5 ms·

Early 2000s were peak of humanity

43 points by lukaszkups 1mo ago

meerita 1mo ago
I think the peak internet experience was blogging. When social networks and social media came along, the decline started happening fast, and I began to see it that way. I was genuinely excited when the iPhone 2G came out, but then that excitement faded, and I quit all social stuff. I still feel nostalgic for the early days of the internet, when people and communities were truly connected.
mdlxxv 1mo ago
Ah, yes. 9/11. The "war on terror". "Peak of humanity", indeed.
- mananaysiempre 1mo ago
  None of the sequelae of that have really improved since then, at least as far as the first world is concerned. The foundations of universal surveillance were being laid down, but it wasn’t yet feasible. Police (transport security, border patrol, potato, pot-ah-to) ruffling through your belongings had not yet been normalized. You could transact with cash. People largely still sort of believed that talking to your political opponents would lead to better outcomes than making them comply under threat of government violence or unemployment. (Plenty of things sucked, don’t get me wrong, it’s just that a lot of the fallout from the “war on terror” was still in the upper atmosphere.)
ashleyn 1mo ago
I kinda feel like many might be biased to view the era of their own youth as the peak of humanity.
vegnus 1mo ago
Explain how there was "kind of" instant messengers. AIM had already been out for years at that point
- kees99 1mo ago
  By year 2000, there were "proprietary" messengers aplenty - yahoo, aim, icq, qq, and a bunch more. All of which were simple enough to reverse engineer, so Linux user could just install Gaim (later renamed Pidgin) and connect to most any of those. What's more, there were already two open standards: SIP/SIMPLE, and newer XMPP.
  - rw_grim 1mo ago
    I assure you stuff like OSCAR (the protocol for AIM and ICQ) is anything but simple and was a huge effort by many people to reverse engineer.
mrkpdl 1mo ago
I think I agree with the premise of this. I miss when there were limits on our time with the web each day. I miss not being expected to be up to speed. I really miss magazines. Etc. Windows XP/Panther felt capable enough. If we could go back I think turn by turn navigation would be the hardest thing to give up.
- comradesmith 1mo ago
  I actively avoid using navigation. If I’ve already been there once I’ll just try get there without it. Sometimes I check the route on Google maps first to get an idea, then close it. I think navigation is like a muscle and you’ve got to train it. Though I do like rerouting depending on traffic conditions. I guess in some cities that would basically feel mandatory to use
  - vel0city 1mo ago
    > Though I do like rerouting depending on traffic conditions This is the biggest reason why I'll use navigation even when I know almost a dozen different ways to go somewhere. Using navigation services, its easier to tell if its worth it today to take the toll roads someplace, or if I should really avoid that bridge today, or what not. Choosing the route blindly can sometimes make a difference of a half hour or $10+ of unnecessary tolls depending on the journeys I take.
    - cucumber3732842 1mo ago
      Wait until you find out the navigation app lies to you based on where it thinks you "should" be driving. I can consistently shave 4-5(!!) minutes by taking a right at a light and coming into a further light from a different direction rather than going straight and sitting in gridlock for 4/5ths of a mile that would've taken ~10min. No illegal turn or difficult left or anything. Basically if I can see the traffic up ahead I ignore my GPS and take the right, instant ETA drop. I have other local examples but that's the most egregious.
      - 1mo ago
giaour 1mo ago
I don’t know the author’s age but suspect this is an entry in the “<my teenage years/early twenties> were the peak of humanity” genre.
- bensyverson 1mo ago
  Every generation has their “good ole days.” Unfortunately the old days never were that good for people who were around at the time.
  - kypro 1mo ago
    You say that but people of a few different generations in my family all agree the late 90s / early 00s were amazing. Some romanticise how things were in their childhood, but most would say that the late 90s / early 00s were objective a great time to be alive.
    - bensyverson 1mo ago
      It was a great time for a certain group of people, but if you happened to be black, or gay, or trans, or Muslim, or had a pre-existing medical condition, it was not so rosy. I was in my late teens / early 20s at the time, and not in any of those groups, but I did not find the late 90s/early 2000s to be particularly "amazing" or objectively great. I wanted to make movies, but film was incredibly expensive, and digital video wasn't yet good enough. I wanted to make ambitious software, but absolutely everything was harder and lower-level back then. It was harder and more expensive to get something delivered, and before you say that was better and we're all spoiled by Amazon, the net result was that you had to drive all over the city to pick stuff up. We knew high-speed internet would change things, but it wasn't there yet. The internet kind of sucked (sorry). I remember spending hours on Excite and AltaVista searching for obscure information that now wouldn't be considered obscure in the slightest, and when I finally found something, it was rarely helpful. Don't get me wrong, I have nostalgia for the early internet, but at the time, we all knew it would get better. I wanted every video to look as good as Apple's movie trailer site, and it took about 10 years for that to happen. There were plenty of good things about that time, but this "good ole days" thinking is dangerous. It's the antithesis of gratitude. It gets in the way of having vision and imagining a better future.
