By luck or fate, I have managed to survive 50 rotations around the sun. I look around, and I think I metaphorically may have a slight understanding of what it must have felt like to be the guy sitting on the horse-drawn cart as the first automobile sped past. I am considered a dinosaur by the youth of today, and honestly, I was just like them at that age. However, at the same time, those of my generation and I were fundamentally different. We were the last generation not born of the internet age. If you ask me, this is the one bullet I was happy to have missed for multiple reasons, the least of which is the fact that every stupid thing I did when I was young is not living in perpetuity in cyberspace. My greatest moments are nothing more than a story told among old friends when reminiscing about the glory days. As a prod GenX’er, I was raised with a healthy dose of skepticism and probably an overabundance of independence. I was part of the “Be home before the streetlights come on!” generation, and like many of my generational peers, I took to the streets looking for adventures and mayhem daily. Just as my parents failed me, so have I failed my kids.
I honestly don’t know if the same threats were there when I was young, and we just didn’t have access to real-time information like we have today, or if that ability to share information in fractions of a second exacerbated the detestable elements of life. If we wanted to communicate, we had, as the old adage went, “Telephone, Tell-a-friend, Tell-a-person” or the good old daily post. Lest we forget that when it came to the telephone, privacy was never a forgone conclusion; anyone at any time could lift up another handset and listen in. Privacy was essentially all we had under our perceived control; it’s no wonder we hold it in such high regard.
We, GenX, were raised in a world of predominantly physical threats. That’s not to say that social engineering, scams, and fraud weren’t there; it was just a different time, and the tools were much simpler in their application. We had to watch out for people actually trying to ransom us, not our data. It was a different time, looking back, I don’t remember the constant feeling that the world was on fire and that we could destroy humanity at any moment’s notice, like it is today.
Regardless, as I said, we failed our children and, in some cases, have fostered that propagation into our grandchildren. We assumed that bringing computers out of schools and businesses and into our homes and daily lives would cause no more excitement than switching from black-and-white to color television. We couldn’t have been more wrong.
How harmless and tempting those first AOL CD-ROMs were, where friendly voices would tell us the exact moment an email was delivered to our new fancy electronic mailbox. We, as GenX, were in the process of learning about home computers and the internet, right next to the children it was our responsibility to be protecting. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. We believed that we could all throw away our sets of The Encyclopedia Britannica because that knowledge would flow from the phone lines we were using to connect to this modern-day library of Alexandria, like water.
The truth is, we were deaf to the song the digital pied piper was playing, and we collectively lost our future, just like in the fairytale, along with our children’s identities. The result of that ignorance has been multiple generations of people who don’t share the same value of privacy and need for security that previous generations seemed to have inherently.
Where we GenX’es were raised with the principle of “Don’t air your dirty laundry”, our successors have gone the exact opposite by documenting most events on one or more social media sites, putting more value in the digital than the physical world. Interfacing with electronic devices is all most of them have done since, in some cases, early childhood. For some, it’s even their first recallable memories of being transfixed on a screen. Our children went from cartoons on Saturday morning to being handed over to the digital babysitter. This made our lives as parents much easier, but it’s only now that we can truly see the long-term effects of our choices.
I decided to take a look at one of my daughter’s social media accounts to vet out a theory I had. I went all the way back as far as I could and started looking for Personally Identifiable Information (PII). I very quickly discovered pictures of the front of our home when she was a child, where the address was on display next to the front door. I found videos of school events where the name of her school was announced to all the proud parents. Then there was where she had posted her graduation announcement, not only the school, but the year she finished school. Over and over, every type of PII you could imagine, from pets, extended family, work history, hobbies, you name it. Everything that we as a culture have been using as ways to uniquely identify a single person is now being shared freely, and my daughter is just one of the millions of people sharing these types of information in the name of “likes” daily. Unfortunately, it’s already too late; the damage is already done and can’t be undone.
When I stopped and took that thousand-foot view perspective, I discovered that even though most Gen Xers would fight to their dying breath that we were collectively so much better than our boomer parents, that we would never allow our children to run the streets like we did. Oh, how we sat upon our arrogance like a throne. When we thought they were playing simple games or doing homework. They, just like us, were exploring the digital world around them unsupervised. We were at least limited to time and distance; they were going places that we couldn’t imagine….back then. They, just like us, were left to raise themselves. The only difference is we physically knew where their bodies were.
Even Worse is just as we failed our children because we didn’t know any better, our children are going through the same thing, only worse, in my opinion. As Gen X’ers, we were coming to grips with the weight, scope, and power of what the internet really was. Our grandchildren have either been born in the final days of “The internet age” or are the first of the “AI Generation”. We at least had some semblance of what was real, what truth really is. The current generation will grow up with a completely different perspective on reality than what we had, and even different than their parents. The best Gen X could hope for was prosthetic makeup, hair dye, and wigs. Now, there are deepfake audio and video so convincing that, depending on where you get your information, two out of three people can’t differentiate between authentic and artificial cloned voices. As deception technology continues to improve. Our grandchildren will know a world where “truth” will become the most valuable commodity, and I fear it will be in very short supply. I fear that future generations will fall victim to mass manipulation by putting faith almost to the point of religion in the hands of governments, corporations, and even influencers. The ability to control the narrative becomes very easy when you control all the access.
We must attempt to impart the last resistance to disinformation to our lost children, showing them how the world was before we surrendered to the technology overlord. I am not in any way saying that all the old ways of thinking were correct, ethical, or even moral in some cases, but that doesn’t mean that everything was wrong and there is nothing worth trying to preserve. As governments and corporations continue to try and find ways to monetize the individual as a marketable product, all of the PII I described before shows its real value. Intelligence can turn every one of us into tomorrow’s special.
We need to remind our children and grandchildren of the importance of anonymity, privacy, and unique identifiers. That keeping some information to ourselves does more than feign popularity, it can protect you as well as the ones you love.
So what is the point I am trying to make with all this? Within the next two to three generations, there will be nobody left alive who remembers what life was like before. I am going to leave it at that high-level definition, before. Before home computers, before the internet, before cell phones, before deepfakes, before “Truth” disappears forever. Every generation likes to think that we did it better than our predecessors and that we are leaving the world a little better than when we got it. I can’t deceive myself into believing that’s true; I, unfortunately, have seen, heard, and know too much.