[ SECRET POST #6342 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6342 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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[Dune]



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06. [SPOILERS for Hades II]




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07. [WARNING for discussion of incest/self-harm]

[Cupid (visual novel)]



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08. [WARNING for discussion of rape]

[Arknights]





















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #906.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[sparklywalls]

I think it is partly the fact that we've had so many generations on the Internet for a relatively long time now and nobody has figured out how to keep certain barriers up. I am not saying this was 100% a GOOD thing, but in the early 00s many of us lied about our ages to access adult spaces because we knew we were skating on thin ice - almost intruding, whereas now it's totally flipped and there seems to be this insane belief that adults don't have any Internet doomscrolling time and it's purely a "kid/teen space" despite the fact I've witnessed plenty of grown folk latched onto their phone while e.g. supposedly supervising a toddler.

On the other hand, yeah the kids have also been messed up by how much they're being watched. I don't have my own kids (never felt the urge) but encounter this via the fact my sister, sister-in-law and friends do and...I honestly cannot BELIEVE how much kids are under surveillance these days. And my sister plus so many of my friends go absolutely insane if they can't track and/or know what their kids are doing 24/7 and I'm sitting here like...hello? I remember you spending the weekend in a field doing god knows what complaining about how our parents/your parents were on our case constantly and you just "want to be free" and "live [my] life" - it's no wonder the youngsters are doing the whole "I'm pure and innocent" routine, they're used to their parents watching their every move.

[(Anonymous)]

I'd say we're dealing with about two, maybe three generations of people who had the opportunity to deal with the internet in a relatively uncensored, left-alone way - the youngest Gen Xers, Millenials, and the oldest Gen Y kids. What I can't understand is how Millennials in particular seem to have grown paranoid about the possibility that their kids will encounter scary, smutty things on the internet. I feel like I encounter way too many people who are convinced they are smart enough to go where they please, but equally convinced that for the good of everyone else, and society at large, mass censorship and social control is totally necessary. Somehow they had the gumption to encounter porn without mistaking it for real life, but other people (especially other people who are younger and more impressionable than them) aren't so wise and sophisticated, so that shit's dangerous. And I'm like ... if you would have been spitting nails at the prospect of politicians restricting your internet access, or forcing you to identify yourself to get online, or any of the other shit that's just being included as a matter of course like "parental" (censorship and site blocking) controls installed on every damn cell phone, why the fuck is that an ethical way to treat your children? Why don't you defend their right not to be shut in a goddamn cage that they will see, and feel, and absolutely want to find ways to escape? Would you have felt respected and well-treated if your parents did that to you, or would you have felt patronized and kept away from stuff that just got more attractive because it was forbidden to you? And people squirm and want to shift the conversation back to how silly and naive and incompetent the younger generation allegedly is, without taking any responsibility for trying to keep them ignorant of as much as possible for as long as possible.

[(Anonymous)]

Above is a DA from the AYRT, if that wasn't clear.

[(Anonymous)]

I think you're overlooking the extent to which the internet, and internet access, has changed since Millennials were young. Take the cell phones you reference: the first smart phone came out in 2007. Elder Millennials were entering the workforce at that point; they'd spent their childhood with computers, yes, but not with handheld ones that they could use to easily access the internet at all times.

Millennials didn't really have social media. MySpace didn't function that way, and Facebook came out when they were in college. They didn't have ubiquitous free porn (PornHub also debuted in 2007 -- fascinating year, that), accessible at all times, in all settings. There's a qualitative difference to their experience of being online than what young people know of it now, where it's always there, always with them, always on, often taking the place of face-to-face interaction; where it's far more difficult to disconnect, and its real-life social consequences are more salient.

