This is a gen x complaint. Boomers would just ask their kids to set it up because they can’t get it to work. Gen x realizes what is going on and that it is bullshit to need an account for a fucking lightbulb.
I think it’s a complaint from everyone but Gen z, who are just used to it.
Somewhere between milennial and gen-z here. I can’t fucking stand making more accounts just because companies want to collect data. And neither can my gen-z younger siblings.
Used to it ≠ Not complaining about it
My late 50s mum happily signs up with her Facebook to everything. Meanwhile it’s often the people in their late 20s to 30s who were introduced to computers during their youth before everything had super streamlined GUIs who know enough about software that they realize this is a privacy concern, what internet privacy means, and why it’s important. People who are older or younger than that have to go out of their way to learn how and why to look behind the easy interfaces. That’s my experience and explanation at least.
Remember when our parents were super nuts about keeping your info private online, not revealing too much info to strangers, and not signing up for stupid shit? My my, how the turntables.
My 70yo mom thinks I’m crazy paranoid because of my data privacy stances, while she’s dealing with constant spam and account hacks. Guess who hasn’t had damn near any info issues? :D
I was never allowed to be on Club penguin or the like. I also wasn’t allowed to be on Facebook when it became popular around me, until I was 14. Mum, what happened?
Not personally, but I remember the feeling
My mom never actually had any idea what the internet was. My dad bought the PC for me, so he probably would’ve doubled down if he knew what I was seeing and maybe would’ve even said it was good for me or not a big deal or something
It’s weird to see my 11yr old brother now with the exact same access to YouTube which I’d ironically argue is a lot worse than old rotten.com. No idea if that’s true but an argument could be made, for sure
Then: Don’t trust everything you read on the internet, and Wikipedia isn’t legitimate because anyone can edit it
Now: Some loud moron on Youtube told me a thing and I believe it 100%.
My young family members are the worst, they just click “yes” to everything, regardless of any effort I’ve made to explain how things work.
Any barrier to convenience is too frustrating to them. They don’t like even using full applications in their laptops, always say “wheres the app, this is too complex”. 🤦🏼♂️
I really wish more things just let me log in with Facebook, I don’t want to fill out and make passwords for every pointless site. At least I can be somewhat confident that Facebook will follow security standards.
Might I recommend a reasonably secure browser with an in-built password generator and manager? I use Firefox. You make up a username and it generates a safe password and saves it so you don’t have to remember it’d Just use a safe password for the browser itself that you can easily remember. I personally feel that’s a decent compromise between secure and convenient.
Hahahahahaha Facebook follow security standards? Your fucking kidding, right?
Facebook, probably the first greatest scourge of privacy invading companies (worse than Google), follows secjrity standards?
The motherfuckers have a profile on me, and I’ve never once been on any Facebook website or service, let alone logged into any Facebook crap.
Boomers would get the bulb set up by their kids, then something will happen, and you come over to find your parents sitting in a rave room because they need the light and can’t fix it.
Sadly these days, it’s a hold over from boomer managers making the decision that services require logins, which in turn require accounts and emails. So gen-x managers who were taught by boomers do the same thing. It’s systematic really.
Not wanting to be exploited by tech coorporations, technological literacy, is not a boomer thing.
I mean, have you met zoomers? Technological literacy as we knew it is dead.
Born too late to be blissfully unaware about technology
Born too early to be blissfully unaware about technology
Born in just the right time to have the cursed knowledge on how all of the cobbled together tech stack out there barely works
Boomers were the generation that invented a lot of this tech. Most of them weren’t literate, but I have known quite a few who were. Honestly same with Gen x, we grew up with it but, a lot of the good tech didn’t come until later in our lives. There are tons of illiterate gen xers and millennials and gen y and z. Some people care and some people don’t.
Laugh it up now. When we’re 50, our holoshere is going to require us to submit to genetic modifications to get our next soylent nutrition paste to dispense. God only knows how we connect to a person young enough in 2040 to know if it’s even possible to bypass. That kind of stuff was laughed at the last time we tried.
How is this a boomer complaint? Why does everyone need my email and info?
to exploit you. not being exploited at a molecular level is boomer shit.
now, are you an old, or are you gonna send me a copy of your social security number and complete sequenced genome?
now, are you an old, or are you gonna send me a copy of your social security number and complete sequenced genome?
Does email work or do you have a mailing address? I’ll spit in a cup and send that to you if I need to but I’d rather not have to go to the post office.
do you have like a cloud storage with at least 1TB? if not, we’re gonna have to sneakernet this.
What I love was it is boomers that allows these changes so they gotta live with it. It’s not like we all woke up and decided to start asking for emails for everything. It was sitting back and being cool with letting ads take over everything until they started needing more and more data so they weren’t paying 30 million for beer ads to people who don’t drink
Anything paying for ads shouldn’t be worth it. We should be hostile to any advertising as stealing from us. They don’t pay us to take our free time yet tell me anytime of your day where you are not experiencing some type of advertising.
