It’s like cars. Almost everyone has one and can drive it but don’t know how it works. Computers have become that. There are some who know or have an idea of how it works and others who can use it but have no idea.
Yeah I think that's a decent comparison. There are of course still hobbyists and enthusiasts today who know a lot about cars despite not being professionals working in a related field, but it does feel like the general understanding among the public has fallen because the cultural phenomenon of a father teaching his son about cars has dissipated. Piracy has always been a niche activity but the core skills and knowledges it requires were taught more to millennials than they were to zoomers. If people have grown up with less education about motor engines or desktop computers then it's not surprising they struggle to expand on that later in life.
The expense of tools, equipment and supplies can be a huge barrier to car maintenance but there is so much legitimately free software for computers (even ignoring the pirated stuff) that people never had so much opportunity.
If is like learning another language or a musical instrument, people have to be committed and practice to get good and few people can make the effort. Businesses have trained people to seek instant gratification from fast food, social media, tik tok, gambling, loot boxes, and consumerism in general because short lived and unfulfilling experiences produce an endless monetization opportunity. The rare people with the discipline and support to focus their efforts have massive advantages with access to information and tools which were very difficult in the past. There are some prodigies out there in a sea of mediocrity.
I'm the computer guy for my car guy and small engine guy. When I introduced them I became our group's guy guy. I don't really know anyone I just help people with their computers in conversations when I'm trying to fill my knowledge gaps.
Yeah but cars have become increasingly more complex over the last 20 years. You basically need an EEPROM arduino kit these days just to get the fucking diagnostics out of the car, because someone decided that analog circuits were just too much bulk
I think their metaphor is referring to ease of use and the knowledge required for use. I have a few personal anecdotes as examples.
I'm an eighties kid. My first PC was a Commodore 64 and my first car was a 1966 VW Bug. Neither was reliable nor easy to use. I had to learn to utilize interfaces that were more finicky and complex than modern equivalents, and I spent a great deal of time learning how to make them work when they glitched out or were broken. The alternative was not having them at all. It was hard to get BBS advice when your PC took a dump and no one else you knew had one you could use, and then where would you get car advice? Certainly not from my dad!
A kid growing up with an Apple anything and driving a 20 year old car doesn't face the same kinds of difficulties. Many things just work more reliably and aren't as difficult to use. One can easily buy gaming systems now where we often had to build our own to get what we wanted. My buddy's 23 year old daughter had never even heard of CLI. That's all I had!
It doesn't make one generation better than the other - younger people today are skilled in ways I could have only dreamed of. We just have different opportunities for excellence.
Lain?
and you don't seem to understand...
How do you come to that conclusion with so little information about me?
はい、そうです。
Without seeds, torrents become almost useless, and many pirate sites offer rare and hard-to-find movies/animes whose torrent versions never download because their seeds are practically extinct forever. So I don't think this is a weak complaint. If torrents didn't have this weakness I would always choose to use them but...
I can't even tell you what us Gen Xers did because I am not sure if the statutes of limitations have run.
Vaguely, it involved ftp and file repositories hosted unwittingly by large companies plus restricted IRC channels to discuss the locations of such places.
I remember installing a keylogger on the school library computers, then "accidentally" disconnecting the dialup internet and asking the teacher to type the login credentials again. I bet the ISP was confused when they saw so many concurrent logins after hours, all playing Quake and downloading huge files.
That's why they made streaming media. Worked good, didn't it?
I think it's more a generational gap in basic computer skills.
Millennials grew up alongside modern computing (meaning the two matured together). We dealt with everything from BASIC on a C64 to DOS and then through Windows 3 through current. We also grew up alongside Linux. We understand computers (mostly) and the (various) paradigms they use.
Gen Z is what I refer to as the iPad generation (give or take a few years). Everything's dumbed down and they never had to learn what a folder is or why you should organize documents into them instead of throwing them all in "Documents" library and just using search. (i.e. throw everything in a junk drawer and rummage through it as needed).
As with millennials who can't balance a checkbook or do basic household tasks, I don't blame Gen Z for not learning; I blame those who didn't teach them. In this case, tech companies who keep dumbing everything down.
Edit: "Balance a checkbook" doesn't have to mean a physical transaction log for old school checks. It just means keeping track of expenditures and deposits so that you know the money in your account is sufficient to cover your purchases. You'd be surprised how many people my age can't manage that.
Gen X: don’t quote the ancient piracy to me, Millennial. I was there for BBS and Napster.
you should organize documents into them instead of throwing them all in “Documents” library and just using search.
No.
I've pointed this out on another account on this very community through KBin Social.
And I was talking about how lazy and entitled pirates across all ages have become overtime. That we were losing more and more sources that had withstood a long standing of time. And one moment everyone is going "RAH RAH! HYDRA! CUT ONE DOWN AND MORE COME UP!" but when we lose some of which that have yet to return or take it's place, the attitude grows weak. Almost desperate.
