Yeah, there are deffo other factors. Edgelord culture, kids raising themselves, school IT being stupider than the students, and so on. Like, my high school IT department blocked all the .com domains and only allowed .gov .edu and .org. That directly led to my entire class discovering 4chan at the same time and somebody hacked the projector to show anime tiddy during class.

But I really feel like the media influence can’t be ignored. Like, a lot of antiheroes from that time period were edgelords, and I know a lot of my classmates saw them as role models.

Yeah, I feel like we can draw a direct line between Musk and the typical 90s-00s antihero. He’s acting like Light Yagami from Death Note, not Picard.

I’m mostly responding to “I thought FOR SURE that these lessons being seen by everyone would lead to a brighter future of mutual compassion and understanding between people.”, because those lessons were seen, but then portrayed as fuddy-duddy optimism by the media of my teens. The message got switched from “lets work together to figure out the solution” to “collaboration is a waste of time because the protagonist is always correct”, and I think that was combined with latchkey kids being normal, and it fucked up multiple generations.

It’s a hot take, but I sorta blame the late 90s anti-hero for this. Obvs there’s other stuff going on too, but the media influence had a hand.

I’m a millennial, I grew up with Mr Rogers and Star Trek, but then came my edgy teenage years and all the girls argued about whether to fuck Spike or Angel from Buffy and all the boys wanted to be Tyler Durden. Then I graduated and I was weird for thinking Sheldon from Big Bang Theory was annoying, and characters like House and Blender were cool and lowkey enviable.

I really think a segment of my generation never stopped trying to be the lovable jerk that only exists in the movies.