When the Elders die in large numbers, unexpectedly, the cultural knowledge of a people takes a rather large hit. Preserving that cultural knowledge is so important because the removal will negatively affect their lives because of the holes left.
My example is a bit odd, but the gay male community lost basically an entire generation of people, and it's one reason that the current queer community is such a shithole: The adults in the room are usually people my age (~30s-40s) who have zero idea of how to be queer adults. A lot of the perpetual adolescence in the queer community is a direct result of queer Millennials being basically feral children/only connecting with other queer kids, whereas before the difficulties in getting involved in the queer communities meant you were likely to interact with a wide age range and get some idea of what, for example, a 50 year old gay man was like and how he should interact with a 20 year old.
A complete lack of strategic, long-term thinking, of preserving any kind of survival tactics during bad times, lack of people to guide you through normal issues in your community, etc.
Feral children (affectionate). I'm a lesbian who was born in 1988, and my first introduction to queer culture was queer teenagers/young adults online from when I was in elementary school. (They're why I knew it was okay to be gay!)
However, I don't recall many, if any, people over 30 around. It was very much like one of those stories where everybody above a certain age is wiped out. Hence my affectionate dubbing of us as feral children.
I'd say that's probably because we made an information system change very suddenly so most adults in the Gen X+ generations were basically soft-locked out.
A lot of our cultural problems come from the fact that we have millions upon millions of people who have gotten online in the last 10 years and a new generation that's grown up in a radically different information paradigm. There are just way, way fewer 'adults/elders' than 'kids/novices' online, and since so much of our lives and culture have moved online, it's a shit show.
I'm 34 and I was one of the first people to be raised with the Internet in the modern sense: I had continuous, assumed, free (in the sense that I wasn't censored) access since I was 4, but among my cohort there's very few of us. Even people who did access the Web in the 90s as children often didn't have a modern experience: Most other online Millennials had to access the Web at school, with adults looking over their shoulder or had some really strict controls that were more possible before everybody had a smartphone and the time they could spend online was restricted (you had to have some really nerdy parents to pay for unlimited Web access in the 90s). I tried deriving approximate numbers once and on the high end there MIGHT be a couple thousand of people my age with experience/context to offer advice to current younger people. And the numbers get worse as you go older: Before at home Web service existed, the only people who could really grow up online were academics' kids. So you're getting into 3 or even 2 figure numbers if you go back to Gen X.
SOME of the gay men survived, there just weren't enough of them to be an actual generational resource.
Same thing: There ARE people out there with the socio-cultural knowledge, but there's about ~5000 of us compared to over 100 million relative newbies, based on American numbers. Luckily, the numbers should level out as the 100 million newbies grow to have 20+ years online and start growing a culture and heuristics to deal with it.
There's also that, much like the current generation of gay 30 and 40 somethings, that those of us who were in the first few generations of kids who grew up in the digital age (and therefore have a first-hand understanding of how your informational models evolve differently through puberty, adolescence, young adulthood, etc) had zero guidance when it came to 'pay attention to these things; future generations will care' since most of the adults online pre 1995ish were mostly just there to play with computers or be nerds.
There's also a "Logan's Run" effect in play where if the population of newbies is so overwhelmingly large, they set the norms and elders don't even get a voice in many discussions - they may not even be in the same circles. I think this holds for both the internet and gay examples: young people do what is convenient to them and don't ordinarily look forwards or backwards, so you ended up with norms for, e.g., social media, shifting on cycles of about 4 years as new user cohorts entered and tried new products with no awareness of the previous ones.
And all we've been doing for decades in that space is making things that onboard the newbies a little better. Now when something new and hyped launches, a bunch of people run in and claim the space speculatively, like a land rush(or maybe crypto mining, for an updated analogy). Their intuition is that they have to "win" at social media and get a high score, and there isn't a strong enough group of elders to add perspective and suggest that they need to define their goals independent of the platform, so they just roll over and succumb to whatever the algorithm is pushing that day.
Likewise, there's a stereotype of an intense party-drugs-hookup culture in the gay scene. But the one time I remember speaking at length with elders of that community, it was in a much more toned down party with literary readings, instrumental recitals and cake. And I think that's kind of suggestive of what a healthy culture is, really: it's the part that can survive to old age, which by its nature means it is usually a little more buttoned-up than what a young person craves.
