Or we could realize that there are already 2 generations that grew while having access to the internet and turned out perfectly fine?

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wafflemaker 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Who knows?

Sexualization of teens is a thing. I personally blame social media together with showbusiness. But kids had access to the internet at the same time.

And the internet was slightly different than it's now. It had much more sharp edges that we learned how to live with.

But it also was much less predatory. World's smartest psychologists and programmers didn't work 80 hour weeks for small fortunes to make it as much addictive as possible.. if it was only that. It's also as triggering and depressing as possible, because distressed and depressed people are engaging more and can't stop.

What I mean to say is that you can't really draw an equal sign between internet we grew up with and the one we give (or choose to limit) to our children.

I don't mean we should block them, just that it's not the same.

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ben_w 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We are many things, but "fine" isn't one of them.

How much the problems today are due to, rather than coincidental with, the internet, is a much more difficult thing to discern.

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IshKebab 3 hours ago | parent [-]

We are fine. You're just falling for the "*this" generation is different" fallacy. Look up some history if you think previous generations had it all sorted until the nasty internet came along and corrupted us.

	▲	ben_w an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not saying past generations were fine. Every generation having problems doesn't mean the most recent ones don't. What makes problems into disasters is denying that there is a problem until it is too late. Past generations mostly tried (with varying success) to fix the problems in their world. Sometimes the past generations' solutions are good, like much of the world mandating 40 hour work weeks and public pensions and workplace health and safety and so on; other times even when the problem is real, the solutions are worse, like the US experience with prohibition. But when problems get ignored, you get stuff like leaded gasoline, cigarettes, and asbestos being everywhere, the Irish potato famine, the dissolution of the USSR, and the 2007 global financial crisis. Even if AI doesn't do what it promises, the internet brings with it even more globalisation, cheap labour that undercuts any rich nation for jobs which can be done on a computer (which we've already seen examples of, not just with coding but also call centres). Even if Musk's promised about Optimus remain as unfulfilled as whichever version of full-self-driving just got made obsolete, a remote-controlled android does much the same for manual labour. And the internet does enable much weirder warfare: our governments can blame hacks on whoever they like, but there is often no dramatic photo of something burning as a result, just a diffuse degradation of economic performance from fully automated scams and blackmails. And that's without any questions about demographic shift and who pays for the current generation's pensions when they retire, and if this has anything to do with free porn and the state of online dating apps. And without personalised propaganda. Without your home surveillance system (or robot vacuum cleaner) being turned against you by hacks only possible from cheap ubiquitous internet. Without any questions about if doomscrolling does or doesn't induce psychological problems, if sexual deepfakes are worse than schoolyard rumours, or if AI is sopping kids from learning as cheating is easier.

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globular-toast 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I would be one of those two generations. I dispute your point on two grounds: first, the internet today isn't what it was back then; secondly, I, and many of my peers, didn't turn out just fine.

Back then the internet was a wild west run by thousands of clever people. It was like living in a neighborhood full of people kind of like you. Nobody built it to be addictive or to cultivate attention. If you wanted something you searched for it. Nowadays everyone is on there and it's run by evil adtech companies. Kids these days are not having the experience we had back then.

It also didn't really do us much good. Already back then geeky types like me had somewhere to retreat to and we did. It took me years to learn real social skills and build a life off of the internet. When I see headlines like "Gen Z aren't having sex" I'm hardly surprised. They're not having sex because they're on the internet. What's more is nobody is learning to be an adult at all. People are in a adult bodies but still totally children at heart. They don't own anything, shun responsibility etc.