I started the In the Zeitgeist blog in 2017, and in one of the first posts I linked to an older blog I kept called Generation Watch. I started that one in 2002 and kept it up until, I think, 2007. Unfortunately I lost some of the content, so what I have up now stops abruptly in 2005. When I first referenced this older blog in that 2017 post, I had just moved it to a new domain, but the links were all broken so it was a mess and basically unusable. At long last, I have cleaned up all the internal links, so it is possible to navigate the site and access the content.

I only cleaned up the internal links, that is the links to other content I created on the blog, not the external links to other sites. I don’t plan to update those in any way, since my intention is to have an archived copy up. It’s the Wayback Machine version of my old blog. So you’ll have to pardon the occasional missing graphics and many dead links. Surprisingly, though, many of the external links still work, particularly the ones to major news sites that keep their articles up for a very long time.

One thing that’s interesting about the old site is how much of what I wrote looks like the same stuff I’m posting about today. The same old red zone vs. blue zone conflict is there, still unresolved today. Now the fault line is even deeper, even starker, as the generations have aged. Even though the post-elder Silent generation is still around and still in power, they aren’t so much the compromisers that they used to be (look at the last post on Generation Watch to see what I mean with that), as simply delayers of whatever final reckoning we are headed to as a society.

On the old blog you can see me struggling to understand what was going on around me in the 2000s. I was trying to wrap my mind around the changes happening and fit them into an understanding of cycles of history. I was also less partisan blue zone back then; you can even detect that 9/11 had brought out a bit of a patriotic red zoner in me. The train wreck that was the Bush administration put an end to that.

Back in the early 2000s blogging itself was relatively new. It was an exciting time when we bloggers felt like we were an army of Davids taking on the Goliaths of the old media. We linked to one another’s blogs in “blogrolls” and talked up the “blogosphere” like it was this groundbreaking new form of discourse. Now all the attention has moved on to social media platforms and blogging seems old-fashioned, like it belongs to an earlier phase in the history of the Internet. But either way you get that exciting sense of group participation – on the Internet everyone is a contributor as well as a consumer.