> There's also a "Logan's Run" effect in play where if the population of newbies is so overwhelmingly large, they set the norms and elders don't even get a voice in many discussions - they may not even be in the same circles. I think this holds for both the internet and gay examples: young people do what is convenient to them and don't ordinarily look forwards or backwards, so you ended up with norms for, e.g., social media, shifting on cycles of about 4 years as new user cohorts entered and tried new products with no awareness of the previous ones.
Yup. The ratios are just bad. On the 'understanding the impact of living on the digital world on one's life stages' aspect, we're looking at ratios of about one elder per 20,000 students at best. Then consider of us 5000, there are plenty of variables that might mean somebody can't help teach. Either they have no education background, aren't people people, aren't alive anymore (RIP Aaron Schwartz), or can't understand the average person's life experience well enough to offer any practical advice (I can't see Zuck having many good ideas here; he's too busy exploiting the situation for personal gain).
Which is another problem: The people who would be most helpful for this particular problem are those in the 5000 kids/earliest adopters who spend the most time around normal people (as opposed to academia or SV), because they're going to have the best ideas of how to adapt the digital world to work for the average citizen who has to work around things like trying to keep up with tech while raising 3 kids and working 2 jobs. But those people are also the group with the least resources, time, and ability to find each other.
I'm surprised it isn't more of a shitshow, honestly.
> And I think that's kind of suggestive of what a healthy culture is, really: it's the part that can survive to old age, which by its nature means it is usually a little more buttoned-up than what a young person craves.
I'd expand this and say a healthy culture can be transmitted and has something to offer for different stages of life. Which is where I think geeks have some issue: Because we're so forward thinking/future oriented + our greater social acceptance is so new, we don't even conceive of ourselves as being a culture, and we can be kind of disdainful of tradition and history efforts.
They're referring to the following argument in the queer community:
- Some people (mostly young people - people below the age of ~25) believe that being 'gay' or 'lesbian' is about gender (e.g. a woman attracted to a pre-op trans woman can still be a lesbian, but a woman attracted to a trans man wouldn't be). Others (mostly older people) believe that being 'gay' or 'lesbian' is about sex (e.g. a woman attracted to a pre-op trans woman is bi but a woman attracted to a trans man can be a lesbian).
Honestly, I think we should just have different terms for each. It's clear that there ARE large amounts of people attracted to (basically) either femininity or masculinity as opposed to bodies, so why don't we make a term for that just like we did for lesbians and gay men? That's what humans do.
The main thing I'm concerned about is how mean the young people are to those who don't agree. It doesn't impact me much, but I do worry about the messages young homosexuals are getting from their peers: There's a large conflation of being attracted to someone with moral approval which is...gross. Basically 'if you're not attracted to trans people, you're a transphobe.' Which isn't how any of this works, but teenagers listen to their peers because developmentally, that's what they need to do.
The person replying to you isn't correct that they want to 'change' the definition, though. It's more that we (the queer community) didn't bother nailing down which definition it was when the queer community was small enough that the issue rarely came up, but now it does and it turns out a lot of us disagree.
That's as neutral a run-down as I can give you. The person replying to you is on the 'it's sex based' side of the fence and I get the sense they're testing out whether they can discuss such things here, since a lot of queer/gay spaces online have very much Chosen A Side, and since the internet is full of young people and they have more time, it's mostly the young people's side.
Don’t build housing on that flood plain, it floods. Don’t invest in airlines for the long haul. You absolutely must be planning on timing the popping of the bubble. Brazil was the country of the future when your grandfather was young, when your father was young and when you were young. By induction it will also have massive unfulfilled potential when you have grandchildren too.
There are an awful lot of things that people are really bad are learning from books, and only slightly less bad at learning from people.
Haha, well technically he wasn't wrong in that way (the contrapositive). He didn't say, "As long as there remains alive at least one man who remembers the horrors of the last great war, the next great war can't happen."
Which all caused an amazingly high suicide rate that definitely did not "save the man". Never mind the number of children killed at the boarding schools[0,1].
Now, we are dealing with elders dying (even when fully vaccinated[2]) that has created holes in our language, history, and cultural teachings. We have been trying for years to document everything, but living examples are so much better.
0) https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/indian-boarding-school-... - 'The report notes the investigation will likely "reveal the approximate number of Indian children who died at Federal Indian boarding schools to be in the thousands or tens of thousands.”'
