Reality is made up of circumstances. I’m thinking the difference in reaction between you and your peers to that makes it hard to see the similarity in those circumstances.

Damn I hate saying circumstances over and over.

The argument is not about how to live your life, but whether historians have any business looking for “eras”.

I think they do. At different points in its evolution, society must focus on different problem sets. One of the major problems now we are trying to evolve past is the breakdown in value of the university system and a lack of mentoring. Hell, most of our institutions are breaking down.

“Web 3.0″ is a good potential solution to this.

So, you are a front runner of an age, an age of institutional breakdown and a rise of individual power. Most of these changes are brought on by technology.

If not for technology, if we only had mostly unchanging human nature I would agree with you, but technology changes the relationships in society, and that causes new problems that define ages.

I’m sorry but I think you meant to say Ryan is “Web 3.0″, not 2.0.

How does that make sense as a thing to do? And why/how is that even a desirable thing to do? I don’t understand how you value that.

Are you accusing me of not letting my own peculiar circumstances define how I view and judge the entire world around me?

That is everything I have tried to do with this site.

I hate to use “web 2.0″ to describe the era/sub-culture you are representative of, but it’s close enough. Do you really think you would have skipped college and had all these opportunities to work in various industries if you were an adult in the 80s? Even if you did manage, the costs would be so different it wouldn’t be the same experience.

Sure, you would have gone for “sex and power” and been successful somewhere, but without those experiences would you really be the same person?

Now magnify that. You really think the type of opportunities available and ideas at the forefront don’t shape everyone a little?

Institutions, technology, and culture change. But people and their interactions are constant. Humans are and always will be social beings. Yeah, we’re interacting at different levels and different medians, but the content of the interactions stays the same.

This is why the premise of the Watchmen is not necessarily limited to a specific “era” as defined by analysts and historians. Truly relevant works of art have universal premises. How else could else do you get movies like O’ Brother, Where Art Thou? Why else do we take the advice of ancient philosophers? It doesn’t matter where or from what “age” the work comes from, the thing that matters is the work itself.

We could spend all our lives breaking down everything into convenient little witty labels. But in the end, who gives a shit? It’s all masturbation and a great way to avoid seeing the world as it really is.

If you are going to deconstruct humanity down to having sex, making money, and being entertained then you may be able to call zeitgeist bullshit. There is much more subtlety to the way in which humans pursue these goals, and the era in which we live is a large influence there. People aren’t just having sex, they are having sex with many partners before marriage. They aren’t just being entertained, they are watching TV on the Internet and eschewing newspapers. And they aren’t even making money to begin with. These are group experiences that cannot be divorced from the era in which we live.

Just look at what we are doing now – arguing with people across the world through a series of tubes. The basics of it could have been done 300 years ago, but it would have been done in a stinky pub and the experience would have been entirely different. So you could deconstruct it to “people arguing,” but that misses the whole point.