to say about the walled garden effect of apps and sites-as-services.

He made it available for free; you can grab a PDF here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46889025_The_Future_of_the_Internet_and_How_to_Stop_It

Can you summarize some of the book's points?

 

[eee-e2]

The 30+ vaccines they got as a child. lol.

 

[Cowpoleon]

Nah. Employee retention isn't an issue. Expecting a zoomer to stay any meaningful time is a mistake. There is a reason why apprentices are getting older not younger.

Given a choice I would hire over 25 every time and do.

Consider employing a danger haired perpetually depressed "person" who thinks they deserve everything. Or a person who is thankful for thier apprenticeship who works hard knowing in 3 years they will be in a far better position than when they started.

I'd choose the second one and remove the first as soon as possible as they are toxic in a work environment

Sounds like you’re the one creating a toxic work environment.
Plus you’re discriminating against people due to their age, which is illegal in most countries.
Lastly, there’s been a huge shift in people’s opinions of work within the last 2 years. It’s not just zoomers who are being “difficult” for employers. Its all working ppl. Everyone I currently know has either retired early or quit their job. They’re all now pursuing either new career paths, personal goals, or starting up some business venture (or trying to become streamers/you tubers lol).
If anything, people have finally realized it’s not the employee whose replaceable. the employer is replaceable.

employers did this to themselves by progressively creating worse and worse work environments and culture. Now ppl are tired of it and realizing they can do better

 

[Online Fossil]

Can anyone here (maybe someone who is a zoomer) explain why Gen Z is so obsessed with identifying as their generation? I’m a millennial and nobody wears “millennial” as something they’re proud of or particular care about, or did when we were younger either. As a teenager the only time I ever thought about what generation I was was in a civics class when we talked about what the different generations were and how it’s basically just a marketing thing (at that time we were still called “Gen Y” or “echo boom”, being the children of the baby boomers). But all the kids you see on TikTok and whatever talk about being Gen Z and take pride in the stereotypes about them constantly. (I also don’t remember hating and making fun of everyone older than me like they do, if anything a lot of people wished they were older/did the “born in the wrong generation” thing and pretended to be older online.)

only thing I can think is that they were pushed hyper-identifying with labels for race, sexuality, etc so hard that they felt the need to make an identity around their age group as well?

 

[Cowpoleon]

I think honestly that Zoomers feel invincible becasue they always get away with dumbass shit. They became smug about anything that transpires in front of their lives. And when I mean anything; I'm fucking serious. They love this idea that they can never be fucking scared because they always pull out the "I'm tramatize uwu". I saw one twitter thread discussing on how parents take pictures knowing full well the kids don't like it when they get their picture taken.

Clothed kids who pretty much have the money to even have internet access bitching and complaining about pictures. That alone kinda seal the shit that was going on, kids are fucking spoiled and smug and they want to be heard despite the fact that they never earned it. And they definitely never worked for it. I honestly think that society is getting to the point where we are giving too much freedom. When I was a kid, I was a fucking scared kid because I didn't want to get my ass beat if I fucked up. That shit actually stayed with my ass at one poiint where I stopped fucking up in school and I made sure that I was doing what I was supposed to do.

The moment when the 6 year old had their tablets because the parents didn't wanna deal with them. That was the moment when we fucked up. That was that moment.

Very true!
The campaign the anti-bullying started in the 90’s was part of the downfall and then the weird ass “kids” content on YouTube that features needles, pregnant spider-man, etc can probably be attributed to the shittiness we’re seeing.
When schools and other organizations started campaigning against bullying kids stopped being put in their place and sanity by their peers. Plus the whole concept of “everyone is special” really fucked up both millennials and zoomers (zoomers more so). Bullying helped bring all the kids who were weird and socially abnormal to earth and keep to themselves and not bother trying to ween. Then parents and schools telling autistic Timmy and Sally that they’re special served to validate Timmy/Sally’s autistic ween behavior. Not only did we lose natures way of tempering ppl’s egos and weening, but we then proceeded to encourage ego and weening.

No on to the infamous “kid content” on YouTube. This goes with how parents nowadays tend to just give their kids tablets and then proceed to ignore them for hours. There is some really dark kid content on YouTube and I wouldn’t be surprised if kids are being brainwashed into accepting weird and outlandish and sometimes abhorrent behavior/content. First example is the infamous channels that feature videos of real life adults in various cartoon cosplays doing very perverted and dark shit. I remember seeing one that had the needle emoji as the thumbnail, the video itself was a dude dressed up as a pregnant spider man and Batman was feeding him a buncha pies. That’s a tamer example but others have ppl dressed up as cartoon characters and they’re cleaning up poop from the floor/putting needles in their arms, etc. some youtbwrs have done exposes of these channels and using analytics a majority of audience members that watch these videos are in the 4-13 age range