1,000 Greatest Drivers: Danny Sullivan

Ryan Hunter-Eighties.

Well, I just finally received John Oreovicz’s Indy Split book, which I won in a Twitter contest before I got locked out of my account in March, a couple days ago. I probably should’ve read this before I proceeded to write the Al Unser, Jr. post, but oh well. I haven’t opened it yet, but it’s definitely nicely packaged. I mentioned what I had been reading on the Jim Clark post. I finished Ball Four, then read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and I’m in the middle of Carole Hyatt and Linda Gottlieb’s When Smart People Fail, which needless to say is proving pretty resonant for me. I know the standard Reddit attitude is if you can’t land a full-time professional job after getting a degree, “you were never really smart in the first place”, which is something I find truly offensive. Boy, have I aged out of social media discourse… I want to finish this list so hard so I can get offline entirely, even though it’s not my smartest move. I did get some more data entry work from one of the guys at Sports Data Research. He wants me to enter pre-2000 college basketball results and I’m game.

Speaking of social media discourse, I’ve been almost as annoyed about all the people making fun of the boomers upset about NASCAR putting the Coca-Cola 600 on Amazon Prime. The smugness and contempt and vitriol I’m seeing towards people who don’t want to learn new technology kind of bothers me, and especially that being equated to right-wing politics (insert that meme of the twenty interchangeable-looking white men everybody likes to share). I totally understand why people who grew up with cable packages where all the channels were on one package would be reluctant to buy a cable package as well as a bunch of different streaming packages, which is definitely where we’re headed. Especially in an era where most of the cultural elitists sneer at everything of this century on commercial television (ABC/CBS/FOX/NBC), to keep up with all the supposedly essential shows you would need to be signed up for six different streaming packages simultaneously and at that point it probably gets almost as expensive as cable. Sure, you can sign up to Amazon Prime for a month and I’m sure plenty of people did that without complaining, but all these companies try to get you if you forget to turn off your auto-renewal. Ever since the advent of “prestige TV”, you need to either spend a lot of money to “keep up with the cultural conversation” or be okay stealing things on torrent sites. Almost everybody who was born before Napster grew up initially believing stealing intellectual property was not okay until people who grew up with the Internet challenged that idea. You may argue boomers are still foolish to believe in intellectual property, but I, a millennial, am less sure. I kind of agree with Jaron Lanier that the Internet destroyed the middle class and I honestly greatly admired him until I found out he was a Jeffrey Epstein associate…

My opinion is this: let’s not give up intellectual property unless we actually have a welfare state. So I don’t blame boomers for not wanting to stream or embrace modern technology. Have people become happier since they got addicted to smartphones? No. In fact, my peers’ boomer parents refused to let their kids use computers and they were shocked that my parents let me use a computer; I think my peers’ parents were right because they were better able to properly socialize and probably more employable as a result. I imagine those people are addicted to smartphones like everybody else now, but the contempt and venom a lot of younger people have for the people whining about Prime bothers me. What about people who want to boycott all Amazon products? There are a lot of those. Few people can afford all the doohickeys you’re supposed to have to watch TV anymore, so I totally get why the poorer boomers just want to stick to cable while the poorer millennials like me just largely stopped watching television entirely and switched to YouTube and podcasts, which are basically free. I get people want to dunk on boomers and blame them for economic decline. But c’mon. People act in the same ways corresponding to the conditions in which they grew up. If you did a body swap and the millennials were raised the same way boomers were raised and vice versa, they would act the same way because it is the conditions that shape people and not something intrinsic to the people. It’s like a lot of people act like the entire boomer generation is Donald Trump, which is as stupid as if boomers acted like the typical millennial was like Mark Zuckerberg. I feel like a peacemaker who dreams of uniting all of society’s warring factions and hates people shitting on other people for any unreasonable reason. You can understand why this makes me truly miserable.