This is not my personal opinion, I know Gen Z men who voted for Harris. But the voter demographics really speak for themselves, and maybe now people will look at the radicalization of young men as a serious (but solvable) issue.
They went for Trump by 2%. Calm the fuck down. Go after millennial men, we went for Trump by something like 10%.Gen X men went for Trump by 22%. And Boomers were actually better than X at 11%.
So if you want to go after someone go after Gen Z’s parents.
9/11 was 23 years ago.
The nationalism that arose implanted itself in the children of that era.
Those kids are now in the voting booth.
Gen Z is the Hitler youth because all you parents told them art school is a waste of time and they took that to heart! Clearly it’s important to be hard and the world is about competition and being better than everyone else! You can’t make enough money if you’re not dominant and respected because we pay for leverage instead of value around these parts!
Because they’re young and naive enough to be fooled by a conman who made impossible promises that will never be fulfilled
I blame social media and algorithms. My teen son for the longest time was leaning further and further right due to the content he was getting served on YouTube. He was making disparaging comments about women and how stupid they are. My wife and I who lean left had to sit down and have a talk with him about what he was saying and videos that he was getting served by YouTube (that popular red pill girl, I can’t remember her name and andrew tate among other red pill stuff). He’s a pretty smart kid, once we showed him data and articles that directly proved all the things he was watching wrong, he started to come around. He’s been careful to believe things that he sees or hears on the internet more now. Occasionally, he’ll bring things to us that we have to double take and fact check to see if it’s wrong.
Because the democrats haven’t made a serious appeal to them in a decade. We need to turn bell hooks into actionable political messaging.
Alienation caused by economics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation
Fascists have a message for them, the liberals don’t because they are committed to the current economic and political system
Because they’re being indoctrinated by Kick streamers like I was by YouTubers in 2015. It’s so disappointing to see the same shit that ruined me for years ruin them.
the Democrats will just pander to this by getting an endorsement in 2028 from Andrew Tate.
it’s either being that or a concubine, gen z was the after millennial hope that died
As a zoomer that’s old enough to be working class now. Man, my childhood was fucked. At school, being a right wing troll was the norm, at least for boys. I was too.
The worst part is no-one cared, fucking “they’ll grow out of it” and now everyone is suddenly in shock. When I talk about it to my friend today he’s even in fucking denial about it, “Oh they didn’t actually mean that, it was all jokes”.
And our education system doesn’t do anything to combat this shit either. Quite the opposite, the dogmatic authoritarian approach schools take coupled with zero-tolerance policies pretty much ensures people shouting this hateful shit get away with it.
After all saying “Hitler did nothing wrong” only gets annoyed looks, gets completely brushed off as “edgy” or something. But then when someone points out that person’s shit, suddenly that’s an attack???
The worst part is no-one cared, fucking “they’ll grow out of it” and now everyone is suddenly in shock. When I talk about it to my friend today he’s even in fucking denial about it, “Oh they didn’t actually mean that, it was all jokes”.
Most edgy teens do grow out of it. I roll my eyes at embarrassment at some of the stuff I wrote in college, and high school me was even stupider.
But one difference in my high school years (in the 90’s), edginess wasn’t inherently politically coded. Some of it was racist, sexist, or homophobic, but plenty of the targets were also Republican constituencies: rural/small town people, Christians, fat people, old people, prudes, etc. In a conservative suburban area, jokes about abortion, sex, drugs, etc. were often designed to elicit shock and disgust.
I think we’ve seen a cultural shift in which edginess is seen as right wing in itself, in part because the right, which used to get offended at things like Harry Potter and Howard Stern and Disney movies, has fallen in line with edgy Gen X comedians who somehow didn’t grow out of it, and made room for people who smoke weed and mock the Bible.
in the 90s you attacked whatever was around cause you were a piece of shit, now you got the internet so pieces of shit worldwide can band together and hate a specific cause.
We had the internet in the 90s. It just wasn’t in every 12-year-old’s pocket all day, and the nefarious smoky room types were too old to understand how it worked, let alone carry our mass manipulation campaigns with it as the medium.
band together and hate a specific cause.
The thing with Gen X teenage nihilism was that the only cardinal sin was actually having a strong opinion. There wasn’t much room to hate on anything, because actually hating something showed that you cared too much, and that wasn’t what we were about.
Gen Z seems to be much more willing to embrace negative emotions and acknowledge that they care enough to hate. Whether that’s a better or a worse thing, I’m not sure.
I begged my admin to do something about my boy students sexually harassing my girl students. Instead, my some of my boy students discovered I was trans and outed me.
“Oh they didn’t actually mean that, it was all jokes”.
Because those were jokes.
