To say that millennials only know the internet as Facebook and MySpace etc, is not a good characterization of reality IMO.

I was born in 1990. Facebook is not my Internet. When I grew up the Internet was a very fascinating place. Flash games, web forums, chat rooms, peer to peer file sharing of mp3 files and movies. A friend of mine had an older brother who used to give him home burned CDs with software, anime, games and other files, that the older brother had obtained via Suprnova.org and other torrent tracker sites. And me and my friends also downloaded and shared files using BearShare, LimeWire and KaZaA Lite.

So no, I can not agree with the overly simplistic characterization of millennials as thinking that Facebook is the Internet.

I see we are from the same generation (born 1991) with the same memories on the internet.

Though I might add, that younger generations have a wast different experience what the web and _beeing online_. Is for us beeing online was not a omnipresent. When you log off icq you are simply not available. Very different to Facebook messenger / WhatsApp imho.

Not saying that we are not living in the same world today but the way to experience the web is different.

I'm from 89 and have the same experience: not being at my computer meant being offline.

But also I was for many, many hours on phone with friends (unlimited minutes). So, I'm not sure that changed much

I agreem its a very different experience. The web seemed less orderly and not as curated as it is today.

I was born in 2001, I am a gen Z and I experienced web as she expressed. I think it would be more convinient if she said gen Z instead of millenials

For a certain age group "millennials" is a meaningless term that can be used to generalized young people. I'm almost 40 and I'm a millennial, but my dad still talks about millennials like they're all 20 and walking around with airpods

+1. I was born 2002.

I was also born in 1990 and I feel like I also experienced some of the things she ascribes to gen X. In the end generational boundaries are always going to result in overly simplistic characterizations. However in the context of the article it's probably helpful to see millennials as a transitional generation.

The tech-literate millennials definitely still shared the tail-end of the internet that gen X was familiar with. However there is also a big part of our generation that only really experienced the web through social media starting in their late teens or early twenties.

>I was born in 1990

You're an older millenial. Barely one, as a matter of fact.

The folks born 10 years after you were are in an entirely different headspace.

Born 83 here, I count myself as generation y, though some would say I'm an older millennial (afaic, a US term imported by the BBC et al)

Kind of an odd take. Either Millennials grew up with the old good web and invented the new bad web or they grew up with the new bad web and didn't invent it. Either way, the arguments kind of fall apart.

Zuck is a Millennial but the rest of web 2.0 is run by GenXers, no?

Well anyway, generational blame is pretty useless. Lets just try to fix stuff.

You misunderstood the point the author is making. She is not saying Millenials or GenXers created the Internet as it is now. She is saying that the Internet used to be open and somehow became dominated by a handful of giant companies. No one invented it, it just happened because no one was paying too much attention. Whether the companies that became dominant were founded by younger or older people is irrelevant to the argument.

The main point I took away from this article is that the younger people today, Millenials if you will, are not used to an open internet, so they see the internet as a closed gate community, a divisive force. A completely different view of the Internet than the previous generation had. And as the younger people are the ones with the most energy to fight against what they perceive as injustices, they tend to actually dominate policy making even if indirectly, and what they see as the enemy is things like encryption and even privacy, which the previous generation saw as essential for a free Internet.

I agree completely with that, but I am not optimistic as the author is that GenXers will at some point get their act together and make the internet more open again. I believe what will happen is that the Internet will continue being this divisive force until legislation (pushed by younger people who don't know better) is introduced to curtail freedom of expression and remove all privacy in the name of justice. That will be a very different Internet and not in a good way.

My main gripe is using "Gen X" as "older person" and "millenial" as "young person".

The youngest millenials are ~26 years old, born in 1996 according to US census definition. They were already 13 when Whatsapp was invented, much older when it became popular.

Replace Gen X (avg 47 YO) with millenial (avg 33 yo) and millenial with Gen Z (avg 20 yo) and at least the premise of the article starts making more sense.

The average Gen X had no computer in their teens. Millenial had dial-up. Gen Z had iPhones. Who is most likely to care about open internet vs walled gardens?

"The average Gen X had no computer in their teens."

I don't think this is true. I was born towards the front end of gen x - 1969 - and I had a vic-20 as a teen. Most of my friends, including some that were definitely not in the "nerd" circles I ran in had them. I had friends with commodore 64s, tandy color computers, timex sinclairs, etc. Our high school had macs and my jr high had TRS-80s.

By 96 I had a packard bell 386sx that came with dos but ran windows. AOL was a thing and it was a very, very different world than dialing up BBSs on my vic-20 as a kid.