kaon_2 1mo ago
Indeed go ask anybody in China, India, North-Africa, or Eastern Europe. I am sure they will tell you things were better back then. Oh wait. Seems like the author never read Hans Rosling's Factfulness. Big recommendation for anyone out there who hasn't yet. If you have find yourself having a bleak outlook, this book is an antidote: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34890015-factfulness https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34890015-factfulness
- testing22321 1mo ago
  Agree 100% One of the best books I’ve ever read, extremely enlightening.
- TFNA 1mo ago
  Early 2000s in my corner of Eastern Europe (Romania) was a very optimistic time. Higher salaries for locally employed educated people were on the horizon, while there was also the ability to work seasonally abroad and make a good sum that could be invested back home. Infrastructure started to see improvement through EU funds. And, to relate this to the linked post, lots of citydwellers then got broadband and found the internet transformational and positive for their lives. In fact, it was a far more optimistic time than since about 2020, as soaring cost of food and going out means even privileged middle-class people are complaining, and infrastructure improvements have stagnated.
- yCombLinks 1mo ago
  Despite the article title, it's clearly about technology usage patterns roughly 25 years ago being a lot better than they are today. Its obviously from the PoV of someone in a developed western country, probably America. Every single time someone brings up positive things about the past there's always some 'Nuh uh, look at how bad this thing you weren't a part of was at that time.'. Boring, pedantic, and not even relevant to what the article is about.
- Markoff 1mo ago
  > Indeed go ask anybody in China, India, North-Africa, or Eastern Europe. I've had pretty good time in "Eastern" (Central) Europe, so did my wife in China. People were still optimistic about EU/euro, that lasted roughly until Lisbon treaty when they forced Ireland to repeat the referendum until they got result they wanted, which later become EU's MO and since then it went all downhill, with another major successes as Wir schaffen das 2015, Green deal 2020 or Totalitarian COVID pass 2021. Hard to understand someone who can still support this failed project. I would just dissolve it and return back to EEA. Next time maybe ask actually people from those countries instead of parroting some writer.
mdrzn 1mo ago
I can't stand. When people type like this. New line after every dot. Even when not necessary. Ultra short sentences. I guess it's "cool"?
- 2snakes 1mo ago
  Yimspeak.
- cjs_ac 1mo ago
  I think it started on LinkedIn, where posts got more reach depending on how many users clicked the 'See More' expander link, so users who wanted to be 'Thought Leaders' were incentivised to present their banal ideas using as many newlines as possible.
  - swed420 1mo ago
    \n;dr
- kypro 1mo ago
  This was how I learnt to write, as it's how I think. I latter learnt in school that writing is only deemed correct when it's stylised into elaborate sentences structures that no human would use when thinking in their own heads. If you're just trying to convey a thought I don't know why people care? Could you not understand the point OP was making or something? In what way is this a less valid way of writing (aside from the fact it's not what's taught as correct in school?)
  - analognoise 1mo ago
    Is this satire? Please, lord Jesus, let this be satire.
    - kirth_gersen 1mo ago
      you know in your heart it's not
    - 1mo ago
stetrain 1mo ago
> Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about.
zecg 1mo ago
As if it's mandated now to have social networks on your smartphone. I uninstalled anything owned by Zuckerberg or fucking Spez, I use only Signal for chat and Openstreetmap with offline vector maps for navigation. I have no tiktok or forever-scrolling apps.
colonelpopcorn 1mo ago
Isn't this the central conceit behind "The Matrix"? lol
- tim333 1mo ago
  The Matrix is more the 90s with the peak as 1999. >Morpheus: You believe it’s the year 1999 when in fact it’s closer to 2199. I can’t tell you exactly what year it is because we honestly don’t know. There’s nothing I can say that will explain it for you, Neo.
titzer 1mo ago
Tech is the way it is because Big Tech wants it to be. Social media is engineered to be the most profitable for the big corporations who run the attention economy which incidentally is a surveillance and content exploitation economy hosting too many narcissists yammering for attention. The software world is several stages of enshittification deep, and yet we're awash in incredible hardware that would be mind-blowing if we weren't so constantly distracted with how much noise and bother the software makes.
- chrismarlow9 1mo ago
