This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
yeah! let's go back to a time when gas was $12 a gallon. where women had two jobs, making babies and making dinner. where teen pregnancy was at its highest ever. where the government fueled a drug and arms war in South America. where the constant threat of thermonuclear war was banging on the iron dome every single day.
yeah....sounds like a fuckin blast from the past. fuckin rad.
what confuses me the most about these videos is the call to action. go back? that's not how time works!
Anyone who actually knew a damn thing would want to stop right at 2015 abd stay there forever
2012 was pretty much peak imo. Cant really think of anything after that thats worth saving. Guess the mayans were kinda right after all. Smartphones had come out and evolved into something decent but weren't terrible yet, facebook was still kinda useful and not a propaganda cesspit, google would give you useful results, reddit was full of unique and interesting information. Tv and movies were really hitting their stride with some of the most bou dary pushing original tv series and movies hadn't all devolved to remakes and superhero rehashes, global warming was bad but people seemed concerned about it and it wasnt past the point of no return yet, youtube didnt shove a million ads down your face. Netflix was streaming content but didnt have any competitors buying up rights yet, spotify was fairly new and revolutionary still, forums still existed for all sorts of niche interests, ads werent completely pervasive everywhere, google wasn't an evil monopoly sucking up everyones data, memes were still fresh and original, gaming pretty much hit its pinnacle of graphical fidelity relative to performance costs, you could order awesome drugs off the internet unregulated (not even just the dark web, research chemicals were fucking great and hadnt started to be banned yet). Idk i could go on and on but literally everything felt like it got worse from there. I didnt even touch on productivity or the economy but it still felt like a bit of a boom in the wake of the rebound from 2008. If im missing anything good that happened post 2012 please let me know.
You read like my poster^(And both are right)
My poster:
In 2015 I actually thought the world was going to get better. Haha what an idiot I was.
There's a lot to be said for the late 90's. Post Cold War, but pre 9/11.
It's not perfect for everyone, especially if you're LGBT+, but it's got a lot going for it.
People gotta stop watching slop. But it seems impossible to get people to stop using tiktok, twitter, instagram, et al. They just don't care enough.
AI slop often slips into your recommendations without you even knowing it until you watch the video and be aware of the tells to know the difference. I've had to scrutinize so many channels and remind the algorithm to not recommend said channel to sway it in the right direction. It's been so demanding sometimes but now I'm getting smaller niche channels that actually have a sole.
There's so much good 80's stuff I'm not sure why anyone would bother.
Rage, that's why. its all to generate views
It's true that this is all AI slop and that they are disgustingly manipulative videos but I do disagree with the notion that the nostalgia and The era was fake and never existed. As a child of the '80s and '90s we really did stay out all day until the street lights came on, and hang out in pizza places and malls and the internet and our screen life has played a major role in changing that. What is heinous here is that people are creating triggers just to manipulate generations. Not the nostalgia.
Sure, but we also drank in parking lots because there was nothing to do, had guys physically grabbing at us instead of just yelling stuff, got bullied in school more, and the violent crime rate was something like 10x what it is now. Oh, and our friends were dying of AIDS as well. And the bay was polluted, and downtown was so dead we could walk around it like a ghost town.
I will never understand nostalgia. There are good things and bad things about every time. But even with the fuckers trying to pull us backwards now, there has been progress.
Yeah, the article repeatedly suggesting it was a disingenuous depiction of the era, but didn't seem to make any attempt to support that assertion.
I'd love a breakdown as to what specifically was disingenuous.
I mean, like any social media, it's selectively showing "the good", and ignoring the bad. Is that it? Like, they can't (and wouldn't even if they could) put the heavy cigarette smell of any restaurant of the era through the phone.
If you watched Stranger Things, the depiction of Nancy going to work and being relegated to making coffee for the boys instead of being taken seriously at an actual job is an iconic representation of women’s struggle in the workplace. Remember, women were only allowed to have their own bank accounts, credit cards, and home loans as legally protected assets, starting in the late 1970s. We were deemed more incompetent, and more wards of our husbands in those respects. Inertia of those notions remained even after the legality changed. That whole bit in Delores Claiborne, where her husband finds her “private”, “personal”, only her name on it bank account and just empties it: real. (That is what RBG had a deciding vote on btw, what gave her such credit back in the day, changing financial freedoms for women to match those of men.)
Yes, this may seem a little focused on women, but it’s a significant piece of the “things were better” push on the right. The right did grow, in part, as a reaction to the loss of the more controlled, traditional, “kept” female. It’s important to keep a full visual of what going back could mean. Roe has already fallen.
Moving away from screen time to more face to face is good. Doesn’t mean texting is bad, it’s fantastic, amazing even, how easy it is to communicate. I love it. But I still drive 10-15min to sit down in a living room face to face with people. I feel little to no stress when disagreement, argument, or even anger occurs. Facing the normal range of human emotion in another doesn’t make me want to hide.
Even just moving back to more long form media would help stop the destructive, anxiety perpetuating, focus reducing rewiring happening. YouTube statistics are now saying anything over 10 minutes is doomed to die based on viewer preference. 9 minutes or less or gtfo. Shorts are quickly taking over and perpetually rewiring people on the daily.
Wow that was well stated. Bravo.
I guess so. This is from the article:
Their political project uses the aesthetic of the past to sell a future where minorities are marginalized, women have no political power, and white guys are in charge. That’s how they think it all worked in the past and they’d love for it to happen again.
What the videos don't show is how bad racism was before everyone is able to record at anytime. Shows and movies were very streotypical. Actually since cancel culture wasn't a thing for not famous people, people were really racists in just everyday conversations.
