Comment on Why are there so many graybeards in FOSS?
Buffalox@lemmy.world 6 days agoI think it’s more a matter of the ideals of the times, Foss was created in the 80’s, as I see it as an ideological child of the 70’s, a period of time where progress, optimism and idealism about creating a better future and a better world probably peaked.
Of course there is also idealism today, but it’s different, at least the way I see it, the sense of quick progress especially on the humanitarian side is gone, the decades of peace with Russia is broken, and climate change hangs as a threatening cloud above us, and the rise of China creates turbulence in the world order.
So although things maybe weren’t actually better, there are definitely aspects that look very attractive in hindsight.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I disagree with your idea of real world turbulence affecting it. Things were going the wrong way even in 2005. Dotcom bubble, Iraq war, those things - maybe.
I actually think that USSR’s breakup is what long-term caused how our world has become worse.
Say, in terms of computers and mass culture too, they sometimes treat the 90s as a result of that breakup, but that doesn’t quite make sense, despite a few armed conflicts, it was a gradual process, CIS as an organization was treated as almost a new union in making even in my childhood.
That breakup has released a lot of dirty money into the world, and through not the cleanest people in western countries, too.
And ideologically - the optimist version of the Cold War ending was some syncretic version of the “western” and the “eastern” promises for the space-faring united future. And much of the 90s was about, often dystopian, but fantasies in the context of such an utopia.
IRL both optimist promises were forgotten. Thus the current reality.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Wow you are way off time wise, I spoke of the 70’s and 80’s. Everything you mention is AFTER that.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I meant the “peace with Russia” part by that, sorry.
Meant that exactly, that (in my perception) there’s something similar in that ideology with science fiction of the same time, cinema, electronic music, industrial design and general techno-optimism. Some kind of universalism, like in Asimov’s Foundation.
1999, 1991 is Yeltsin, but one is a logical continuation of the other (many Russian liberals disagree, love Yeltsin and hate Putin, don’t listen to them).
Perhaps ; here I’m too ignorant.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 5 days ago
You are absolutely right, my bad on that one. But actually under Yeltsin there was still room for optimism, and in those years cooperation between the west and Russia increased.