I was hanging out with this late gen Y crowd, and literally everyone had their phones out and were messaging other people in the friend group who weren't currently hanging out. Instead of hanging out, they were messaging others who weren't and might later. Then when those people stop by, they'd start messaging other people they're not with. Now and then they'd look up to say "so and so is doing so and so" to someone, like give an update from the person that wasn't there.

Kinda agree. We fucked society up with phones. I both admire that we can hold such a powerful computer and carry it in our pocket, and hate that it's normalized.

Someone pointed out how there's no phones in Star Trek and it's probably deliberate. I get it.

>here's a new mental illness term

4CHDESS = 4chan derangement and estrangement syndromes (there's a whole group of them)

They have communicators and iPads.

Somehow 4chan sounds like a healthier option.

And this was 3 years ago.

As long as you stay off b/ and pol/ it probably could be.

Data: Captain Picard, we are being hailed!

Picard: don't put video on

Data: but they want to video chat sir

Picard: text them "what's up"

Outrage against a legitimate problem with nostalgia for times the problem still existed in other forms and some ableism sprinkled in for spice. Delicious.

Can't forget the misogyny!

Glad to be an older millennial. Was in my late 20’s when smart phones were normalized

While I agree it got worse, I remember some people doing exactly that when I was in high school in the 2000s - sms were enough to constantly distract them form what was going on in front of them

Yeah I was talking about your garden variety "tiny pocket screen" type of deal

I dont think that in the 60s-90s anyone would have necessarily anticipated the existence of smartphones as they are now. Rather than it being a “deliberate” choice not to have them in the show. Its just not a futuristic idea of communication that existed at the time. Theres not smartphones in The Jetsons either. Earlier ideas of what the future would be like were a lot more utopian than the dystopian hellscape induced by smartphones and social media. Their various ideas of the future were a modification of the way people actually lived then, which was simultaneously less connected but also more interpersonally social. They dreamed of a more connected future, but not one where that level of connection would rip apart established social fabrics

Even pol/ has pro Ukraine and pro Russia posts. It’s not tailored to only show you only one worldview.

There's a lot of newer Trek shows that seem to have stayed away from smartphones too, though.

Well yeah, but they are based on the universe that was invented earlier. It would be pretty jarring for them to have made a change like that

Look, this is a boring conversation right? I feel mildly gaslit, can we talk about anything else?

Anon has become the boomer.

My friend group was really late to adopt smart phones. I was always the nerdy one, so i had a cracked iphone as soon as it was available. Years later, tgey still rocked the dumb phone. None of us cared about social media at all. The smartphones slowely dripped in, because that was the only thing that you can get.

Boy that broke our whole group. A thing we would always do is hang out, listen to music, talked about movies, whatever. I did this for a long time my the last guy without a smartphone. The day he got an iphone, that was gone. We did it one or two more times and then we kinda drifted apart. Instead of talking about movies and music it was: let me look this up... I saw this thing on (whatever)
This was before tiktok, i can't imagine what younger people go through.

Well I was talking more about the kind of people frequenting those boards, not necessarily the content.

There's not a whole lot of entertainment value in having a bunch of people sitting in silence texting other people off screen with the occasional loud video being played to nobody. Even if they are in space.

Yeah, well it sucks in real life too

Aw dude

Okay fine, you either die a zoomer or live long enough to see yourself become the boomer.

Yeah! Didn't notice that first. Truly this green text keeps on giving

There is an episode where a new game is brought on board. It's really enjoyable, and once people start playing, they don't want to stop. Soon, the whole crew is addicted. It turns out the creators of the game are using it for mind control.

Seems like the perfect metaphor for modern cellphone/app usage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)

Its one of the filters, of the great filter.

These people have NPC-ified themselves, and they basically have the AI behavior routines of zombies, just ones that can do a slightly more convincing emulation of socializing.

Brain dead by way of vanity and consumerism.

Sorry, turns out that a wide swath of humanity is too dumb to recognize what this stuff does to them, that our technological abilities have evolved way, way faster than our biology has.

We never should have made computers this user friendly. Because, when, you do that, it lowers the barrier of entry/usage down so low that you end up programming the less aware users, moreso than the software.

Not to mention that TikTok, Twitter/X and Facebook are all owned and controlled by delusional narcissist freak anti-social Epstein class people, who openly view normies as dumb cattle who exist to be distracted and surveilled and groomed and conned.

So give them a simulation of socializing, a simulation of culture, a simulation of even rebelling against that culture... so long as they control the black box algorithm, the algo that knows them better than they know themself, the algo that harvests them via either subscription payments or data extraction.

They figured out how to induce drug addiction behavior, without selling an actual drug... they hacked the human brain, via a much more advanced version of basically networked, interactive television.

It's not ableist to point out the epidemic of 'TherapySpeak' on TikTok.

They didn't actually make any ableist insults.

It is a legitimate problem that TikTok is a prime vector for spreading and normalizing medical misinformation regarding mental health and psychology terms and concepts.

I seen it yeah

Ditto for AI. Oh, sure, they played with AI, but always in an embodied holodeck character or an android, never as a disembodied computer program. Imagine a show where every major decision point on the bridge was "do what the computer says."

Don’t forget scrolling while driving.

The exact same as been said about facebook, video games, TV, and cinema even before.

I bet the same will still be said of the next thing that get popular among young people...

Deeply melodramatic. Humans have always been and will always be annoying

The irony of saying this on 4chan.

I guess some things really must get worse before they get better

Honestly, yeah

Dude I see this way too often. I say there's a 50% chance I look over and someone is on their phone

This is worse than Facebook and Twitter times

It's not. It's exactly the same.

The only difference is that you're getting older, so you're experiencing it more viscerally than when you were ten years younger and didn't know better

I can't stand the unrealistic body image and behaviors that TikTok creates

Stares at vore comics for 40 hours every week

Tbf, there's a 50% chance I'm in gridlock traffic.

Everyone could be scrolling their phones on the train or the bus, but that's for poors and city slickers.

I need to be jerking off to OnlyFans from the driver's seat of a Ford F-Over9000

Stares at vore comics for 40 hours every week

Then anonn goes to church for communion

These people have NPC-ified themselves

Fascist talk

The 4chan TradCath is the strongest evidence against God's existence I've ever experienced.

Kind, vengeful, no God would tolerate this shit without smiting it like Gomorrah

What do you mean? 4chan is a symposium of the elite and enlightened.

(/s)

It is kind of wild to me that out of all the websites on the internet, 4chan of all places remains one of the few where you stand a chance of seeing a relatively unbiased set of viewpoints. As in, there's no algorithm or underlying agenda promoting certain posts to you and not others. You're going to see posts from users all over the world and they are going to contain every conflicting opinion that mankind is able to hold.

In some ways it reminds me of Lemmy, in that way. I'm glad to hang out with this population instead of that one though. 4chan has had a bit of a reputation for a decade or two now, and the kinds of folks that are drawn to that reputation are usually something of a self-selecting crowd of assholes. I was one of them when I was a teen but I grew out of it.

Algorithmic flattening will be the death of me. Everything is homogenized and made palatable for the masses, either that or engorged to extremes to capture the last neuron that still has an attention span.

Can you explain?

Explicitly dehumanizing

My youngest is always calling out my music as "this is a Tiktok song" ... child, that song is almost older than I am.