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)."

Comments

Not sure thats a good thing

[also-rr]

The mindset of anyone who has had to sit on a plane for 9 hours listening to an inane cellphone call will not be healthy. The only hope of salvation is that by then your cellphone/camera/gps/projector/printer/mp8player/s extoy/flashlight/pda/radio convergence device will have a battery life of 3 seconds, and/or banned from the plane by the government to stop you pirating the in flight movie.

Re:Not sure thats a good thing

[Praedon]

The only real hope for this mindset list, is that all of us will be in power by the time it rolls around. We must spread the word about Mario, 4chan, Mr. Rodgers, and Dick Chaney. We must also clone Robin Williams. We must also keep George Lucas around to digitally remaster Lord of the Rings. We also need to conspire against silicon valley in the future. The world can never forget!

Re:Not sure thats a good thing

[rhartness]

I think Nintendo will be able to keep Mario around through endless ports of old games to new portable systems and new games. They intend to keep their best franchises around forever.

I was born in 1981 so, of course, Mario in one form or another has been a constant of my life. I, personally, beleive that the video gaming industry is certainly going to continue to grow and since it is an 'industry' just like movies and music, companies like Sony, M$ and Nintendo understand the idea of branding young impressionable minds with familiar concepts.

Mario is an icon and by 2029, it wouldn't suprise me that he and his friends (Peach, Luigi, DK, etc.) are just as famous as Mickey Mouse and his firends were in the 80's (appx. fifty years after his introduction). Mario is an icon of video games that children recognize all over the world. It would be foolish for Nintendo, or any company that might buy them out in the next 18 years, to discontinue such a long running and successful trademark that literally millions of young and old people associate with happy, youthful memories.

Anyways, that's my two cents.

They can't believe...

[DynaSoar]

... that people were ever against euthanasia. If all those old people were ever to accumulate the hospital industry would collapse. Maybe that's why they called them "boomers".

I don't think LOTR will look fake

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather, I think they'll find it boring because it's not interactive.

They will be horrified...

[nebaz]

That the government was so big and bloated before Emperor Bush dissolved the Senate.

Re:They will be horrified...

[smchris]

I was going to say the list obviously depends upon the selectors who do the selecting and it seems a bit negative this year. But you are right. It could be worse. There's already nobody under 30 who remembers a pre-Reagan world when government could do anything right like infrastructure or the space program.

Re:They will be horrified...

[Original Replica]

"There's already nobody under 30 who remembers a pre-Reagan world "

So in another 50 years no one will ever remember having faith and pride in the US government? I'm 32 and I have never had any faith or positive feelings towards Congress. I faintly remember liking Reagan, but at the time I knew nothing of politics or policies, just that Regan gave good speeches. Outside of that I have never felt proud of our government, or had an elected leader that I actually wanted to follow. I have often felt pride in being American, when traveling overseas or helping with my small part of some charitable work, but that is pride in our culture not our leaders. It seems to me that the USSR collapsed not too long after the last generation to actually believe in it died. I fear if things continue the way they have been, the same will happen here.

for the class of 2029, they forgot...

[wpegden]

... "grew up on bottled air"

add another one to the list

[wwmedia]

add another one to the list

Osama Bin Laden is still the boogey man

Re:add another one to the list

[friedman101]

Believe Memphis was always a popular surfing destination

In 2029...

[Stanistani]

The world's largest Theme Park is HolyLand, run by the Disney Corp. It "features the colorful and historic actual former countries of Palestine/Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. Of course, all inhabitants are Disney employees wearing colorful costumes. Parting of the Red Sea at 10 am, noon, and 2 pm. When asked what happened to the former inhabitants, the tour guides always say, "We don't like to talk about that," and offer a two-for-one coupon for the donkey ride in Jerusalem.

Re:In 2029...

[GPL Apostate]

Also, people who ask how all the prop sand from the beaches of the Indian Ocean was transported onto the large sheet of glass are asked to leave.

And

[AbbyNormal]

Duke Nukem is still not out yet.

an oldie but a goodie

[larry bagina]

2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.

100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.

10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.

3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.

2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.

1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.

490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".

399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.

336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.

4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.

A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.

A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.

A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.

A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.

A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.

A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.

A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".

A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)

A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.

A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).

A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.

A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".

A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."

A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).

A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.

A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.

A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.

A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.

A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".

A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that mayn of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.

A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.

A.D. 1776: Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco's passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a sever

Re:an oldie but a goodie

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Who/what the hell is ESR???

a nobody that pretends to be somebody. Move along, nothing to see here.

Re:an oldie but a goodie

[GPL Apostate]

Who/what the hell is ESR???

Don't worry about it.

It's easily wiped off with a dilute solution of bleach in water, and a garage rag.

Re:an oldie but a goodie

[Bananatree3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

Re:if i have kids..

[Anonymous Coward]

"They don't know what a LOLCat is or why it talks that way."

  Though ironically, Tubgirl & Goatse remained a staple of internet culture that everyone clearly understood.

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

[pete-classic]

I hope I live as long as I can!

You're in luck! I assure you that you can!

-Peter

Re:Sea change

[Stiletto]

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.

On the flip side, however, this generation is useless when the power goes out. Most of them can't recall basic historical facts, spell properly, or do basic arithmetic without a machine to help them.

It's the "I don't need to know---I'll google it!" generation.

Re:Sea change

[rantingkitten]

Well, did you find the item or not? Don't leave us hanging!

Movies have always come in the mail

[Aqua OS X]

Really? With OnDemand, iTunes, UnBox, Xbox Marketplace, P2P, etc. ?