The government's war on immigrants is very much like the war on drugs with were specifically created to target hippies and black communities while at the same time suppying the communities with the drugs they deemed illegal.
In terms of the environment, lead was banned in gasoline in 1996. I thought it was way earlier than that when I looked it up. Shame really. I am no a scientists and the results of microplastics in our system is still being researched but lead poisoning effects are very well documented and I believe the pernament mental effects of it can be seen in a large portion of the boomer population.
Lead was out of most gasoline in the 70s. It is still available in some, for example airports. The big thing about the 90s was that was when teens and young adults didn’t grow up around it. It’s a long term poison.
Yeah, I kinda imagined this was the nature of the issue.
Not really sure how I feel about the implied argument, though, which appears to be that it is wrong to create period art (or ask an AI to generate a video) which doesn't include some (all?) negative experiences of that period.
May I paint the view from my balcony, omitting the mosquitos biting me while I paint?
I think the crux must be intention... Which is notoriously hard to prove.
It's really not. We know foreign countries are using ai to radicalized boomers and incels. So it's just safer to assume the worst until we are back in control of our society
It's not even just the bad they're not showing, they aren't showing anything outside of a suburban straight white guys point of view. Which does reflect a lot of 80s media but doesn't reflect the experience of a lot of people in the 80s
*Your experiences may differ
Kids with mullets in the back of a ute? That’s just this year in Adelaide.
. . . What?
Boomerfying!
A perfectly cromulent word.
The thing about the English language is that you can verb any noun you like and get away with it. Just like I did in the previous sentence.
Well, I just nouned your verb right back to the way it was, checkmate.
Is there a c/TitleGore up in this bitch?
Remember all the propagandaish art of the 50s, 60s, and 70s based on advertisements of the time? Like all the Norman Rockwell stuff, sanitized hippie shit, and 70s rock star junk?
Apparently AI is being used to pump out the same kind of thing for the 80s but more blatant.
I can't tell if I'm too cooktified or not cooktified enough to understand that headline.
This all or nothing, either or bullshit needs to stop being perpetuated. It is why we have such an inured two party system that effectively makes their followers dance each election.
The tactic here is exactly the one used by Jordan Peterson, mixing truth with garbage for the sake of manipulating an audience into his way of thinking. And it works.
We did stay out in groups of friends, face to face, until it was dark out. We also used destinations like malls, pizza places, and water as an excuse to do so. Cars were a big deal, a means to get there without parents. Summertime involved backyard bonfires in states without burn bans. Uninvited friends and neighbors would randomly show up. Being occupied socially sometimes meant sitting with other people saying nothing, a little bored, doing nothing other than sitting in a room with others, sometimes listening to uninteresting people or TV. But that was ok because you were with friends, spending time.
The reality is there are brain changes due to screens and the invasive format of the “short”. Literal re-writing at the level of how neurons talk to each other. Shortened attention spans. Increased anxiety. Increased impatience. Inability to focus. Worse, inability to go all in on a single point of focus, for hours to create, produce, invent, or simply develop thinking skills. Increased anxiety and lack of coping in interpersonal, not even relationships, but interaction such that this idea of sitting around with groups of people, deliberately, as a way to use free time appears weird and fictional.
That said, the world wasn’t necessarily better. Just watching Wills mom on Stranger Things trying to make a phone call when her phone burned out was painful. It is nice to have a map with a “You Are Here” star wherever you go. No more perpetual cloud of cigarette smoke with all white walls and decor perpetually stained beige or yellow with nicotine sludge from cigarettes. Women’s lib had (past tense) made more progress away from rape culture and towards reproductive freedom. Less racism. And so on.
Articles like these, similar to political pundits, seek to muddy what is true by using truth to spread lies.
Gods thank you. If lemmy is any indication of youth culture and beliefs and attitudes, fuck me. (Am middle-aged with mostly 20-something friends, they are not like y'all.)
Freaks the shit out of me how scared young people are of simple social interaction. "LOL, I'm too autistic to answer the phone!" Yeah, well there are reasons we no longer want to do so, but y'all are NOT all autistic and ADHD. "Hate talking to a cashier." Fuck is wrong with you?! I want to scream, "You're not autistic for being socially uncomfortable you wuss! That's a normal part of growing up!"
Fuck me, thought I had a handle on it from my junior year until I went to college, BAM!, like puberty all over again. And then the same damned anxiety hit in my late 20s! "Welp. Guess I gotta do this every 7 years or so." We had words for this: "Growing up." It can suck, but we all have to do it. Get the fuck over yourself, you are not special or strange or different. The horror may be, you are normal.
And yes, anyone trying to mix us up, make us see through rose-tinted glasses, is a liar with something to sell. And anyone trying to make the past into a hellscape is at best ignorant, wasn't there.
I hate to tell you this, but the mullets were very real. It was a dark time and we’re all glad it’s in the past.
Mullets are back, my dude.
Like actually back. Popular, even. I get downvoted to oblivion for making fun of mullets. I don't understand a world where mullets are not just here, but defended as a legitimate hairstyle.
The party is behind us.
We gave our kid a wolfcut mullet, and honestly it’s working 🤙
Says you. We the transmasculine population refuse to let mullets die
What did “boomerify” mean?
Boomerifty: To turn GenX into believing an idealized past as their parents believed.
I feel it's a vaguely Australian term?
I’ve said for a while that WW3 will start because of a meme. But now I feel like WW3 will start because of a band AI video taken seriously by the boomers.
Non AI videos:
Awesome Oregon in the 70s:
Awesome Oregon in the 80s:
Awesome Oregon now:
