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The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority;
they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no
longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs,
and tyrannize their teachers. — Socrates
Nostalgia is a toxic impulse. — Judge John Hodgman
"I’m an official Old Person (I turned 52 last month). According to the AARP,
that means that I am now officially entitled to complain that back in my day,
things used to be better.
I am suspicious of this impulse! When I started dialing BBSes in the early
1980s, the Old Hands there told me that it was all downhill after acoustic
couplers and that modems were degrading the noosphere into a fallen paradise.
When I got on Usenet a couple years later, every disagreement would feature
some Unix Greybeard telling us that the Fidonet gateway had opened the
floodgates for dumbass kids like me who were stinking up the joint and adding
nothing of value.
By the time I joined The WELL in the late 1980s, it was too late: the rarified
Athenian agora had been overrun by barbarians and the Age of Reason was over.
Then there was the Eternal September, the moral degeneracy of menuing systems
and the wicked temptations of a GUI.
I even got in on the act, explaining “Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you
shouldn’t, either).”
Here’s the thing: all those other Cranky Olds complaining that we were on a
greased slide to Hell were wrong.
I was right."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