Snail mailed disks are antiquated you damn old timer. Non-downloadable movies will be a laughable distant memory in 18 years.

Re:Movies have always come in the mail

[Belacgod]

I'm afraid in the future, we'll just have to settle for watching edited montagues of YouToob snippets.

So they'll have won the format war with the YouToob capulets?

The Lucas Factor

[Treskin]

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

My prediction: Lord of the Rings will become a cult classic among the youth of the next 20 years. When it has become accepted as a mainstay of American culture, Peter Jackson will admit he was never truly satisfied with the poor quality of the special effects and release 3 "Special Edition" movies. These will feature new special effects and opening sequence in which Sauron was just actually just kicking back in Mordor, enjoying a lemonade on his gazebo with the orphans he just adopted - when suddenly Elendil walks up and pimp slaps Sauron across the face with a mace. This will trigger a campaign known as "Sauron maced first" seeking to restore the original concept and flavor of both characters.

After meeting with some success with these Special Editions, Jackson will decide to release a 3 movie prequel based on The Hobbit which will feature the dwarf Thorin replaced by a lovable anthropomorphic fish-dwarf who likes to say "Mesa gonna havea big adventures with yousa Hobbit, sah" who everyone will hate. Following their release, the class of 2029 will complain that Peter Jackson has ruined their childhoods by destroying the movies they had grown up loving so much.

Tales from a Beloit non-grad

[SuperBanana]

Just FYI- Beloit is the armpit school of the midwest. When I went there in the late 90's:

• An entire dorm left mid-term. Something like 1/4 of the freshman class was "asked to take a semester off" (I was one of them, and I suspect it had more to do with them grossly overbooking dorm rooms and classes.)
• My physics class was taught using a self-published physics textbook developed by a nearby university. The previous year's physics 101 class sent in FORTY pages of corrections, and ours were wrong in all sorts of new and exciting ways. The class was useless, because the professor had to have the entire class go over the homework together, and you never knew if you were doing the problem set wrong, or if the problemset itself was wrong.
• the facilities were a mess (we couldn't even get lightbulbs for common areas)
• students were crammed into every available space; there were 6 and 7 people in some converted lounges. I was shoved into a double with three people, and it was a fight with res life to get furniture for the third guy; they gave us two desks, TWO BEDS, and two dressers.
• They don't serve anything except brunch on Sundays. This sucks more than you could possibly believe when you're in the middle of nowhere. It's not like you can walk a block or two into town and get something tasty and cheap. Your choices: pizza and...pizza.
• The town is full of really bigoted, angry, poor people. My roommate, who was seeing another student who had come from Indonesia, had a run in with a guy who said: "Yeeer girlll-friend Chaneeeeese?" "Uh, no, she's Indonesian." "She LOOKS Chaaaaaneeeeeeese". The guy then followed them back to campus in his pickup truck.
• The only exciting thing to do in Beloit...is to drive to Madison. YEEEHAA. Sucks if you don't know anyone with a car!
• The nearest transportation to Chicago (where you will be flying in/out of) is several MILES off campus. Do you know how much that sucks any time from fall to late spring, ie, the academic season?
• My dorm freshman year was infested with cockroaches- the basement lounge was full of them, and our room had them as well, despite it being the start of the year and the room being very clean.
• By 4-5PM people are drinking and smoking pot, and every Friday/Saturday night, the lounges would turn into what a nightclub looks like after it closes; full of broken glass, beer cans/bottles everywhere, beer coating *everything* (the furniture was never cleaned, so...yeah) and recycling bins and trashcans filled to the brim with beer.
• We had wonderful militant feminists and lesbians who all strong-armed the campus into giving them the nicest dorms on campus and making them women only. One was called "The Womyn's Center". Their favorite activity was scrolling sexual slurs like "DYKE!" on the walkways to get a rise out of people.
• Relations are so good with the town that the Beloit police department spends all night "patrolling" "town property" (aka the one public road that goes through the residential section) and ticketing people for anything they possibly can. I was never ticketed, but half my dorm had been ticketed for "open container of alcohol" because they crossed the street from one dorm to another with a can of beer.
• The local canned food plant (the only real place for people to work- General Dynamics shut down its plant and is mostly why the town was/is a hell-hole) regularly belches forth clouds of artificial cheese smell or baked beans. The student-run "Coughy Haus" is named for the cough people make when they smell the "cheese breeze."
• There's a freight train line nearby that blows its horn at every crossing....at about 5AM. EVERY MORNING.
• Thefts on campus were rampant. I repeatedly had stuff stolen off my bike by townies who considered campus an convenient automatic teller machine.

It's the fucking armpit of the midwestern liberal arts schools. Give it a WIDE BERTH. If you're stupid enough to go, don't even think of staying in "810", or its nearby dorm (I forget the number...6-something?)

Nothing new here

[AndyMcL]

The article is just stating current events and the author's own current likes and dislikes. More than likely many of the companies and items mentioned will be different by 2029. Especially since the rate of change is increasing. Where was Google and Yahoo 22 years ago or many of the technologies we use today? Not even on the radar back in 1985. Many of the Slashdot readers may not have even been alive yet or were still in diapers.

The only thing you can accurately predict is people will be fundamentally the same, only the tools they use will be different.

Just my 2 cents.

-Andy

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.

Lindsay Lohan was never innocent.

[garett_spencley]

"Lindsay Lohan was never innocent."

Hopefully in the year 2025/2029 it will be "Lindsay who?" and "Paris who?" and "Britney who?". And if we're *really* lucky people might actually stop obsessing so much over the lives of people that they don't know personally or have anything to do with all together.

But I guess I'm just a dreamer :(