  > we're awash in incredible hardware that would be mind-blowing if we weren't so constantly distracted with how much noise and bother the software makes. This is the part of it that bums me out the most. I just wish aesthetics didn't drive so much of the current tech world. Everything has an absolutely beautiful interface now that is slow, buggy, can't be shared, etc. But I guess at least it's pretty and pays the bills.
  - titzer 1mo ago
    Agreed. Have a look at the music app that Jordan Rudess built for the iPad that allows a kind of tapped steel guitar / keyboard interface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JA4DqWmHBY&t=165s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JA4DqWmHBY&t=165s He made the touch screen interface into a low latency, multi-touch musical instrument. I couldn't seem to find if he had made this program open source or otherwise available, but it looks pretty cool. I am amazed at the displays, CPUs, memory, networks, storage, and not to mention GPUs of 2026. They are really incredible. Then I derp around on my tablet with these clunky ad-laden websites with extremely poor layout, janky scrolling, barely registering my fat finger flailings, alternating between hitting a one pixel button amongst a sea of mis-aligned text and a grid of six big stupid square things, two of which are ads, and all of which are algorithm-computed content that isn't really what I wanted to see...
- TFNA 1mo ago
  Big Tech is nefarious, but not the only force to blame. I think that modern internet use would be inferior to the early millennium regardless, just because people's main interface these days is the smartphone with its small screen and keyboard, and that tends to discourage long-form text and nuance. If you look at libre corners of the internet, they have seen that decline nearly as much as corporate platforms.
bluecheese452 1mo ago
Another thing not mentioned is that not everyone had a camera 24/7. You could act silly without fear that one minor fuckup would haunt you the rest of your life.
slackfan 1mo ago
And people were yapping away on their phones while driving and crashing into trees. I remember it too. It wasn't that rosy.
ethagnawl 1mo ago
The author hints at _the end of ownership_ when talking about physical media but I think that's been a significant regression worth emphasizing. There have been countless stories about people losing access to their favorite movie when streaming service's licensing agreement expires, Amazon removing books from their Kindle library for ... reasons, Sony moving to digital-only PlayStation releases, etc. These examples are annoying and mostly hinder access to content but there's also the legacy element (what do my children inherit? My Steam account? Some sampler app I used to make music instead of analog hardware?), the inability to share books or music with friends and family, the surveillance aspects, etc. This class of issues has also started to bleed over into The Real World, as companies no longer sell you dumb appliances but a license (which they can terminate) to use, for example, a computer on wheels _in the ways that they see fit_.
andrewla 1mo ago
I find this way of thinking to be almost alien. There's nothing here that I would want to go back to. You could not give me enough money that I would trade down to a 2000-era cell phone from my current phone. "Technology was a tool, not a lifestyle" -- well, guess what! It's still just a tool, not a lifestyle. I'm shitposting here instead of on slashdot, big whoop. My lifestyle is completely unrelated to this. The "physical world"? What if I want to listen to a song that I heard on the radio the other day, or that I heard playing in a store or something, or that someone told me about? I can't just "pop a CD in the player", there's a whole thing where I have to literally purchase the music from a store that sells music. How is that possibly better than the world where I can just pull up the album and play it? Pop in a DVD? Are you insane? "There was a very obvious boundary between being online and being offline. Today that boundary basically doesn't exist. You wake up online. You work online. You eat while watching something online. You walk while listening to something online. You go to bed while scrolling online." So ... maybe the "work online" thing applies. But none of the others do. Maybe the listening while walking too; but I had a crazy thing called a "walkman" (I'm old) and "ipod" (but not that old) back in the day too. I guess circa 2000 I might have had an mp3 player. But the others I opt out of because I don't want to. It's easy ... just don't do that? "Social media" -- I absolutely hate this term because it combines two unrelated things; friend networks and user-generated content. Most of my friend networks have abandoned online social media almost entirely, and I in turn will almost never use it. User-generated content is fun but I'm a lurker and a consumer, I have no hopes or dreams of becoming an "influencer" or "going viral" or whatever. I understand that for some people that is a dream, like being a rock star or a movie star was when I was younger, but I simply opt out of this and it doesn't affect my life. I could go on and on. I simply don't understand how the author finds themselves in this bind where they are "forced" to use technology they don't want to use. Just ... don't use it.
glimshe 1mo ago
In my opinion, it was early 90s. In my parent's opinion, it was early 60s. I wonder what my grandparents thought...
tclover 1mo ago
Depends on how you define humanity