And it's due in part how most of the pirates just take and take, but never give back. On r/piracy and sometimes on here, people are making posts wondering where they can get free stuff and how they can get free stuff. They don't care about the technicalities, they don't care about the cause of piracy, they don't care at all. It's always "give me free shit, thanks, bye". There are few pirates out there doing the work and it's just so that these lazy and entitled pirates can just take and take.
But when we lose sources, they scatter away like cockroaches and all that they can think about is asking where it is that they can get free shit. It's almost like consumerism but for free shit, it's annoyingly disturbing. It's not about wanting the new product, it's about wanting the source to mooch off from.
I sadly predict in time that the whole hydra ideology will just simply become the way the Pirate Bay has become, just a symbol, but will it mean anything? It'll be so if this whole trend continues and all generations are just as guilty to doing it.
The best pirates are librarians with legit ethics.
Preserve human knowledge and make it available to everyone.
I hate that you are right about mostly just greedy dipshits pissing in the high seas without contributing.
We should have taken up arms after Aaron Swartz...
I agree with the sentiment that it's very easy to underestimate the harm done by the loss of a major site or scene group, but I'm not sure I really agree with much else you've written here. In particular:
And it’s due in part how most of the pirates just take and take, but never give back. On r/piracy and sometimes on here, people are making posts wondering where they can get free stuff and how they can get free stuff. They don’t care about the technicalities, they don’t care about the cause of piracy, they don’t care at all. It’s always “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.
The people making those posts have minimal exposure to piracy. This is getting your feet wet. For me, contributing my share is saying that I think these users deserve access. Yeah, they wouldn't have a place on a private tracker, that's not a problem because they're not on a private tracker, and if they join one they won't stay for long if they neglect seeding.
I'm sure a lot of these people will continue their lives without seeding or contributing. I won't say I endorse that, but I'm cool with it, and even if I wasn't I still don't think an argument can made that the harms of any hypothetical injustice here outweigh the benefits from a single dedicated pirate that began their journey this way.
I care about uploader counts, about seeder counts, about the wellbeing of the people who maintain the infrastructure. I'm invested. I don't care about download counts. Looking at an unseeded download as a loss in seeder count makes exactly the same amount of sense to me as looking at a download as a lost sale. I think it's morally right to support pirates who will not end up contributing, and beyond that I think treating them with kindness a net plus for the cause, because less than 100% of them will just say “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.
I think the gap stems from need. Most people only learn what they absolutely need to. My sister and I are just 3 years apart in age. Yet I am pretty familiar with tech, while she knows next to nothing. I was always there to fix whatever broke. Even now she knows that if she needs to watch something, she can just ask me to add it to my Jellyfin server. I often have to remote into her system to fix stuff.
The Gen Z we're talking about here mostly grew up using phones, and phone OSes do their best to hide any complexity away from the user. So they never learnt anything. I'm also technically Gen Z (very early), but growing up in rural India, I had to teach myself how to pirate since streaming wasn't a thing yet (our internet was too slow for that anyway), and the local theater didn't play anything except local mainstream cinema.
I'm an older GenZ born in the late 90s and I've had to show a few younger peers how to torrent recently.
The idea of you needing a "special" program just for downloading a file seems to throw some of them off.
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but "generally tech savy" people seem to be declining. It's either you're really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
One other thing I've noticed, People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices. Which its good people give at least a bit of a shit about security but convincing people Firefox isn't a virus gets a bit annoying (Yes I've had that conversation).
No most millennials are also too lazy because they stopped giving a shit about computers when it stopped being a requirement to use the internet like 10-15 years ago because smartphones.
Most who did haven't in at least a decade, and wouldn't unless you put a gun to their head.
For some reason the vast majority of people seem to just want to ignore the machines that literally run our society, and its fucking maddening.
FFS the amount of people who I work with in IT and even then don't really give a shit about they're daily computing is absolutely fucking baffling.
Its really just a smattering of people from all ages who actually know how to use a computer because they're actually interested in doing so.
If you had real shitty internet back in the day (read 56k modem) and you liked to play russian roulette you would dump satellite traffic with a skystar2 DVB-S card. You never knew what you'd get realistically, found some true gems underneath mountains of coal in the day of (still) unfiltered internet.
the only people who know how to torrent are the ones that want to learn. the learning curve is gentler than a walk-in shower. I've shown people of all ages and all tech backgrounds, though recommending VPN connections and getting that going does throw a few.
anyway, it's so easy, it's crazy compared to the old days of usenet, ZIP disks, ftp sites, .is files, and sequenced RAR files. this is the golden age of piracy and I love it.
1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
💰 Please help cover server costs.
