The Mindset of the Class of 2029

theodp writes "In response to Beloit College's 10th Annual Mindset List, which takes a stab at describing the worldview of the incoming Class of 2011 (grew up with bottled water; have always had the World Wide Web), Valleywag's Nick Douglas presages The Mindset of the Class of 2029 (have always been able to use a cell phone on a plane; 'Lord of the Rings' looks fake and the effects are laughable)."

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[nxtr]

Current terrorist witchhunts were as laughable as the McCarthy Hearings. Oh wait, they already are.

Sea change

[lawpoop]

Last year I was walking through the Home Depot. I needed an item of certain specs for a project, but I didn't know if that item even existed. I asked several employees for help, but if it didn't have a name, the thing didn't exist, as far as they were concerned. I wandered around for a little bit, wondering which isle I might find my mythical device. Then it struck me -- "I'll look it up on google!"

In retrospect, this seems astoundingly obvious. I was using my 2400 baud modem to dial-up BBSes before "The Internet", and I was asking my college classmates if they had tried Google yet for their internet searches back in '98-'99. But even though I'm relatively young and computer savvy, the information revolution has not completely saturated my mind. I'll be a foreigner who learned to speak the language late in his teen; I'll forever have an accent. I grew up in a world of libraries and card catalogs, of unhelpful adults who knew little of the subjects I wanted to learn about, and experts who couldn't answer questions that I didn't know how to pose. The world I grew up in was opaque, by default. I grew up in an information famine. If there was a weird or esoteric subject that made itself known to me somehow -- perhaps a short reference in a comic book -- I would spend days or weeks wondering about it. I would spend fruitless hours in the library trying to look it up, or getting blank stares from librarians or store owners.

But the kids these days -- anything they might want to know is sitting there in the computer room. They will never know a world of informationlessness. Everything from obscure programming langauges to Hatian Gods to currrent events, right in front of them.

Amazing things are in the pipeline. I hope I live as long as I can!

Re:Sea change

[superdude72]

On a semirelated note, I'm struck by how much easier kids today have it when it comes to discovering new music. I had an appallingly limited selection when I was growing up in the suburbs in the '80s. Bands that we now think of as seminal--early REM, the Pixies, Husker Du--weren't played on commercial radio, and there was no college radio in my town. A lot of these bands were actually rather obscure at the height of their careers. Maybe in Los Angeles there was a station that played them. Not in my town. My parents wouldn't subscribe to MTV. There were mail order clubs like BMG (what Ben Stiller referred to as "Baby's first scam,") but selection was worse than what you might find at even a crappy record store. Basically the only way to hear something new was to make friends with other music geeks and trade mix tapes. Which I guess encourages social interaction which is a good thing, but it's a very laborious process if all you want is to check out the latest from the Pixies. Oh and I guess you could purchase music from a store. If you had a car, which I didn't until I was 16, and anyway purchasing tapes without hearing any of the music on them first is a prohibitively expensive way to discover new music, particularly when you are on a (stingy!) allowance or working 12 hours a week at a pizza place and also have to pay for your own car and clothing.

This actually influenced my life choices. My desire to live in a large city largely stems from the fact that they had decent radio stations, clubs, and record stores. (Yes, I still call them record stores even though I bought mostly tapes when I was a kid, and later CDs.) Nowadays, the big city radio stations have mostly come down to the craptastic level of the small city stations. (I don't blame technology entirely--telecommunications reform and consolidation hastened its demise.) There are a few record stores that are better than ever, but a lot of the smaller ones have closed. Clubs survive. My little hayseed cousin in Outer Bumfeckistan can download the same stuff that I moved to the city to get.

The downside, I guess, is that the used record stores are in trouble along with the rest of the record industry, although I think things are actually better for the more obscure artists who have access to a vastly larger audience due to the Internet. I wish radio didn't suck, although I don't think technology is entirely to blame there. I don't know what my teen / college years would have been like without mix tapes. I imagine the kids will adapt. I just hope they learn to socialize somewhere other than in front of a computer screen.

Re:an oldie but a goodie

[bigstrat2003]

There is only one question which burns, lingering, in my mind after reading this.

Who/what the hell is ESR???

Onward and upward

[Animats]

Views of 2029:

• China is the superpower.
• "What's your draft status"?
• No more shaving. Laser hair removal. (It's only expensive now because the patent licensing terms are terrible.)
• Cars plug in, and mostly drive themselves.
• Getting a good job looks hopeless. Success requires picking your parents carefully.
• Being a "knowledge worker" is obsolete; it's like being a manual laborer before heavy machinery. Computers are smarter than you are.

Back to the future

[Charcharodon]

'Lord of the Rings' looks fake and the effects are laughable/

They look laughable now, no need to wait 20 some odd years.