43 points by lukaszkups 1mo ago

I think the peak internet experience was blogging. When social networks and social media came along, the decline started happening fast, and I began to see it that way. I was genuinely excited when the iPhone 2G came out, but then that excitement faded, and I quit all social stuff. I still feel nostalgic for the early days of the internet, when people and communities were truly connected.

mdlxxv 1mo ago

Ah, yes. 9/11. The "war on terror". "Peak of humanity", indeed.

mananaysiempre 1mo ago
None of the sequelae of that have really improved since then, at least as far as the first world is concerned. The foundations of universal surveillance were being laid down, but it wasn’t yet feasible. Police (transport security, border patrol, potato, pot-ah-to) ruffling through your belongings had not yet been normalized. You could transact with cash. People largely still sort of believed that talking to your political opponents would lead to better outcomes than making them comply under threat of government violence or unemployment. (Plenty of things sucked, don’t get me wrong, it’s just that a lot of the fallout from the “war on terror” was still in the upper atmosphere.)

ashleyn 1mo ago

I kinda feel like many might be biased to view the era of their own youth as the peak of humanity.

vegnus 1mo ago

Explain how there was "kind of" instant messengers. AIM had already been out for years at that point

kees99 1mo ago
By year 2000, there were "proprietary" messengers aplenty - yahoo, aim, icq, qq, and a bunch more. All of which were simple enough to reverse engineer, so Linux user could just install Gaim (later renamed Pidgin) and connect to most any of those. What's more, there were already two open standards: SIP/SIMPLE, and newer XMPP.
- rw_grim 1mo ago
  I assure you stuff like OSCAR (the protocol for AIM and ICQ) is anything but simple and was a huge effort by many people to reverse engineer.

mrkpdl 1mo ago

I think I agree with the premise of this. I miss when there were limits on our time with the web each day. I miss not being expected to be up to speed. I really miss magazines. Etc. Windows XP/Panther felt capable enough. If we could go back I think turn by turn navigation would be the hardest thing to give up.

