Before the OKC bombings we used to buy chemicals to make explosives/fireworks from a catalogue and set them off in the backyard, with minimal parental supervision. The same catalog sold bulk red phosphorus and extra strength pseusoephedrine tablets were available by the hundreds at any grocery store. We never made meth but it would have been trivially easy. After OKC the fun chemicals got much harder to find and we had to content ourselves with whatever our kin smuggled in from someplace fireworks were legal.

There was a period of about 18 months where e-commerce had just begun but no one verified credit card numbers beyond ensuring that the number had the right checksum. Someone I knew found a credit card number generator on a BBS and we'd buy whatever we wanted and have it delivered to a vacant lot. Gas station receipts still had people's entire credit card numbers printed on them, you could use those once they started verifying zip codes. None of our parents asked how a couple of barely-teenage kids were able to afford to build out custom PCs or where all the recording equipment, CDs, and books we very suddenly had came from.

The police didn't know what the internet was. The FBI knew but didn't understand or care about the internet. The level of surveillance we were subjected to was minimal and easily evaded as long as you kept your nose clean. It's all relative, but compared to the panopticon we live in today it felt a lot less pervasive. If there were cameras anywhere they were so blurry it didn't really matter.

We were a bunch of suburban delinquent shitasses but the opportunities to be a delinquent shitass have been foreclosed on in so many ways. The spaces we had to exist in, in public, no longer exist, or are heavily policed. The world seems to be in general, a lot more hostile to young people existing in public.

Everything children do today, and I've seen this with the kids I've been responsible for myself as well as more generally, is being logged somewhere. Time is much more regimented. If my kid skips class I get a text message from the school about it as soon as they're marked tardy or absent. I see other parents monitoring their children's location via cellphone in real time all the time. It seems absolutely suffocating. It feels suffocating as an adult having to navigate a world where everything you do is going into a database somewhere, and that's with the memory of a time before the panopticon was so fully developed.

Are Kids Today strange or are they just doing their best to exist in a world that doesn't have a place for them? The human experience, at its most basic, is the same as it's always been. The conditions in which people live have changed.