The problem we have today is not that it was socially acceptable to be a psychopath online in 2014. The problems are, in my opinion:
- Rapidly decreasing standards of living
- Social media making people more stupid
- Governments being too large and intransparent
- Pointless governmental spending without explaining the why to the population
The right-wing shift is part of a global failure of established governments.
The right-wing shift is part of a global failure of established governments.
Yes! Thank you.
Just as the next left-wing shift won’t be a result of humanity getting smarter somehow, it will be a result of right-wing policies failing. And that shift won’t lead to any improvement either.
It’s a pendulum.
People are willing to tolerate a failing system longer, when it aligns on surface with their own views. This is similar to people on the right defending Pinochet and death squadrons.
And people on the left 20 years ago would defend a lot of things about USSR or Che Gevara or stuff like this, even not being tankies.
Tribalism leads to degeneracy.
Get that logical crap out of here!!
A lot of millennials were pro war back in 2001+ a bunch of people I went to school with joined the military. People would say “support our troops!” When you criticized the wars. This is nothing new, just brainwashing.
I graduated from a Christian high school a few years ago, and now they have a Discord server that’s basically their own version of 4chan and they post a bunch of edgy racist/queerphobic/etc stuff. Then the person running it went to MIT. It still exists and I’m pretty sure the staff knows about it and doesn’t give a shit. Of course the school itself promotes racist and queerphobic political ideologies as well so that’s not exactly helpful either.
A lot of this are encouraged under the table. Any plans on it is usually talked rather than texed, so there will be less chance of it that it could surface, and is between the most trustworthy people.
I have seen teachers say that hitler was right, that walls were invented by aliens and that giants existed and were romanian
giants existed and were romanian
Wait, what? I didn’t see any giants in my high school. Are they invisible giants or something?
Also, where were those giants during the 2nd Dacian war? Romans must have been superheroes or something to take on giants and win.
We were told that there were only bones on romanian territory, not alive ones
Also, why do you think there were multiple Dacian wars?
Not enough Panera bread locations.
Cite data
The main source of this recent trending fascism, anti-scientific thinking and so on is social media or the web in general. To resist or refute the mass of false information and find out what’s likely true and what’s not, requires education, literacy, media competency, things like that. I guess current generations are lacking this so they fall easy prey to “funny” fascist memes, fakes and rhetoric, then vote for rightwing extremists, destabilizing their own country as a result, not realizing that this leads to big disadvantages for everyone including themselves. We failed to protect these younger generations from misinformation, and now they are turning the world into what they are misled to believe is true.
We used to have relatively high living standards in the Western democracies. This will soon all crumble and we (most people who aren’t rich) will suffer from it, regardless of who you voted for. And on top of that, climate change will finish us all off, because battling that isn’t even on the radar for those fascists because they don’t even believe in it. So instead of doing too little, we’ll do literally zero and even accelerate the problem, meaning it’ll affect us all much sooner already and with higher intensity.
So enjoy your still existing relatively privileged life while it still lasts. It’s ging to get much, MUCH worse before it’s going to be better again. Buckle up and prepare yourselves.
With the levels of anti-intellectualism, it’s also quite hard.
You write more that 3 lines? You used a “buzzword”? Congratulations, your refutation won’t be read, but will met with ridicule!
My mother’s boyfriend often “reads” articles from more liberal-leaning news sources, and he just laughs at the buzzwords. Cannot tell what the articles were about.
A buzzword being one with three syllables or more, I presume?
(Syllables are probably woke nowadays)
map of climate change outcomes. 2.7 warming. Violet - unhabitable“More suitable” than what? I live in a green area: both this phrasing and a scan of sources added below, make it look like I benefit from 2.7°C global warming. Bring it on!
Do you have the source for this? I’d be interested in learning more, this is pretty useful imo
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01132-6
Its heavily processed and prettified https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01132-6/figures/15
In the linked sources, I don’t see that huge black area in Siberia
*looks at Russia*
Well, I knew we are fucked.
Russia is going to be a bit busy with a massive influx of climate migrants. America will also have this issue, so they will both have that much bigger problem to deal with.
It seems counter intuitive but I don’t think Gen Z is as good with technology as most people assume they are.
I think they just believe everything they see on YouTube and TikTok. Those algorithms just feed people what they want to see and don’t challenge anyone.
Who thinks they’re good with technology? They’ve never had technology that requires any more knowledge than how to swipe. They’re shit with technology.
I mean that many people just assume younger generations are better with technology.
Do they? That’s what I’m asking, who thinks that? I don’t know anyone who thinks zoomers are good with technology.
It’s absolutely a belief and it used to be true. For millennials especially it was true. We grew up with technology around us, but they required effort from the user to make them work. These created a lot of self-learned resourceful technologically literate people.
