I’ve had a pet theory for a long time that society loses it’s collective mind every 10ish years or so, usually starting with a good reason, but the outcome is mass stupidity followed by mass forgetting leading to a new cycle. War on terror, GFC, crypto, covid, now AI. Although the cycle does seem to be shortening.
Also we’re just so damn stupid to learn from history, or even just people 10 years older than us, that we repeat the cycle.
And there I guess is where saying a new sucker is born every minute is from.
I agree with you but I think it happens every 4 years, not every 10.
I first started noticing this in the 90’s .. comp-sci grads were entering the industry with no clue whatsoever how to do software. (Of course its gotten worse since then, but I started noticing it in the 90’s..)
Everything old was thrown away as being archaic and obsolete - only the New Cool Shit™ mattered .. except nobody had ever done anything, properly, with the New Cool Shit™ - everything was still running on the old.
(Unix was dying, everyone was learning only Microsoft tech because “that was the future” ... until it wasn’t. Now, a majority of us are running 21st century Unix workstations given us .. by Apple, of all companies, which didn’t die so easily, after all..)
People entered the market not because they were truly interested in improving the world through computerization, but because they wanted the lifestyle afforded to them by a career in “Information Technology”, a nascent term back then which simply meant “career path for the budding materialists”. Trouble is, you can’t be materialistic with computers, they are almost entirely a spiritual device, which value is determined strictly and only on the decision of value made by humans. It is humans which decide the true value of all that physical hardware after all.
I think this cyclical amnesia is driven by materialist consumerism. People who take a less material approach to technology, tend to build stuff that lasts a long time.
The reason I think it happens in cycles of 4 years, is that is the average time it takes someone to enter the academic churn, and get spit out on the other end, ready to join the work force and do big things.
grebc · · focus · HN ↗
Also we’re just so damn stupid to learn from history, or even just people 10 years older than us, that we repeat the cycle.
And there I guess is where saying a new sucker is born every minute is from.
MomsAVoxell · · focus · HN ↗
I first started noticing this in the 90’s .. comp-sci grads were entering the industry with no clue whatsoever how to do software. (Of course its gotten worse since then, but I started noticing it in the 90’s..)
Everything old was thrown away as being archaic and obsolete - only the New Cool Shit™ mattered .. except nobody had ever done anything, properly, with the New Cool Shit™ - everything was still running on the old.
(Unix was dying, everyone was learning only Microsoft tech because “that was the future” ... until it wasn’t. Now, a majority of us are running 21st century Unix workstations given us .. by Apple, of all companies, which didn’t die so easily, after all..)
People entered the market not because they were truly interested in improving the world through computerization, but because they wanted the lifestyle afforded to them by a career in “Information Technology”, a nascent term back then which simply meant “career path for the budding materialists”. Trouble is, you can’t be materialistic with computers, they are almost entirely a spiritual device, which value is determined strictly and only on the decision of value made by humans. It is humans which decide the true value of all that physical hardware after all.
I think this cyclical amnesia is driven by materialist consumerism. People who take a less material approach to technology, tend to build stuff that lasts a long time.
The reason I think it happens in cycles of 4 years, is that is the average time it takes someone to enter the academic churn, and get spit out on the other end, ready to join the work force and do big things.
Or .. not.
andrekandre · · focus · HN ↗