on everyone's ass.I just saw someone on tumblr posting about how "kids these days" (always a great way to start a post) don't know how hard it was "back in the old days". I'm just gonna go spitballing here and say that OP is a millennial complaining about gen-alpha. "Oh, kids these days have it so easy!" Prithee, how? This is probably The Most Bogus Time in History to be a kid. First, there's COVID, right? Everyone goes on spring break in 2020 and they don't come back to school until the fall. How do you suppose the kids felt, going to spring break in 3rd grade and coming back in 4th grade? Plus, their parents are just as weirded out by this as they are, since they can't relate to their children's situations.
Then, there's The Politics. Kids are getting politicised far earlier than anyone ever should. Using myself as an example, I didn't become truly political until college, when I discovered that I was Not Straight. I really started to notice just how much of a social taboo had grown up around this and I realised that it didn't make any sense. I kinda knew this before, but it took my finally admitting that I was queer to really notice it. It was pretty easy at that point to trace it back to its source: the nonexistent separation of church and state in this country. If you think Trump was the first one to make a big deal out of "the sanctity of marriage", then you've never heard of George W. Bush. I mean, he wasn't the first one either, but his administration weakened protections for queer people of all stripes. These days, however, kids-- like kids-- are getting political, mostly because Donald Trump is empowering school bullies by his behaviour, and parents have to tell their kids why. Also, fascist school boards fire and replace teachers who aren't displaying sufficient nationalism, either because the school board is fascist itself, or because it's afraid of the Trump regime's tendency to get what it wants by suing people, and parents have to explain why Ms. Rosenthal suddenly disappeared from school.
Also, don't let's forget that kids aren't particularly safe, either. On one hand, there's ICE, who might come rolling up on your house, separate the kids from their parents, vanish the parents into El Salvador or Uganda, and throw the kids into whatever logistics centre-turned-concentration camp to rot beneath symbols of American military might. On the other, there's the increasing number of mass shootings that take place in schools. The best example I can think of offhand is Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas; wherein the police waited around for the killer to kill himself before coming in, by which time 21 people were dead. Real live actual discussions are taking place about building bulletproof bunkers into classrooms because of the combination of nationwide police ineptitude and the free flow of guns and ammunition into the public, seemingly without restriction. Schools aren't the only places where kids have to worry about being killed, either. Is there a pride flag of some kind too close to that park? Then you better look out for an evangelist Christian with an AK-47. Is your skin dark enough to be distinguishable as "non-white"? Then you better look out for cops with itchy trigger fingers. Are you white, Christian, and otherwise what fascists consider "normal"? You're still not safe from random gunmen looking for social media engagement. Everyone attending that TPUSA rally where Unlucky Chucky got deepthroated should count themselves lucky that this particular republican gun nut was a good shot with a sniper rifle, and he didn't just go Stephen Paddock on everyone's ass.
Interestingly, this is not what I started this up to talk about. The commentator on Tumblr was referring to technology; specifically how most every kid in the US, UK, Canada, EU, Japan, et cetera, has a smartphone these days, which they can use to take the place of all the various devices that millennials grew up with. I personally had a handheld tape recorder that my granddad bought in 1989 that my mum let me use once I turned 6. I loved recording random shit with that thing, but, batteries and cassettes proved to be a problem. I would always run out of tape before I ran out of stuff to record. I would have LOVED Fossify Voice Recorder. I never had a camcorder, even though I sorely wanted one. I would have LOVED having a smartphone camera. I had a Game Boy Advance, but same problem: batteries. I would have LOVED Retroarch. There's nothing noble about having to use the technology that we had back then. It's exactly the same with smartphones right now, honestly-- in 25 years when there's brain implants that allow you to free your hands of all electronic devices of any kind, gen-alpha's gonna be like "Oh, kids these days have it so easy; back when I was a kid, we had phones and tablets and smartwatches." When millennials were kids, the boomers were like, "Oh, kids these days have it so easy; back when I was a kid, we had to send letters and play stickball and read comic books." Back when the boomers were kids, the GI Generation was like, "Oh, kids these days have it so easy; back when I was a kid--", when the GI generation were kids, the Lost Generation were like-- When the Lost Generation were kids, their parents were like-- Do you see where I'm going with this?
Another thing that comes up a lot in relation to kids and how my generation relates to them is videogames. I've written A LOT of blog posts on this subject, both on here and on Tumblr, and I've come to the unmistakeable conclusion that kids these days have exactly the same videogames that millennials and gen-x had. Nintendo has a lot to do with this; first, with Virtual Console, then with eShop, now with Nintendo Classics. Also, emulators and retrogaming are more popular and accessible now than they've ever been before. Basically every console, from the Nintendo 3DS on down to the Atari 2600, has been picked apart and studied at a bare-metal level, to the point where Riza is able to play Mario Kart 7 on their 8" Android tablet. Despite talking a big game about "piracy", Nintendo is starting to feel the stress of this constant and unfulfilling game of Whac-a-Mole with ROM databases, to the point it's starting to let most of them through the cracks. It was not legal sanction that brought Myrient down, it was AI training driving up the price of computer parts. I'm fairly confident when I say that every single game in the 15 Essential Games series can be played within 10 minutes notice by anyone of any age, regardless of whether they currently have the ROM for it or not.
Thanks to streaming services, libraries with DVD box sets, and yes also torrent aggregators, gen-alpha also have access to the same TV programmes and the same films that we had when we were kids. Thanks to Youtube, Spotify, libraries with CDs, and yes also illicit filesharing, gen-alpha also have access to the same music that we had when we were kids. Hell, they even have access to the music that our parents and grandparents had. With only a couple minutes' research, I found the full version of "Take Care" from Ultrakill-- a song called "Were You Foolin'"-- and had it downloaded in M4A and converted to MP3. This is a song from 1937, and I was able to find it with very little searching. I can only assume the commentator on Tumblr resents for some reason how easy it is to do extensive research in a short period of time. Had I been restricted to the research methods I had in elementary school, it would have taken a week, plus time spent sending emails back and forth with music archivists to merely find the title of the song, let alone a way to play it back.
The only thing that's changed dramatically about gen-alpha relative to millennials is toys. And, honestly, it's not that dramatic actually. I had Star Trek action figures, little playsets and things, Polly Pocket, Crash Dummies, and Inspector Gadgets. There's still Batman, GI Joe, Barbie, LEGO, RF-controlled cars, certainly sports balls and stuff like that. Honestly, when I was a kid, I would have committed actual homicide to get my hands on all the heaping great piles of Super Mario merch that exists today. Fun fact: did you know that Toy Story merch has been around without end since 1995? I had a Buzz Lightyear, I had Woody, hell I even had Slinky Dog (Toy Story branded, unfortunately). To this day, you can go down your local big box store and find all this stuff with better articulation than anything I ever had when I was a kid.
So, yeah. I pray you, what exactly is different about kids today, relative to kids back then? AI chatbots maybe, app integration where it doesn't belong, and politics being introduced too early, but that's basically all.