I don't know how much I agree with the author's premise, I would need to think on it more. But I think at least from the perspective of people my age - there is definitely a big difference between how we grew up and what was available compared to millenials. I didn't own my first cell phone until after 2000. By the time the first millenials were 10 in 2006, 77% of people in the US had cell phone subscriptions. By the time they were 15 in 2011 it was over 95%.

I think the article's tone is problematic and some of the assertions but I also feel some agreement in terms of how I emotionally viewed technology and the possibilities it brought compared to when I talk to younger people now and how they see it.

I think you're exactly right... some other commenters who are actually millenials are saying this as well: they were still children then, but they remember using KaZaa and sharing mp3's and p2p. The author just lost track of which generation is which :D but the point is a good one, I think.

The article's opening paragraphs are fairly rife with silly generalisations.

The old open web still exists. Just because a larger percentage of people prefer the order of walled gardens doesn't mean the web is now closed. I'm sure the lawyers would love for us to believe that and have us normal tech people turn and rage against our most successful members. It's divide and conquer.

Most tech company resources go to litigation and legal fees rather than research and development. They get all the money and they're given the power to read our private emails too, so they can take more money if anything we say using a computer could be portrayed in a negative light. That's the closed internet.

This is the truth. Anyone can go and start a web blog right now, and still say whatever they want on it. Anyone can create a silly web game in any of a dozen competing free game engines (or a Minecraft mod, or whatever), and publish it in a dozen different places. There are small-but-thriving online communities for a gajillion different hobbies, kinks, ideologies, or areas. Facebook Groups hasn't killed them all yet.

But the average person doesn't do any of this, I think because we're all addicted to the fake internet points, and you don't get fake internet points for writing a blog post, or making something fun, unless you post it to social media. And it's so much easier to get those fake internet points by just commenting. (Hence me writing this right now instead of getting on with unclogging the 3D printer which is what I should be doing. I kicked my Facebook addition, only to find myself here).

We can't put the genie back in the bottle. Now we know that humans are susceptible to fake internet points, that's always going to be a business opportunity for someone. We could regulate it, but I'd hate to see what that regulation would look like.

But we can, individually, go and find the old open web. Because, as you say, it's still there.

You make the Internet sound like it's some kind of casino. Karma on sites like Reddit is pretty fake since they optimize towards people like violentacrez but points on twitter and facebook tend to do a better job accurately quantifying social stratification, hence their success. Looking at your account you've got a reasonably healthy karma score so I wouldn't beat yourself up over hanging out here. It's high enough that you're liked but not high enough to be an addict who just snipes threads preaching to the crowd.

I don't believe there is any correlation at all between actual social stratification and any of the fake internet points. Even the successful influencers I met while nomadding around SE Asia were pretty charisma-less (though usually good looking) irl.

The problem with hanging out here is that I'm doing this instead of anything useful or productive, because my brain likes the feel of fake internet points.

> well anyway, generational blame is pretty useless

Blame is useless but I can’t help but think about the possibility of a generation-specific tax. For example, you’re 80 and lived through the period where global warming was tipped beyond the point of no return?

Boom, 10% increased tax to pay for it so the burden isn’t put solely on the younger generations to solve the older’ lack of concern for the planet.

You're going to have a hard time taxing retirees.

Some people are missing her point. Many young people in politics have been misled and are actively fighting against privacy, encryption, and freedom of expression.

I personally believe that things will get worse before they get better. The momentum is on the side of the young people. The western world is already moving closer to the Chinese model -- that's been in progress for years.

Eventually there will be a backlash. And I think open distributed protocols, such as content-centric networking, will play a part.

But unfortunately, I would not be very surprised if the younger generation had to learn the hard way about the importance of things like freedom of expression. And as the author says, they are in the driver seat, in some ways, and we will all be dragged along for the lesson again.

Ultimately, there is a cultural imbalance that will need to be adjusted. But the adjustment is not what young people think it is. There is no truth fairy that can wave a wand and make all the bad facts go away. And appointing truth fairies will be deadly.

The culture has a tendency to enthusiastically distort facts to support one extreme political perspective or another. The answer is not censorship. The answer is to change the culture so that tendency which is practiced by all sides is no longer tolerated.

It's a subtle and difficult thing that humans may never get right. But there is a difference between open, nuanced and honest debate and the hysterical polarized rhetoric that is typical, and a difference between nuance/integrity and censorship.

To me both the east and the west have taken extreme cultural stances that are missing that subtlety.

