>>15210914>life before smartphones>before 9/11>before the GFC>before COVID>before WW3Ah, the good, old days. I remember paying my classmate 1 buck to google cheats for AoE2 on lycos and print them out for me.
For my zoomer lads: that was the last time we had privacy. You could be unreachable for a whole day, and when you agreed to meet someone, you had to arrange the time and place beforehand, as well as look up the route yourself. You could truly be disconnected. If you did something embarrassing, it would only spread by word of mouth among your peer group, not at the speed of light all over the whole world. There were no online lynchmobs, no minute-to-minute updates on what everyone was doing, no instant access to all public information on every issue. You could, in short, be human, only having to deal with issues which a human is equipped to deal with. On the flip side, people were quite ignorant (as opposed to today, when they know about everything, but are comically misinformed). There was also a general feeling of optimism about the future: the Cold War, what people thought of as the last vestige of WW2 at the time, had ended, and people looked naively towards a better future of liberal democracies and space exploration. "Go to school, study hard, and you'll get a good job" still rang true. There was no pervasive feeling of paranoia and no acquiescence to the surveillance state; no terrorism (except for the Palestinians, but those attacks were far away and few and far between). It was, in short, a break from history. Then the Muslims, and the boomers and their investments into stocks and housing fucked it all up.
