I was late to the internet party, as I got my first connection at home back in about 1998, after only getting my first PC (I had an Amiga earlier) in 1996. By 2000, a brother started a little multimedia business and I was helping him with the client side and also developing websites and digital presentations - It was a different time back then.
But, things started earlier than this, as back in the Amiga days when I was a kid, there were cracked games being sold in dodgy places and then once the internet arrived, warez sites for downloading the latest games and software, which is how I first learned Photoshop, as well as Flash and much of the Macromedia suite, which was later bought by Adobe anyway.
After this, there were the torrent sites that arrived, for music first and then games and movies. Things moved faster then and slower because even though things were developing rapidly, the speed of the internet was a major bottleneck. Photoshop was about 250MB and took over 5 days to download pre-torrent, but it wasn't much quicker after either. Plus in Australia, there was a transfer cap and every MB over was expensive as hell.
Yet, they were fun times, exciting times, uncertain times.
The youth of today are far too comfortable.
Several times over the years I have mentioned that it is the older people on Hive that tend to do the best and this has come up again in conversation recently. There are many reasons for it, including experience, time, financial availability, economic literacy, social skill and a deeper understanding of the world in general - but perhaps on e of the things is that they remember the excitement of the early days of the internet and crypto brings back the same feeling. A sense of living on the edge, challenging authority, building something new and unexpected.
"The kids of today" are predominantly users, meaning that they do not build anything themselves, they have it all on-demand and provided for them. Not only that, for the most part, they no longer will go through the complication and inconvenience of pirate content or software and instead favor the "SaaS life", paying for availability, living as a domesticated consumer, rather than an active hunter and gatherer.
The thrill is gone.
Many will argue this, but it is evidenced on Hive in the way that for the most part in the young, the grind is gone, and rather than work their way to become part of an infant industry, they look to buy their way in. There is nothing wrong with this of course, as buying is recommended, but the problem for the young is that in order to buy, one needs to have available resources and many young don't.
I have always found it highly unusual that there aren't more people on Hive and of those there are, aren't more people willing to really work at it. However, I am not surprised because I see the same thing in society as a whole, where there is far less pushback from the young than there was and what there is mostly "social media movements" where they do not have to do much, just count themselves among the whatever-is-popular cause of the day to feel like they are making a difference.
There are of course young people out there actually doing some cool stuff and taking life by the horns, but they are few and far between and only appear numerous because they can be cherrypicked out of a pool of billions and shared globally. The majority are just sitting and waiting to be fed the solution that will make their lives better, get them what they want - which is ironically what they have been fed to desire by the people they are waiting for to save them.
The start of an industry.
Isn't that where everyone wishes they had been when they look back? The exciting times when things were uncertain and innovation was shooting off in myriad directions, knowing that most would fail, hoping that theirs would survive and thrive. It seems that the will to be part of the new has skipped a generation or two, perhaps because they weren't part of defining the last, they just benefited from it as endusers.
They don't want to build, they want to dropship. Proliferate a trend, not start a movement. Be rich, without doing the work.
The old however, the ones who are meant to be giving up on life and becoming set in their ways, seem to be far more bold in accepting change and making change. it could be because they remember the "glory days" of uncertainty, or it could be that they have seen enough of the world and the slide away from what was so promising, into what has become so controlling. The freedom and promise of the internet became the caging of society.
People staring at their phones, consuming what has been engineered for them to entertain their minds, with minds primed for precisely what they are fed. Lonely people, depressed people, disconnected people - consuming, rather than conversing with the world around them. The ability to talk to anyone - isolated in a void of their own creation.
So many try to buy their way out of the hole, consume their way to happiness - but without money, they are doing it on debt and the hole gets deeper, the availability for investment smaller, the chance to thrive thinner.
Don't worry.
Everything comes to an end.
Including opportunity.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
