rwhitisissle

If there's one thing I've noticed about Gen Z purely from interacting with them online it's that they're incredibly, remarkably gullible. Like, broadly resistant to the concept of facetiousness, sarcasm, or that they might be being taken for a ride. They take everything at face value. I once made the joke on reddit that the greatest Disney villain of all time was Cobra Bubbles from Lilo and Stitch because his backstory was that he used to work for the CIA before becoming a social worker, which meant there was a non-zero percent chance he helped train Osama Bin Laden in insurgency tactics in the 1980s and was therefore indirectly responsible for 9/11. The zoomers were both confused and outraged because they believed me entirely at face value. I would imagine them applying a similar degree of online literacy to your average dark pattern scam that said "click here for free V Bucks." There are no V Bucks, dog. There's never any V Bucks.

I asked it before when this got posted on lemmy.ml and I'll ask it again now that it's here: how is this a meme?

I feel like they're fighting an up hill battle against startups. If you're a tech startup, you don't have to invest in physical office space. You can hire competent people from anywhere. Pay them competitively and not have to drop 50K a month on a corporate office lease. It's a minor edge in the long run, but something of an inevitability I think. Anyone genuinely competent realizes that if you force people to go into the office, you're just gonna have people who dick around in the office and make idle conversation while staring at their phones instead of doing honest to God work.

Valve is a soulless corporation that only cares about money. Why wouldn't they?

HR exists to insulate people with real authority in a business from those who suffer from their whims. In a lot of companies, your job is to get yelled at so some ghoulish C level executive isn't forced to strain their neurons processing the emotional reality of the fact that their decisions impact real people in negative ways. It might disrupt their "objectivity" and make it harder to issue layoffs next time.

I think one of the things you're saying, and which I might rephrase, is the idea that a generational cohort and the political landscape of a nation during a period of time, is the byproduct of a truly incomprehensible number of factors beyond any one person's or any one group's control. Also, no one group of people is a monolith. There are plenty of conservative millennials, and it looks like Gen Z is going to be more conservative than Millennials in a number of ways. As one person online I saw put it "the kids are puritan pilled." And of course even that's not true for all of them. We're all products of the world in which we live and it's easy to judge people harshly who came before you because the world as it is now seems to be worse than the world as you imagine it was. But our perception of time and history is also imperfect, and we selectively forget and remember the past.

The boomers started retiring 20 years ago. What they're doing now is dying.

I'm convinced ageism (and to a lesser extent religious discrimination) is the last true bastion of bigotry. You're not allowed to be homophobic, transphobic, or racist on the internet anymore. But if you call someone evil for the crime of being of voting age when Reagan got elected? No problemo.

Eh, Obama oversaw the expansion of our national surveillance state apparatus, so...not everybody felt he was very likable.

I've always liked the term "institutional inertia."

As opposed to what? It's where the people they follow post. Why would they leave for somewhere that doesn't have any content they care about? It's like asking who the fuck is still on reddit. The answer is the enormous shitload of people who just want a steady feed of the same content they've always consumed.

Well, WoW also came out in 2004. If you were born the year it came out, you'd be old enough to vote by now. If you were 14 when it came out and started playing that year, then you would be 33 or 34 now. It's an old game designed for a different world. Its player base will continue to age with it. I'd imagine in a few years the average player age will be over 30. Which is incredible, when you think about it. Most adults don't have the time to really dedicate to video games anymore. You have work, family, and social obligations. That so many people that age still play WoW is a testament to its place in their lives. You could say for a lot of people it's not just "a game," it's "their game."