I was thinking about the difference between how I perceive technology, and how those gen-z and gen-alpha kids perceive technology. When I started with this, it was on Commodore 64. That thing gave you an empty screen and you had to figure out how to make it do anything, useful or not. If you wanted to write code, you needed to figure it out in your head and then go through the entire process of writing it in computer’s language. If you wanted it to count to ten, you had to FOR X=1 TO 10 PRINT X NEXT X. You couldn’t just turn the computer on, open the web browser and be flooded by an eternal deluge of inane crap that vies for your attention. Even later, as computers got better, you needed to really learn how to create a space in your mind where you’ll hold the pieces that need to interact and keep juggling lots of apples in the air simultaneously. It was easy to be stupid, but it wasn’t cool. If you wanted to be cool, you needed to work for it.

How do you get to be cool today? You need to know the latest meme. The one from last week makes you look slightly retarded. The one from last month means you’re a “boomer”. So, you essentially join a race where the timestamp means everything and content of the data chunk means nothing. I’m perfectly sure that knowing what Chimpanzini Bananini is won’t help you in any tangible way, but at some point it bought virtual coolness points in a peer-group of abject fools. Today, it’s likely boomer lore.

Of course, everybody with IQ above room temperature very quickly realised that they are trading their actual lives for unattainable approval in groups whose members figured out a wining stratagem: remain skeptical and unconvinced regardless of any arguments you provide in evidence of your worth. So, the only winning move in this game is not to play.

And how do you not play? Well, the kids don’t see the computer the way I do. To me, a computer is something that does things for me. I want to write text, I open the word processor, write, save, post on the blog. Or I want to do something else; the process is the same. But to them, a computer is something else. It’s a judgmental real world where people will laugh at you if you dared to spend time on “boomer activities” such as anything with any pertinence to the real world and actual people that live in it. Knowing what I actually think about the physical world, that is quite telling: they are in fact managing to live in such a profound illusion, that the physical world itself feels like reality in comparison. And so, lacking the mental discipline required not to alt-tab into some toxic online environment that seems to draw at them with the Sirens’ call of offering approval and self worth, and yet never providing it, they decide to do the only realistic thing left at their disposal – turn off the computer altogether and find completely analog ways of doing things that interest them. They buy a film camera, shoot Tri-X, develop it in Rodinal, print it on actual photo paper and hold the physical image in their hands, pleased that no computers with vitriolic mobs of eternally critical bastards were at any point involved in the process, and that the result exists exclusively in the physical world, invisible to anybody online.

I don’t have that problem – basically, I don’t give a shit about those online crowds, and I don’t see why a digital camera is a problem in any way. Things either stay on my computer, or are printed if I feel like it, or I send them online if I like it. I don’t get ego validation based on what other people do or how they react. Going analog, from my perspective, is merely a hassle without any useful elements. So, I pretend to be surprised at their fascination with analog things, and their fake nostalgia over things they never actually experienced; I do, however, know what their problem is.

People assume that kids spend days doomscrolling brainrot online because they find it entertaining. I sincerely doubt it. I think they are doing it in order to be able to impress their peers with new and fresh brainrot, which they think will get them coolness points within the peer group; they are basically mining online karma, where the intermediary goal is to avoid ridicule for not knowing the freshest brainrot, and the ultimate goal is to win acclaim for being cool.

How is being praised for knowing the buzzword for the freshest chunk of brainrot going to help you deal with any actual issue? If you run out of money, are those fuckwits online going to pay your rent? If you get sick, are they going to get groceries for you and make you tea? Are you even on the level of friendship with any of them where you actually do anything real together and enjoy it? No? So why the fuck do you waste your life on that inane nonsense? And so we get to why people read physical books, listen to vinyl records, take pictures with a film camera, drive a car without airbags and computers and so on. They are gradually deciding they are done with the perpetual circle of seeking validation online and learning how to live, instead. For my generation, it was the other way around. We learned to read physical books, listen to audio tapes, ride a bicycle and go pick mushrooms and hazelnuts in the forest first; then, later, came the Internet, and we learned that you can download books, music and movies, and that was cool. We also learned that fucktards exist online. We tried talking to them. It proved pointless, so we stopped. We wonder why it’s so hard for the younger people.

It’s hard because they don’t know how to do anything real. Internet is all they know. They learned to talk in increasingly cryptic and nonsensical abbreviations with their peers, until they have now reached the point where the AI can pass the Turing test, and they can’t. If I want to talk to someone who will make sense, the AI is a better choice than anyone born since 2000. That is, at least until the next generation of AI gets trained on gen-z outputs and loses all mental faculties altogether, at which point I expect to despair helplessly and experience actual nostalgia for the times when people talked in full, coherent sentences, and had the foundation of knowledge necessary to say something worth reading. I used to think that, as I grow older, the new generations that grew on the Internet will learn so much stuff that I’ll feel like a chimp among humans. Instead, I feel like a human among chimps.

At this point, we can tell that something was likely made by the AI if it’s good. If a text is coherent and longer than a sentence, it must be AI. If a photograph looks good, it must be AI. The way to tell if a human made something is to see if it’s shit.

Fuck my life.

In all seriousness, I don’t think the actual cause of fake nostalgia has anything to do with either nostalgia, or a belief that old technology was in any way better. I think those young people, and by young I mean that they grew up looking at computers, are completely saturated with fast Internet content that rots their brain and cooks their eyeballs, and they see analog technology as an escape from looking at the damn screen all day where it’s either looking at shorts and tiktoks or AI brainrot. In either case, they feel that continuation of the digital overload will doom them, and they are trying to figure out a way how to escape that and still retain a modicum of functionality. Essentially, film photography, as shitty as it is today, is a way of doing photography that doesn’t require looking at the screen that is just an alt-tab away from TikTok.

Which brings us to the next point: how is my generation able to retain self-control in the same environment that makes young people go insane?

I can only speak for myself here, but it’s probably because we learned to deal with people first, and with computers later. To me, people on the other side of the Internet chasm aren’t an abstract entity. I know how to deal with people. I know when to ignore them and when to take them seriously. If they are full of shit I can roll my eyes and alt-tab. I don’t have to keep up with the latest memes in order to maintain a good impression on some herd of dumbasses. Whatever they think doesn’t matter, because they are insecure babies who didn’t read a single book between the 50 of them. Why would I even care about their opinion? If they know what’s good for them, they would care for mine.

So I don’t think it’s about technology. I have the newest, most modern technology there is, and I kept that up since the times of Commodore 64. It’s also not like I haven’t talked to people online for a long time, so I don’t know what it’s like. I’m a pro at that shit. The difference is, my ways of dealing with things and people were well formed before I ever connected to the Internet. I don’t think I perceive it the way young people do. It doesn’t influence me the way it influences them. To them, “go touch grass” is some kind of a new insult, because the implication is that they never do. It took me a while to even understand what they mean by that, because they say it as if it’s something uncommon. And then I understood that for them, it actually might be, and the “analog” hysteria means that they actually need to learn how to interact with the physical world without computers.

Touching grass.