I can't wait for the new generation of lawyers to save us from the old generation of lawyers that set our policies without knowing much about how technology works. Doesn't congress have like 5 people out of 500 with an engineering background? If you want to save us, give us representation.

What makes you think that will happen? A lot of young people I know seem to understand just as little about computers as the older ones, on average.

Younger people use technology a lot, but what is being used tends to require much less understanding of any of the underlying tech. The level of abstraction is a lot higher now.

So true. They laugh at me 'cuz I know nothing about the latest app. I laugh at them because they have no idea how their computer works.

How many times do I advise: "Just unplug it and plug it back in."

P.S. for non-digital electronics, the cold reset doesn't work.

P.P.S. My skill at writing programs took an enormous discontinuous leap forward when I learned how transistors worked, how to wire up a transistor to make a flip flop, and how to hook up flip flops to make registers, adders, etc.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic is generally used to talk about how it works for a less developed civilization meeting a more developed one, but perhaps it also pertains to the non technicians in the magic civilization.

At a certain point of specialization and advancement it no longer seems productive use of your time to try to understand it, leading to large portions of the population who view the technicians holding things together as inscrutable magicians.

It'll happen incrementally. Each time the lawyer ruling class does something bad, like build a website that doesn't work, they'll need to give us a little more power in order to save them. Then after a long enough timeline, we'll win, and legal code will be executable.

I’m not sure it’ll work out this way because a lawyer can become a coder much easier than a coder can become a lawyer. Then again, lawyers are notoriously allergic to all-things-technology, so who knows.

> Then after a long enough timeline, we'll win, and legal code will be executable.

Awesome, I was looking forward to Kafka running on EC2 instances.

And I meant Kafka as in Kafkaesque, not Apache Kafka.

What % of the population is engineers? 1% representation doesn’t feel that off.

Not if you consider that 66% of the people who sit in congress are lawyers and they're only 0.36% of the population.

But a decent part of congress' job is around laws ( writing or sponsoring them, arguing for/against them, etc.) it makes sense that lawyers are overrepresented.

It would make sense that Congress hires a lot of lawyers but since Congress is supposed to represent the people I don’t think having one profession so heavily over-represented is beneficial. And I say that as a member of the heavily-over-represented profession.

The commonalities between a set of people born in a certain 15-20 year period are so diffuse and weak, generational analysis is pointless.

It makes some sense to bring up in a TV advertising perspective context, where the first thing you can target is a general age group.

If you try to break the world down this way, you just end up with a vague, soft, pile of BS.

Generational talk is usually just a way for older people to talk trash about younger people as well as to help them figure out how to sell more stuff to them. That's not the whole story though. The world has changed significantly in the last 15-20 years. Technology and Globalization have reshaped so much that it is meaningful to talk about people raised in this new context in a ways that's more than just marketing BS.

Maybe the generational framing is not ideal but there's definitely some value in talking about people born within this particular era because it's so incredibly different from the eras before it in many complex and deeply interconnected ways.

In general I'm not crazy about stuff that is based around praising one's self. I get a lot of marketing on facebook that assumes I want to buy t-shirts that brag about how awesome I am because of the different groups I belong to - including my age, gen-x, etc. I find it to be off putting.

That said - I see the author's point about how we grew up with a sense of the wide open possibility. There is a feeling I had as a teen that this new world of computing made anything possible. I had posters of EA devs up on my walls and my friends and I wrote our own games that we played.

As things moved along and dev tools got expensive I lost some of that optimism until I ran into FOSS in the early 00s. That reignited the whole thing for me. But I think it will be a constant battle against many forces to keep open platforms, tools and networks. At the same time I think regulation has to be a part of it. It's a balancing act like so much of life.

I think the key is finding how it impacts the majority of people and helping them understand why it matters to them. They may not understand technical or philosophical arguments - they need to see the real impact on their daily lives.

> We – the GenXers – think of the internet as the open web

It's more than that. We think of the Internet as something separate from the Web.

I'm just about this person's age and my career has pretty much been entwined with the web since the very beginning (I started right around '93). I don't necessarily see it the way this person does. I don't think op groks how many more people are on-line now (including the web), how much it has grown, in multiple dimensions. I feel like we had our time to exert an outsize influence on it, and we did what we did, for good or ill.

I'm a millennial and remember the Geocities days, however in my opinion the internet is more open than ever. Anyone can get a cheap VPS, raspberry Pi, or a plethora of other hosting options and publish what they want. We have so many incredible open-source and free libraries & tools for building these things, and getting them out into the world.