comradesmith 1mo ago
I actively avoid using navigation. If I’ve already been there once I’ll just try get there without it. Sometimes I check the route on Google maps first to get an idea, then close it. I think navigation is like a muscle and you’ve got to train it. Though I do like rerouting depending on traffic conditions. I guess in some cities that would basically feel mandatory to use
- vel0city 1mo ago
  > Though I do like rerouting depending on traffic conditions This is the biggest reason why I'll use navigation even when I know almost a dozen different ways to go somewhere. Using navigation services, its easier to tell if its worth it today to take the toll roads someplace, or if I should really avoid that bridge today, or what not. Choosing the route blindly can sometimes make a difference of a half hour or $10+ of unnecessary tolls depending on the journeys I take.
  - cucumber3732842 1mo ago
    Wait until you find out the navigation app lies to you based on where it thinks you "should" be driving. I can consistently shave 4-5(!!) minutes by taking a right at a light and coming into a further light from a different direction rather than going straight and sitting in gridlock for 4/5ths of a mile that would've taken ~10min. No illegal turn or difficult left or anything. Basically if I can see the traffic up ahead I ignore my GPS and take the right, instant ETA drop. I have other local examples but that's the most egregious.
    - 1mo ago

giaour 1mo ago

I don’t know the author’s age but suspect this is an entry in the “<my teenage years/early twenties> were the peak of humanity” genre.

bensyverson 1mo ago
Every generation has their “good ole days.” Unfortunately the old days never were that good for people who were around at the time.
- kypro 1mo ago
  You say that but people of a few different generations in my family all agree the late 90s / early 00s were amazing. Some romanticise how things were in their childhood, but most would say that the late 90s / early 00s were objective a great time to be alive.
  - bensyverson 1mo ago
    It was a great time for a certain group of people, but if you happened to be black, or gay, or trans, or Muslim, or had a pre-existing medical condition, it was not so rosy. I was in my late teens / early 20s at the time, and not in any of those groups, but I did not find the late 90s/early 2000s to be particularly "amazing" or objectively great. I wanted to make movies, but film was incredibly expensive, and digital video wasn't yet good enough. I wanted to make ambitious software, but absolutely everything was harder and lower-level back then. It was harder and more expensive to get something delivered, and before you say that was better and we're all spoiled by Amazon, the net result was that you had to drive all over the city to pick stuff up. We knew high-speed internet would change things, but it wasn't there yet. The internet kind of sucked (sorry). I remember spending hours on Excite and AltaVista searching for obscure information that now wouldn't be considered obscure in the slightest, and when I finally found something, it was rarely helpful. Don't get me wrong, I have nostalgia for the early internet, but at the time, we all knew it would get better. I wanted every video to look as good as Apple's movie trailer site, and it took about 10 years for that to happen. There were plenty of good things about that time, but this "good ole days" thinking is dangerous. It's the antithesis of gratitude. It gets in the way of having vision and imagining a better future.

kaon_2 1mo ago

Indeed go ask anybody in China, India, North-Africa, or Eastern Europe. I am sure they will tell you things were better back then. Oh wait. Seems like the author never read Hans Rosling's Factfulness. Big recommendation for anyone out there who hasn't yet. If you have find yourself having a bleak outlook, this book is an antidote: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34890015-factfulness https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34890015-factfulness

