2mo ago

Peak

23 comments

I'd push the peak forward a smidge to late 2003, at least for where I'm from. Florida banned smoking indoors that year.
- 9/11/2001 was the end of attitudes of the 90s, so I think the peak would have had to been before that.
- Peak was mid to late 2000's. Late enough for most people to have broadband Internet and lots of websites with user submitted content that bypassed the traditional cultural gatekeepers, before smartphones and social media ruined everything.
  
  So basically the Internet before YouTube came out and sparked the rapid corporatization of the Internet we called "Web 2.0"
  
  YouTube was launched in 2005, as a way to share clips of Janet Jackson’s breast from the superbowl halftime show. The founders worked at PayPal, so I guess we can blame Peter Thiel once again
  
  I grew up before the internet… I think life in general might have been better before it.
  
  We can agree to disagree. I don't miss the days of paying for long distance phone calls, all the waiting around in trying to link up with friends at a designated place, looking up addresses in a physical book of map grids, manually maintaining a calendar in a planner, driving across town and waiting in line for tickets to a show. The internet made things better.
  The other stuff back then wasn't always better, either. Smoking eveywhere, unreliable cars, air pollution, crime, etc., really cut into quality of life.
  
  I agree with that. What I was thinking about was more so people getting atomized spending so much time on their phones, socializing less, receiving more disinformation, and so on.
  Sure it used to take longer to meet up, but time was less compressed, you enjoyed the quiet in the time between moments, the chance to reflect. Sure it sucked people smoked in public places - but at least we were out more together at public places - the trend now is people do things together less in public than ever before.
  Those kinds of differences.
- dimpled chads

23 comments