Something interesting I've come across recently is Zoomers watching videos of kids in the '90s and lamenting that it wasn't their experience. They wish they hadn't grown up with phones. They're longing to escape the digital realm, not to have free reign of it. And they're likely right to! We've got quite a bit of evidence now to the effect that unfettered phone and social media use is not good for kids (it's not fantastic for adults, either, mind), and that early exposure to porn (not smut, or art, or even the slow-loading images that Millennials had, but actual filmed, hardcore porn) is detrimental, and is to some extent warping the expectations that young people have regarding sex.

In any case, while I do think there's a vein of overprotection in the parenting styles of Millennials and young Gen X-ers, and believe they ought to back off in many respects; and while I'm not in favor of the government-level restrictions that are popping up on the name of protecting kids, I do see the wisdom in limiting screen time (including in schools having students lock up their phones during the school day); in keeping kids off social media as long as possible; and in striving to keep them off the likes of PornHub and RedTube (which feature not only extremely hardcore and degrading acts, but also literal rape). I don't see the hypocrisy in this, as, again, we're working with a different internet, and different modes of access, than we were as little as 18 years ago.

[(Anonymous)]

cAYRT

I was born in the period that gets people labeled millenials, and the fact that cell phones (and hybrid machines like Samsung Tablets) became a widespread thing after I was an adult didn't keep me from getting attached to being able to internet whenever I wanted.

Social gatherings online were different, subtly or overtly hostile to attempts at commerce, and not concentrated on business-owned megasites, but they were certainly not "nonexistent." There weren't sites promoting "check in with your offline friends and relatives every fifteen seconds and livetweet everything you do," until Facebook came along, but style of social media tied people down more directly to their offline life, while a lot of the places to socialize that preceded it encouraged people to make new connections based on similar interests. For people who had plenty of social overlap with others in their offline life, the lure of that was fairly modest, but for people who were less able to find their people in person, the internet often became the place where they'd voluntarily spend their discretionary time. I don't think I fell into either extreme, but the story being told about "online life didn't use to displace in-person interaction" is very much oversimplifying the nuances. The captain of the football team may not have known how to operate a computer, when I was in high school, but the sci-fi club, the theater kids, several of the more intellectually inclined countercultures, and a bunch of teenagers with chronic illnesses or long term disabilities had set down deep roots and emotional investments in cyberspace.

As for ubiquitous free porn, I'm not sure why you equate that with the existence of a paid service. PornHub, of course, is more modern, but the porn I found when I went exploring as a twelve year old was plentiful and much more hardcore than what turns up in lightweb search results today. The first dozen sites or so were competing for clicks by showcasing BDSM, underage, and bestiality. And I think my search term was something like "sex." XD; Video was pixellated and slow-loading, but ... Avenue Q the musical came out with the song The Internet Is For Porn in 2003, and they really did mean porn. Not "erotica, tasteful artistic nudes, etc." though the internet had all of those, too.

What I've heard from Gen Y people is not that they want less of what I loved about the internet. It's that they suffered from a fuckton of social media tying your online presence to your legal identity - no one likes the way schools, businesses, and governments decided to threaten people (and kids in particular) with ruined lives for posting the wrong thing on the internet. I remember when universities started withdrawing scholarships from incoming students based on finding pictures of partying, drunk seniors online and figuring out who they were. I remember the police gleefully bragging about busting people who'd inadvertently provided evidence of using forbidden substances. I remember when adults started using spyware on their kids phones and trying to find their social media presence and basically prying everywhere else they could invade their offspring's privacy. I remember internet pseudonymity failures that outed gay kids to homophobic communities and families, and the scandal when it turned out that school-provided computers were watching and listening to students in their rooms at home. Most of the things people miss about "before all that" have to do with the sort of stuff XKCD confronts in cartoon 137 - Dreams. They look back with envy at a time when no one was humiliated by their parents or peers on YouTube *in front of potentially millions of people.* But the social anxiety, self-consciousness, and fear is not an inevitable result of the internet being easier to reach than it was. It's the predictable result of an all-out assault on privacy and free access to information, online, that's been going on for decades.