testing22321 1mo ago
Agree 100% One of the best books I’ve ever read, extremely enlightening.
TFNA 1mo ago
Early 2000s in my corner of Eastern Europe (Romania) was a very optimistic time. Higher salaries for locally employed educated people were on the horizon, while there was also the ability to work seasonally abroad and make a good sum that could be invested back home. Infrastructure started to see improvement through EU funds. And, to relate this to the linked post, lots of citydwellers then got broadband and found the internet transformational and positive for their lives. In fact, it was a far more optimistic time than since about 2020, as soaring cost of food and going out means even privileged middle-class people are complaining, and infrastructure improvements have stagnated.
yCombLinks 1mo ago
Despite the article title, it's clearly about technology usage patterns roughly 25 years ago being a lot better than they are today. Its obviously from the PoV of someone in a developed western country, probably America. Every single time someone brings up positive things about the past there's always some 'Nuh uh, look at how bad this thing you weren't a part of was at that time.'. Boring, pedantic, and not even relevant to what the article is about.
Markoff 1mo ago
> Indeed go ask anybody in China, India, North-Africa, or Eastern Europe. I've had pretty good time in "Eastern" (Central) Europe, so did my wife in China. People were still optimistic about EU/euro, that lasted roughly until Lisbon treaty when they forced Ireland to repeat the referendum until they got result they wanted, which later become EU's MO and since then it went all downhill, with another major successes as Wir schaffen das 2015, Green deal 2020 or Totalitarian COVID pass 2021. Hard to understand someone who can still support this failed project. I would just dissolve it and return back to EEA. Next time maybe ask actually people from those countries instead of parroting some writer.

mdrzn 1mo ago

I can't stand. When people type like this. New line after every dot. Even when not necessary. Ultra short sentences. I guess it's "cool"?

2snakes 1mo ago
Yimspeak.
cjs_ac 1mo ago
I think it started on LinkedIn, where posts got more reach depending on how many users clicked the 'See More' expander link, so users who wanted to be 'Thought Leaders' were incentivised to present their banal ideas using as many newlines as possible.
- swed420 1mo ago
  \n;dr
kypro 1mo ago
This was how I learnt to write, as it's how I think. I latter learnt in school that writing is only deemed correct when it's stylised into elaborate sentences structures that no human would use when thinking in their own heads. If you're just trying to convey a thought I don't know why people care? Could you not understand the point OP was making or something? In what way is this a less valid way of writing (aside from the fact it's not what's taught as correct in school?)
- analognoise 1mo ago
  Is this satire? Please, lord Jesus, let this be satire.
  - kirth_gersen 1mo ago
    you know in your heart it's not
  - 1mo ago

stetrain 1mo ago

> Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about.

zecg 1mo ago

As if it's mandated now to have social networks on your smartphone. I uninstalled anything owned by Zuckerberg or fucking Spez, I use only Signal for chat and Openstreetmap with offline vector maps for navigation. I have no tiktok or forever-scrolling apps.

colonelpopcorn 1mo ago

Isn't this the central conceit behind "The Matrix"? lol

tim333 1mo ago
The Matrix is more the 90s with the peak as 1999. >Morpheus: You believe it’s the year 1999 when in fact it’s closer to 2199. I can’t tell you exactly what year it is because we honestly don’t know. There’s nothing I can say that will explain it for you, Neo.

titzer 1mo ago

Tech is the way it is because Big Tech wants it to be. Social media is engineered to be the most profitable for the big corporations who run the attention economy which incidentally is a surveillance and content exploitation economy hosting too many narcissists yammering for attention. The software world is several stages of enshittification deep, and yet we're awash in incredible hardware that would be mind-blowing if we weren't so constantly distracted with how much noise and bother the software makes.