I gotta go to work 1/3 my day. 1/3 I’m sleeping. 1/3 I get to myself except that 1/3 for me is taken up by lunches, kids sports, prepping for tomorrow’s 1/3 work day. So of that 1/3 maybe I get a few hours to relax and enjoy something. So I sit down to the streaming service I cut cable for and and still get chunks of that time giving to company’s Hawking me stuff I don’t need wasting my free time. It gets worse when you think how much-needed of our day is being in front of some type of ads. Radio, TV, bus stops, magazines, going to kids hockey games, browsing the internet, watching movies. Even viral videos often are just paid commercials made to circumvent ad regulations and laws and to not pay websites for server time and big fixes.
It is insidious. We have been corralled into something we don’t even know we’re in. Like cows that don’t realize are in a pasture. It all seems innocent like “I’ll just ignore that thing I don’t like” but deep down that thing is affecting every part of the society we are in and it’s a root cause for most of what we complain about today.
For me it’s that I don’t want short form video anywhere near my view.
I went to a bar for a drink the other day. They had TVs all over the place which I normally don’t care for but it looked like golf or something I could just ignore. After I ordered my drink I realized how wrong was.
It was actually some weird short form video TV channel. They croped the 16:9 screen into a 1:1 square with moving neon lines in the “empty space” where there was no video. Each video was about 5 seconds long and showed brainless content of people using a Rube Goldburg machine or doing card tricks and other such nonsense.
Once I realized what was happening it was too late as I got my drink and I felt compelled to finish it and pay. I tried to ignore the 5+ screens in my view but they were too big and eye-catching to really ignore. I kept catching myself looking at one of the screens after a minute or so. I felt like I was getting serotonin raped between ads.
Eventually I moved to sit by a window and stare at a tree. I’ll never go back to a bar like that again.
This reads like a cyberpunk vignette; I enjoyed it. Thank you. I’ve started to take note when something decidedly cyberpunk happens in day-to-day life. I make a lot of notes.
I could increase the cyberpunk feeling by turning the TVs off with a flipper zero. I haven’t felt the need to yet but it’s always an option.
that’s the direction we all need to be moving, if we’re going to survive/avert the water wars.
Extrapolating a bit, here are the next steps
- screens in places where people might look at an ad will all have built in image recognition and eye-tracking.
- an algorithm/model will calculate the number of people within view and an acceptable level of eyes on screen per minute (or some other time increment tbd by an industry leading marketing psychologist) depending on the task they are doing.
- the algorithm/model can also calculate the local demographic
- the short format video content can be easily tweaked to improve engagement. If the racing crash clips aren’t generating enough engagement, then it can try indoor cat clips.
- when the eye to screen levels are at or above minimum advertising levels, display an ad that would best match the target demographic that the advertiser set. The ad contents will also match the actions of the local population.
Certainly. Having worked in advertising for 25 years, that’s probably just phase one. Those short videos will eventually be different for each person seeing the screen… and largely A.I. generated with few humans in the loop. In the flip side, people will probably be able to program their smart glasses to hide all that shit. It’s an arms race over our attention already. See: Trudell’s “mined mind.” Or Bo Burnham, for that matter.
CHILI’S IS ABLEIST AND HAS LITTLE SCREENS KN EVERY DAMN TABLE THAT DISTRACT ME.
I’m a grumpy bastard and hate similar things but honestly, this doesn’t sound so bad that I’d be particularly bothered by it or leave if I hadn’t already ordered that beer. It’s just wallpaper. If I was by myself I’d probably appreciate it on some level and if I’m with other people I’d likely stop noticing. Overall I think I’d probably prefer the bar not have them at all but it’s really not that bad.
Loud sports or music that can fuck right off but otherwise, meh.
Normally I would agree with you. But they had these 50" screens in every direction except for down. I was literally staring at the floor in an attempt not to look at them. The swirling colorful “boarders” of the short format square video was eye catching enough. But with the video changing scenes every 5 seconds it was a similar effect to the Eisenstein editing style in Battleship Potemkin. The screens were screaming at you to stare at it.
It was also just total garbage content, the type of stuff I left reddit for. It was just a step above what Americans of the future watched in Idiocracy. It was truly a bizarre experience for me and also one of the most “boomer” moments I’ve had. Although out of everyone else in the bar, only the boomers were happily watching the short format video.
@The_Picard_Maneuver I once bought a TV sound bar that wanted me to download an app, make an account and give it detailed location information just to use it as a wired speaker. I returned it.
The only radio with Bluetooth that fits my older car requires a fucking Android app to sync Bluetooth… Fuck you pioneer!
Thankfully there’s a ton of workarounds for that.
If there’s a tape deck, you can do headphone jack to cassette tape. If you don’t have a headphone jack on your phone you can get a little bluetooth reciever to headphone jack type thing.
There’s also the route of using a small device to broadcast your own little AM station (same deal, gets audio from jack or bluetooth), then tune into it with your existing head unit.
Best way is to just rig up your own aux in, but that requires some doing.
Was it a Bose? I once bought Bose headphones and downloaded an app to pair it. When Bose recognized the headphones, it told me that I had used the wrong app to pair to those headphones.
@snow_bunny Nah, it was Sonos. Which, I guess the app ecosystem is their whole thing - but I didn’t know that at the time. I just wanted a basic sound bar, and the reviews didn’t really mention that all that extra fluff was mandatory.
In retrospect Sonos sucks for a lot of other reasons too, so I guess it was a bullet dodged.