Modern technology almost all wants to prevent you from messing with them. They function out of the box and limit your ability to modify them. This has created a lot of people who can’t understand how technology works beyond the user interface. They’re great at using a touch-screen, but they don’t understand what the device is doing beyond that.
Millennials aren’t zoomers though. The original statement was specifically about zoomers, and idk anyone who thinks they’re good with technology, and from what I’ve seen, they are not.
Gen X and older millennials are the only generation who knows stuff on average. We had to teach our parents, and then we had to teach our kids (who don’t care to learn). We’re sandwich meat!
That’s why I worded it the way I did. There’s still a sentiment that younger people should be better with technology, since they’ve interacted with it their whole life also. Their interaction was much different than ours though.
My 80 some year old dad was better at some technology than my 30 year old son.
Your 80 year old dad used DOS. Make your 30yo use it for a year exclusively and he’ll be fine
No he wasn’t using DOS a couple of years ago although he did use Windows. In fact, I don’t know if he ever used DOS. When they did move the drafting system to computer, he was likely using a jnix workstation or special purpose hardware.
But he learned how to acquire media from the UK that isn’t available in US. He’d search and download torrents, unrar when needed, move to his plex libraries,etc.
I personally don’t, but it’s a sentiment I hear around me from time to time in the workplace or on TV.
That’s been a common and roughly true trope for a long time, but I think we may have hit the point where high technology has been ubiquitous for multiple generations now and it’s probably not quite as true as it once was (that the younger generation is always better with technology than the previous)
Who thinks they’re good with technology?
Millennials, it’s the only thing we’re good at, we suck at everything else…
I meant who thinks zoomers are good with technology.
We killed napkins motherfucker
Also stigma about depression, no stigma when you’re the majority.
We killed napkins
Do you use your sleeve? I don’t understand.
Apparently millennials prefer paper towels over napkins and it’s affecting the napkin industry.
“tissues” vs “kitchen rolls” for anyone wondering what a paper towel is compared to a napkin.
I gotta say, I always found tissues just sub-par for the job. A kitchen roll (towel? sleeve? paper?) you just need to fold it once and it will hold against a storm
You could literally search “millennials killed napkins” and get your answer
Maybe napkins is some kind of influencer or something
You could literally search “millennials killed napkins” and get your answer
I’m not, tho. 😎
Have a discussion with me about napkins. This is a social website.
Ok, the first article says “Millennials killed the paper napkin industry” then says they’re using paper towels instead
WTF is the difference between a paper napkin and a paper towel? I thought they were the same thing? 😂
Yep. Older people (Millennial, Gen X) grew up with PCs that could be heavily modified, run any program, even repurposed to run Linux if you were brave. Later generations who grew up with phones only get to use the apps that Apple / Google approve of. There’s no hacking the system, so you get whatever the algorithm says you get.
Older people grew up on BBSes and later “Bulletin Boards”, which were mostly the same thing just with prettier graphics, also with email, and sometimes instant messengers. Communities were smaller, and there was no mediator. Younger ones are stuck in apps that are designed around engagement, with a “celebrity” vs “fan” content model where it’s all geared around followers and likes. It’s all parasocial relationships from the “fan” side, and trying to keep up with whatever the algorithm wants from the creator side.
It really fucking sucks that platforms that used to be designed to allow 2-way communication between equals have flopped so hard trying to follow the exact model you just outlined. For all its faults, Facebook used to be a really great place to keep in contact with long distance friends and family. Now it won’t even show you anything anyone in your friends list posts, and the options for interacting are completely neutered on their mobile site. It went from being a site I enjoyed, to a site I despise. And there aren’t any alternatives. The era of a platform for friends and family is over.
The only reason Facebook was at all successful is that they made it easy to migrate over from MySpace.
Before Facebook people weren’t locked into their social networks. In the early days of BBSes you were mostly on your local BBS, but you could sometimes communicate with another BBS if your BBS was part of FidoNet. When instant messengers like ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, etc. became popular, it was common to use a unified program that logged into all of them at once. But, already there was corporate consolidation. BBSes were often run by people out of their own homes, or at least by hobbyists. The early messengers were all commercial products.
Then there were the early social media websites: SixDegrees.com, Classmates.com, Friendster, (LinkedIn), MySpace, Orkut, and in 2004 Facebook. At first Facebook was closed to anybody who wasn’t a US university student. You even had to have an email address from a US university to register. But, when they wanted to grow, they made it easy to migrate from other sites, especially MySpace. They released a tool that allowed you to basically stay in touch with your MySpace friends from Facebook, but not the other way around. That slowly drained people away from MySpace until it eventually collapsed. These days, thanks to section 1201 of the DMCA, if you tried to release a tool that allowed people to migrate away from Facebook, you’d be nuked from orbit.