chrismarlow9 1mo ago
> we're awash in incredible hardware that would be mind-blowing if we weren't so constantly distracted with how much noise and bother the software makes. This is the part of it that bums me out the most. I just wish aesthetics didn't drive so much of the current tech world. Everything has an absolutely beautiful interface now that is slow, buggy, can't be shared, etc. But I guess at least it's pretty and pays the bills.
- titzer 1mo ago
  Agreed. Have a look at the music app that Jordan Rudess built for the iPad that allows a kind of tapped steel guitar / keyboard interface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JA4DqWmHBY&t=165s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JA4DqWmHBY&t=165s He made the touch screen interface into a low latency, multi-touch musical instrument. I couldn't seem to find if he had made this program open source or otherwise available, but it looks pretty cool. I am amazed at the displays, CPUs, memory, networks, storage, and not to mention GPUs of 2026. They are really incredible. Then I derp around on my tablet with these clunky ad-laden websites with extremely poor layout, janky scrolling, barely registering my fat finger flailings, alternating between hitting a one pixel button amongst a sea of mis-aligned text and a grid of six big stupid square things, two of which are ads, and all of which are algorithm-computed content that isn't really what I wanted to see...
TFNA 1mo ago
Big Tech is nefarious, but not the only force to blame. I think that modern internet use would be inferior to the early millennium regardless, just because people's main interface these days is the smartphone with its small screen and keyboard, and that tends to discourage long-form text and nuance. If you look at libre corners of the internet, they have seen that decline nearly as much as corporate platforms.

bluecheese452 1mo ago

Another thing not mentioned is that not everyone had a camera 24/7. You could act silly without fear that one minor fuckup would haunt you the rest of your life.

slackfan 1mo ago

And people were yapping away on their phones while driving and crashing into trees. I remember it too. It wasn't that rosy.

ethagnawl 1mo ago

The author hints at _the end of ownership_ when talking about physical media but I think that's been a significant regression worth emphasizing. There have been countless stories about people losing access to their favorite movie when streaming service's licensing agreement expires, Amazon removing books from their Kindle library for ... reasons, Sony moving to digital-only PlayStation releases, etc. These examples are annoying and mostly hinder access to content but there's also the legacy element (what do my children inherit? My Steam account? Some sampler app I used to make music instead of analog hardware?), the inability to share books or music with friends and family, the surveillance aspects, etc. This class of issues has also started to bleed over into The Real World, as companies no longer sell you dumb appliances but a license (which they can terminate) to use, for example, a computer on wheels _in the ways that they see fit_.

andrewla 1mo ago

I find this way of thinking to be almost alien. There's nothing here that I would want to go back to. You could not give me enough money that I would trade down to a 2000-era cell phone from my current phone. "Technology was a tool, not a lifestyle" -- well, guess what! It's still just a tool, not a lifestyle. I'm shitposting here instead of on slashdot, big whoop. My lifestyle is completely unrelated to this. The "physical world"? What if I want to listen to a song that I heard on the radio the other day, or that I heard playing in a store or something, or that someone told me about? I can't just "pop a CD in the player", there's a whole thing where I have to literally purchase the music from a store that sells music. How is that possibly better than the world where I can just pull up the album and play it? Pop in a DVD? Are you insane? "There was a very obvious boundary between being online and being offline. Today that boundary basically doesn't exist. You wake up online. You work online. You eat while watching something online. You walk while listening to something online. You go to bed while scrolling online." So ... maybe the "work online" thing applies. But none of the others do. Maybe the listening while walking too; but I had a crazy thing called a "walkman" (I'm old) and "ipod" (but not that old) back in the day too. I guess circa 2000 I might have had an mp3 player. But the others I opt out of because I don't want to. It's easy ... just don't do that? "Social media" -- I absolutely hate this term because it combines two unrelated things; friend networks and user-generated content. Most of my friend networks have abandoned online social media almost entirely, and I in turn will almost never use it. User-generated content is fun but I'm a lurker and a consumer, I have no hopes or dreams of becoming an "influencer" or "going viral" or whatever. I understand that for some people that is a dream, like being a rock star or a movie star was when I was younger, but I simply opt out of this and it doesn't affect my life. I could go on and on. I simply don't understand how the author finds themselves in this bind where they are "forced" to use technology they don't want to use. Just ... don't use it.

glimshe 1mo ago

In my opinion, it was early 90s. In my parent's opinion, it was early 60s. I wonder what my grandparents thought...

tclover 1mo ago

Depends on how you define humanity