This is really a cultural problem, not a technical or political one. And given how cyclical culture seems to be, I have little doubt that in a few years we'll swing back to a rich federation of independent services and content.

Wouldn't a good start be to separate infrastructure providers and infrastructure users (services/content)? Seems like a weird situation to allow corps to own the infra and think that they will promote "fairness and openness" when competing with other actors using their infra. What would happen if e.g. Govs or non-profits provide e-mail, messaging, video conference and social media infrastructure guaranteeing a level field and privacy-upholding policy (by regulation)?

The author doesn’t consider that some of the “Gen-X” PoV was out of naivete. I’m using Gen-X out of convenience, as HN has peolple of all ages that remember the good old days.

Software engineers never united or created any meaningful professional organization, so it let the organizations with the most money create platforms. To SW engineers, “union” or “trade org” was a dirty word even back in the late 90s (I remember vividly arguing on forums even then).

Today, it’s the FAANG companies that dictate things these days, which unfortunately includes the worst of the worst.

Gen-X was also naive, because it never considered that the internet would become so ingrained or essential so quickly; indeed, it was more incremental until the iPhone and Android.

Therefore it also never seriously considered bad actors manipulating walled gardens and creating echo chambers, as an open internet meant that ideas (including bad ones) would flow BOTH ways.

Finally, it never gave any credible thought to what a a highly accessible internet would do for local/regional/national journalists. This above all else I feel hurts us the most, because it lets bad actors get away with so much.

So if there’s one thing I feel we must solve first, it’s to help revive the journalism field; and I feel ongoing help from software engineers (as a whole) is a must.

Discord brought back a lot of "open web" feelings for me tbh. It's really like the AOL/IRC experience. Small communities of like minded people really hits the sweet spot.

The intimate and memorable communities and experiences are out there still, you just have to go looking for them. Isn't that in the spirit of the old web, anyway?

Even better would be self-hosting capability as an addon.

The longest living and most "alive-feeling" multiplayer gaming communities form around games with moddable, dedicated servers.

I see what you mean, but I cannot trust a closed platform. For instance : before Discord there was Skype... until Microsoft bought it and ran it into the ground.

The "founders" were GenXers and older but the internet or "cyberspace" was so tiny then that there are as many clueless GenX now as from any other generation.

I hear too much that the web is broken. My first experience with the web using MSN Explorer to create a Zelda fan site by copying gifs and html from other Zelda fan sites. MSN was a walled of version of the web by microsoft where you could create your own webportal. If people are curious then they will explore and find new things. Too many people want to "fix" the internet, wining about monopolies, stuf like that. Feels like old people being nostalgic about the world moving on, while I know 12 year doing amazing stuff.

I've seen a mention of privilege.

I'm 32, grew up in a non-western country and my experience with the internet was much like the author's, because well, DSL was always mighty expensive around here.

This article is not about why Gen X will do anything.

It’s about why Gen Xers think they are well suited to do something that no organized group is planning, or executing, on.

Very self congratulatory, and absolutely no meaningful call to action.

Scrap the generational titles for our purposes here. It makes more sense to apply what say shes talking about to people born between 1978 and 1994. Older than that, and you're not really in the internet age. Younger and you think of the corporatized internet.

I'm Generation X, what do I need to do?

On that topic I found "The Fourth Turning" very interesting - although I do not subscribe to the conlusions of that book.

a generation never did anything

> All of those formative experiences give us (cough) fortysomethings a perspective on the internet which the boomers who birthed us lack, and which the millenials who followed us will never know.

I'm a millennial and definitely experienced most of this. Maybe not the magazines and payphones, but still.

Even so, I appreciate the open web sentiment even if the generational patter is unhelpful..

well, Coupland preserved even that aspect of our gen in "Microservs" and "JPod".

Is it just me who could go up the wall, when people mix up "Boomers" and "68'ers"? 2008 was the Boomers and the Genx'ers. It was these two Generations who created today's mess, when shelling out 70% more money for a white cotton T-Shirt, just because a man named "Giorgio Armani" has branded it.

This looks like a long-winded version of those boomer memes about how they used to return glass bottles to the shop and buy groceries on the high street, mocking the supposedly eco-aware younger generation who buy single-use plastics and drive to an out-of-town supermarket.

By the time GenX grew up, the boomers in charge had stopped selling drinks in refundable glass bottles and had shut down all the high street grocers etc.

It was GenX and Xennials who did this to the web and then started blaming younger folk for not having their own hand-coded Geocities page on a webring.