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> Many older people spent their lives with a working phone system It's shocking how quickly the phone system has just up and vanished, replaced by a simulation
by flyinghamster 2y ago
> Many older people spent their lives with a working phone system
It's shocking how quickly the phone system has just up and vanished, replaced by a simulation of a phone system running over the internet, with little wireless supercomputers taking the place of the landline phone's 19th Century technology. Oh, pockets of the old circuit-switched voice network still exist, but they're rapidly being decommissioned.
It didn't hit me until one of my dad's friends called him from an unfamiliar number - because he was forced to get a cell phone for the first time in his life. My parents are on a VoIP service with their old phone number, and it works nicely, but it still depends on working internet - a reversal from when getting TO the internet required working phone service.
- matthewdgreen 2y agoThe simulation would be fine if we hadn’t abandoned it to scammers so that some two-bit VoIP services could make a buck. The result is understandable to young people: you literally cannot trust any incoming call that isn’t from a person you know very well —- because the only people calling your phone are people who want to do you harm or defraud you. And they call constantly. The worst part is that thanks to AI voice impersonation, even the “accept calls from people you know” heuristic isn’t trustworthy anymore. How do you explain to someone who spent 80 years trusting a communication medium that we’ve decided to let criminals run wild with it, and we think that’s fine?