To be fair everything looks fake once you've seen a movie a few times. You spend less time engrossed in the story and more on the technical aspects. I've noticed much of it seems to be with inaccurate or sloppy lighting for composite images or things being too perfect or too perfectly imperfect (ie Star Trek & Star Wars), rather than the level of detail. That and how ridiculous the cliche flooded action scenes have become.

My take on it will be kids of that generation will either wonder about a world that isn't entirely engrossed in civil and global conflicts or be so bored out of their minds that suicide at 40 is considered a proper end to a long and full life.

Cell phones on planes

[RJBeery]

Airlines don't allow cell phones on planes for a reason that most don't understand - it's about control of information. When the passengers of a plane are in danger they are frequently kept in the dark to avoid the ensuing panic, and that wouldn't be possible if they all got phone calls about their plane being on television.

As a side note, I asked a Southwest stewardess why they turn off the lights after dark, even when it's too early to sleep. She was real shifty in her response so I kept pressuring her. She finally admitted that it's so passengers' eyes are adjusted correctly so they could see while getting off the plane after an accident!

-R

The REAL class of 2029

[Ralph Spoilsport]

1. Will have lived most of their lives in economic recession.
2. Will ride bicycles and electric trikes - cars are too expensive.
3. Will not be able to afford air travel, which will be largely the province of the super rich and the military.
4. Will grow some fraction of their own food.
5. Will be lucky to attend university.
6. Will mostly graduate from trade schools in maintenance (plumbing, HVAC, cabinetry, ensolarisation projects, or agriculture.
7. Will remember several small limited local nuclear wars, and know or know someone who knows someone who died in them.
8. Will hate their parents and grandparents for being such an idiotic bunch of uniformed greedheads.
9. Will bear the brunt of the Powerdown.
10. Will know or know someone who knows someone in the refugee transit camps in eastern Oregon and southern Idaho.
11. Will be trying to figure out a way to move north, or northwest, where it's cooler.
12. Will consider gay marriage as normal as any other kind of marriage, because marriage is a matter of metaphysics, and government doesn't care about that - gov't cares about contracts and property.
13. Will look back at the Bush administration as a complete and utter failure, and those who voted for Bush as complicit in his war crimes, as the German People were complicit in WW2 and the Holocaust.
14. Will realise that technology is not energy, and will know how to calculate Energy Return on Energy Invested in their heads, much as the class of 1976 was able to calculate grams of coke vs. ounces of colombian pot...
15. Will know how to darn their own socks.
16. Will remember the internet as the predecessor of what became "transparent" and they simply see it as "media". 17. Will laugh at Kurzweil for being such a tool, as machine intelligence is STILL 30 years off.
18. Will know that fusion is still 20 years away, just like it was 20 years ago.
19. Will help tear up the broad asphalt streets to be replaced with narrow cobblestone.
20. Will raze their grandparent's McMansions because they were build like crap, and the land is more useful as farm land.
21. Will live in cities or in small towns clustered near railroad depots.
22. Will eat organic food because there isn't enough natural gas left for fertiliser and pesticides anyway.
23. Will know how to stoke a wood fire in the morning to warm the house in winter and get a pot of tea boiling.
24. Will change their outer clothing less often, but change their under clothing every day. The outer clothing will be more strongly built and durable. They will repair their own underwear.
25. will find digital media will not exist - it's all digital, so "digital" media has no meaning.
26. Will be able to procure all of the films of Warner Brothers (or any other film company), including cartoons, on a single deeply encrypted drive.
27. Will be able to procure a drive that contains every song ever released by a given music company.
28. Will the depth of media daunting and much of it will be ignored.
29. Fine Art will finally be completely digested and shat out by the entertainment industry as simple entertainment for the educated. Some will argue this had already happened by 1995...
30. Will find The Long Emergency in full swing. Billions dying off in Africa and Asia, millions perishing in Europe and North America as the human species loses its fight against Mother Nature and the laws of thermodynamics.

RS

Re:Tales from a Beloit non-grad

[IamTheRealMike]

Our campus dining services was mandatory - except if you joined a co-op or in limited other cases - and it was run by a company that specialized in prison services, while the administration admitted that funds from board fees were siphoned off to other areas of the school.

Haha, you think that's good? My college at university had mandatory charges for catering (breakfast, lunch and dinner). In my final year they admitted after a few weeks that they had used the food money to pay for a rebranding exercise. They spent millions of pounds on consultants who recommended they change the name from "University of Durham" to "Durham University", which they then proceeded to do, at a cost of further millions of pounds. From then on every night it was the same stuff - stew and if you got there early, rice too. Nobody ever figured out what the stew was made of.

Re:And

[maxwell demon]

And Windows Vista still won't run on any existing hardware... You do know that Vista is capable of running quite well on some existing hardware, right? Your shot at Vista doesn't hold true even now, what'll make it become true in 2029? DirectX13. The one which no single graphics card manufacturer will get right. :-)