I recently had a conversation about buying pot. I would like to make clear that I don’t buy pot (not for a very long time at least) but never the less this is what the conversation was about and the person I was conversing with casually told me that they only buy weed online. ONLINE? Apparently you can send cash in the mail to an online “dealer” in British Columbia and they send you weed via Canada Post. He said despite how sketchy this transaction sounds that this site has the best customer service he has dealt with online buying, “Better than Ebay and Amazon” he said to me. I was amazed. This was the last of the things that the Internet could not sell I thought, but I was apparently wrong. We don’t need stores anymore; we can cut out the middleman, now it can be just manufacturers and your house.
The whole thing just got me to think how much has changed in the way we live our lives in such a short time.
In the 20th century the world gave birth to the car, the television, films, the radio, and the computer all things that revolutionized society. Since 1994 we have launched so many things that never thought we would ever need to rely on but we completely do.
When I was 14 the Internet existed but nobody had it (I didn’t physically use it until I was 15 and I still didn’t really get what it did).
Cell phones also existed but again nobody had them except doctors and coke dealers. If you worked on Friday night and didn’t call people at dinner time to make plans you were screwed because at 9:00pm no one was home and there was no way to get a hold of them.
Now we text our friends all day while at work and never pick up our phones to talk EVER!
Much Music only played music videos and every show they played had to do with playing music videos.
You couldn’t download any music; you had to buy an album even if you only liked one song on it.
You don’t have to wait in line for concert tickets anymore. Now you can just wait until the second they are available online and then have some scalper buy all of them (the second after they are available online) and you buy them off of him on Craigslist for double the price. Thank God for that convenience huh?
But at least now people line up at high-end shoe stores to buy designer sneakers. This I don’t understand.
There were no email lists; everything came in the mail (today’s is much more efficient, although I liked getting newsletters in the mail from the Green Day idiot club).
Reality television didn’t exist (except COPS and The Real World).
CD burners didn’t exist, until I was 17 and no one had them for another 2 or 3 years after that. I can’t remember the first CD I ever burned, but I remember going to someone else’s house when I was 20 to download all the music I wanted for a keg party and burn it onto a CD. That took 4 hours.
Digital camera’s existed but they cost thousands of dollars. The first time I ever used one was 1999 and it was 3 mega pixels and was the size of a brick.
DVD’s didn’t exist until 1997 and no one started buying them until I was 21 (2001).
When I was 14 you had to buy everything at a store. Very few times in my young life did I order something from a catalogue other than albums or t-shirts or skateboards. Now you can buy a house on Ebay. You don’t have to interact with anyone anymore when making a purchase you just have to order it. This is not to say that retail stores aren’t still thriving but even stores are becoming more condensed. They will eventually condense into websites.
It was hard to get porn when you were under 18 and if you scored a Playboy underage you kept it forever. Now porn is a bigger than the music industry and we can view porn 24 hours a day for free at any age. I kind of wish this was around when I was 15.
Basically if you’re dedicated you can stay in your house and live your entire life electronically without any human interaction. In 20 more years you won’t even have to be dedic
ated that’s just the way it will be and if we don’t learn to live with it we’ll be struggling to catch up.Oh and of course you don’t have to go to a paranoid guy’s dark apartment to get weed anymore you just have to order it online and have it delivered in the mail along with the birthday card from your grandma.
