O. K. Boomer Dept. - The Dopamine Rush Of Infinite Scroll

O.K. Boomer enjoying an iPhone skeet shoot, yestiddy

In my day [Guest bore O.K. Boomer writes - Ed.] it was a convivial joint passed between friends, or, more rarely, the tribal ceremony of acid; communing with nature, meeting the godhead in a flower, etc. Kids Today© have Infinite Scroll [← link- Ed.] on their hand-held brain crutch. It makes them sullen, stressed, and deeply unreachable. Ask a teacher - "it's like you're interacting with them briefly between hits of internet". The addiction started - it's too late, everything is too late - as little kids. Little kids who should be playing in the street, flicking boogers, falling out of trees, annoying the shit out of their parents. You see them in supermarket carts, hunched in restaurants, strapped into traffic-jammed cars, hypnotised by their glowing magical amulet. Toddlers fercrissakes. They grow up with a fucking phone in their little paw, and they think in bits, in memes, in emoticons, in gifs. Cute, right? Where's the harm? Keeps 'em out of their parents' hair, keeps 'em quiet, and crucially, as they get older, keeps 'em off the street, doomscrolling under a blanket with the attention span of a flashcard. Kids on dates sit opposite each other, silent, heads bent over their phones, maybe messaging each other, probably not. Groups of kids in the park sit under the trees, every single one of them staring at a phone, immersed in a flashing, blinking, seductive, addictive dream.

Not all Kids Today© are dopamine addicts. Many are wonderful, active, positive, skilled, funny, helpful people. But if I see any without a phone, experiencing each others' human company in the messy raw, it's becoming a noticeable rarity. The delusional world they share (and that's "sharing" in the internet non-sense) leads them to believe not only in its concrete reality, but also their aloof remoteness from the non-internet shit happening out here. Youngs are, like, politics? Meh. I'm, like, *eyeroll* lol! And now their opposition is limited to and by the very thought-control system that got us all into this mess. I'm posting the punch-a-Nazi meme! That'll hit them where it hurts! But first, here's an adorable kitten we should all look at. And a clip of me posing somewhere exotic, anywhere in the world, it doesn't matter, the whole wonderful scenic world is my back-drop!

LOL

Woke was the best thing that ever happened to the Far Right, the gift that keeps on giving. However well-intentioned, the emphasis on gender identity, sexual preference, pronouns and other issues that didn't concern the majority of the electorate resulted in the jes' plain folks' disaffection, as in not voting, or voting against.

Millennials and genwhatevs who like to blame everything on a post-war generation of selfish grasping sybarites might like to practice their excuses for when their own kids and grandkids - if they're lucky enough to have any - ask them what they did to stop the Nazis and the oligarchs from destroying their nation from the inside. And very possibly taking the rest of the world with them.

You can't meme your way out of this, kids. This is on you.

 

This post is about Infinite Scroll. On what is basically a music blog. It's best read in that context. It will have no effect on the real world, the one you see when you look away from the screen, so don't feel too strongly about it. Unfortunately, Infinite Scroll is affecting the real world, even the world I see when I look away from the screen.