Now, every social media site is a walled garden protected by a moat and an electric fence. Every one is owned by companies worth more than $1b. People can’t leave because the FOMO is too strong, but they don’t want to stay because the sites are pure shit. You see that especially with Twitter. It is absolute shit since Musk took over, but many people feel like they can’t leave. And, when people do leave, do they go to Mastodon, which isn’t owned by a corporation? Nope, they mostly go to Threads, owned by Meta, or Bluesky, owned by a lot of the same people behind Twitter.
Unless the governments of the world step in and either break up the tech giants, or require that they are interoperable, I don’t know how we back out of this shitty situation.
I lived through those early days, and although they were glorious, those boards, and forums, and ICQ chats weren’t filled with friends and family.
MySpace was the first place where everyone was. It was the first time in history where you could go find out what happened to all of your old friends and rekindle a relationship if you wanted to.
I remember going through basic training when the Drill Sergeants told us we’d make the best friends of our lives, that we’d never see again. And that held true for 10 years after I got out. Then suddenly MySpace became hugely popular and I found them all again! Because of Facebook I’m still friends with several of them today.
Facebook got really lucky with the timing of their public launch. They still kind of just sat around being empty until MySpace started massively changing the platform under new ownership from NewsCorp. I think that acquisition was the worst in history up until Twitter.
Anyways, in their infinite corporate wisdom, they wiped everyone’s profiles. Like seriously, WTF? They deleted everyone’s pictures, all of their blog posts, comments, and just about everything. Talk about not understanding what they bought. They did release a tool to get your pictures back, but why the heck would anyone trust the site after that. People were already checking out Facebook, so they all just jumped over there. Plus the clean design, with lots of white space (which is completely gone now), was very Web 2.0 and people liked it.
Anyways, like I originally said, and like you confirmed, that era is over. We both know the government is never going to split them up, and even an exact clone of a service today would fail. Social sites need people to succeed, and people don’t have any interest in creating a new community when there’s all of these ready-made communities that they already understand, regardless of how bad they have become.
The only reason TikTok succeeded is because it had backing from CCP and basically infinite money to market and attract new people. No start-up would ever have those types of funds these days. If somehow through a miracle a start-up did acquire enough funding to be a threat to meta or Xitter, then the billionaires at the heads would make an irresistible offer, buy it, and kill it. It’s over. The free Internet is dead.
We both know the government is never going to split them up
The American government isn’t going to. But, I do hold out hope for the EU. The EU already doesn’t like the US tech giants, and they’re much more driven by lobbying by European-based businesses, almost none of them on good terms with the US tech giants.
We’ve already seen what effect the GDPR had on the web, and it affects Americans even if the law doesn’t apply in the US. We’ve seen how Apple has had to design all its devices to use USB-C because of new EU rules. I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect that the EU might require Mastodon-type rules for social networks, that you can leave to an instance that communicates with your old one, and that your followers and followees change when you move. Facebook would hate it, but Google (whose social network efforts all failed) wouldn’t really be affected, so they might push for it just to spite Facebook. Some of the other big American tech companies might actually like it. Like, Netflix might like to be able to graft a social network onto their video watching platform so that people could watch and talk about videos together.
With the Biden administration going out and Trump going in, I think the FTC is going to go back to being a corporate cheerleader, but I still have some hope for the EU.
Xennial here, you speak pure facts.
My son is in his early 30s and hardly a day goes by that I don’t have to help him with a software issue.
I don’t know if he’ll even be able to keep the media server running when I die. Probably won’t be for about 20 years so we’ll see.
I’m in my mid 30s and I know a lot of people my age who are like that too. They just aren’t curious about how things function. That’s okay, though. They have other talents that I don’t have.
Sure are some glass-tappin motherfuckers
This made me actually laugh out loud. I’m calling gen z that from now on
I guess the lonelyness epedemic plays a part in it which hits younger people harder then older ones and mans stronger then woman.
Indeed, and it’ll get worse. Plenty of women (on popular dating sites, at least) have already been swearing off dating Republicans. Now, with a higher likelihood of a national abortion ban, don’t be surprised if straight women become even choosier. After all, every man we think of sleeping with must now also be viewed as a potential father.
Forget about casual flings or one-night-stands. Why would I risk a lifetime of supporting an entire human being just to have one night of fun?
And that’s only for straight women. Bisexual/pansexual women can choose to straight up stop dating men entirely.
In a lot of ways, lonely young men who voted for Trump just shot themselves in the dick.
Straight women can choose not to date men either. Of course I’m older but quite enjoy living alone.
You mean to tell me that using birth control or even practicing abstinence is the best way to avoid getting pregnant and removes the need to use abortion as birth control?!
And that perhaps having reckless one night stands all the time is risky and probably not a great idea?!!
Gen z girls are a lot less into sex than girls in my generation were, I wonder if that is a factor.
