September 25, 2021

The Good Old Days

Aside from trying to prove the true age of the world from one viewpoint or another, at least the age of writing itself is more or less agreed upon by most people. At a very outside guess of about 7,000 years, and the average number of years between generations of human beings being about 20 years, that's about 5 generations per century, times 70 centuries... puts us at about 350 generations of human beings in recorded history. From what I know about how the world looked to my parents' generation, it seems pretty amazing to think about how quickly this all happened and how suddenly we ended up here at this point in time on the world.

It's a little weird to think about how stuff ended up happening how it did, as I saw it happening over the years, and to wonder about what's even going on anywhere that I can't see it. I really have little to no idea what's going on even in the room behind me. I can only assume my cats are eating the bread again, just because I know what kinds of things they end up doing usually.

I turned around to check, and I was wrong about even that. They're behaving themselves quite well at the moment.

I got this website name at least a decade ago, there's kind of a story behind that. I've been through so many hypotheses about how these things work, assuming people noticed I have a blog, then finding they say no, no one noticed I have a blog, then seeing weird connections in things, especially online... I guess a lot of that has to do with automation algorithms and stuff. Someone said to me recently, that he had noticed people seem to act differently depending on whether something seems to be automated or operated by a human being... kind of interesting to think about the psychology of that.

It's so weird to think about what interest a person, or even an algorithm, might have in what, and why. I got this website name as a gift, in a community that was mostly online... kind of an early social media network. Small groups of humans would have historically decided how things should work in their group, and why, all throughout human history. It's so weird to think about how things can change this much within 20 years. We were a small network of kids, kinda slow to figure out what was going on in the world, in some ways, maybe... it's unclear who started that network even, or what we were doing exactly... but definitely some kind of social media.

I showed up to that group well after things were underway, and the people who had started the network had actually already left, at least for the most part, before I even became a member. It was all started by kids, as far as I know, who would mostly graduate high school eventually, and go on with their lives, etc. We actually really more or less didn't know how it happened, which was kind of weird to think about.

As things continued on, we made certain network policy decisions, for how things should be run, and so forth... It was such an amazing thing to be a part of.