As with most things there’s the good & bad. I discard what I don’t like.
For example, half or more of the ‘features’ that came with my car I’ve disconnected because, to me, they’re useless. They came in a package with an item I did want.
I sense some fellow shoppers scoffing at my inability to use a self checkout. It’s not an inability—I could probably take the thing apart & put it back together, having worked for years with computers etc. It’s the ongoing level of diminished service that keeps me from using the thing. Anytime a self check is used, know you’re being played for the sucker you are. Also known as corporate greed. Anything to squeeze another nickle at the expense of service & quality.
Smart phones are generally useless except as a poor man’s computer. I say that because a lot of what people use a phone for can be done better (& more secure) with a computer. Except the mobile factor of course.
It’s wrong that to have accounts with companies there’s an expectation that one must own a phone worth several hundred and a data/phone subscription on top of that. I don’t think Ticketmaster will sell you a ticket without the prerequisite that you own a smart phone. Not right. I can’t count the number of times I’ve sent someone something only to be told ‘I’m not seeing that’, or not seeing all of that. Straight away I know they’re on a phone with a useless 5 inch screen & semi functional software.
I think what I’m getting at is a lot of these technologies are being shoved down our throats with little option whether we like it or not and too many people confuse new tech with better when it quite often isn’t better at all. Corporations rely on the younger crowd that knows no better to become their flag bearers and what a lot don’t seem to get is that it’s all in the name of more profit. No other reason at all.
I don’t know what the hell generation I am - because that’s another thing I’m anti, is that everything, everything seems to have to be fit into a label. A category. Ever look up a movie, or music? It can’t just be classics, rock or jazz or blues. Under those is so many subcategories that you don’t know where to look. Similar for everything.
I’ve strayed a bit but my point was; it ain’t all good and if one does a bit of history in a lot of cases there can be good examples of why things were the way they were whereas it seems more & more these days changes are for two reasons only - money & greed.
Of course another huge thing against new tech is that much of it serves little useful purpose other than as spyware. Intrusion into personal lives so you can be manipulated at worst and sold shit you have no use for at best.
I expect this thread will bring out the ‘defenders until death’ crowd. Part of the addiction I suppose.
If they actually used the ill-defined term “plugged in”, then that could explain it. I use the internet lots, but would I describe myself as “plugged in”? Probably not.
Between today or 1987, I’d choose the tech of today. But, for a third option, I’d head back to the mid 90s when the internet didn’t feel like it was owned by a handful of megacorps, things were still weird and fun, and the internet wasn’t something you had in your hand 24/7.
Plus, if we’re literally going back in time, I’ll be in much better shape with more hair.
I do pine for the days just before the Internet took off, when comparatively fewer people knew about BBSes, dial-up modems, and ASCII. Back then, it was more underground, and only the “cool” people were in on it. We’d get together at parties, share our technological secrets, and leave the normies outside.
Today, the Internet is way too valuable a resource to give up. I have coworkers across the world, and have to share multiple gigs of files with them. In the dial-up days, we would have had to snail-mail CDs to each other, as downloading would probably have taken longer and been subject to constant interrupts. So while I’m bummed that idiots have the same access to technology I do, I wouldn’t be able to continue working without it.
First of all, I’m not so sure that the latter is really a cure for the former.
Ennui and general boredom can often be a motivating force to go out and do something useful and productive. Read a book. Take up a hobby. Go to the gym. Go out and meet people. The internet makes it very easy to just sit there for hours doing nothing and be entertained.
OTOH, the internet also makes it way easier to find stuff to do and people to do it with.
I graduated college in 1995 so we barely had email and certainly no Facebook, YouTube or other social media. I’m not so sure that I would have liked growing up in an age where every stupid thing we did as teenagers could potentially be broadcast to the world. And we certainly did a lot of stupid shit.
I’m the last of the boomers, born late in '64, so I identified more with Gen X growing up. I love the internet and would not willingly want to go back to a ‘simpler’ time.
Yet, that said, if there was some sort of apocalyptic event that caused the internet and technology in general to go away, I’d adapt just fine. I’ve done a lot of camping in my younger days, and I’m old enough to remember well doing pre-internet things like breaking out the big folding paper map to figure out where the heck I’m going on a road trip. Or taking a trip to the library to research something I want to learn more about. Or actually leaving the house to go to a brick & mortar store when I needed something.
I don’t know that I agree with all of this, but I will say that I don’t like how the drive towards trying to “digitize” everything seems to make interactions very transactional. Like dating or job hunting or other activities get reduced to a series of parameters that can be optimized by some algorithm. That, in turn, incentivizes people to game the system by maximizing their scores.
" technology is no more nor less than what you make of it"
This is a canonical truth that is a complete falsehood. Having spent a good half century resisting new technology, as well as thinking about it a great deal, my opinion is that new technology changes cultures and individuals with the inexorable force of a juggernaut, no matter what the ultimate effects. There are extremely few cultures that have steadfastly gazed at the whole effect of a technology and made a decision that it was not congruent with the goals and health of the community. They almost always have a deeply held spiritual or religious set of core values which make that possible. The Amish obviously come to mind.
Individuals fare worse. No matter what you believe or wish, if the culture around you universally adopts a technology, it is going to eventually force you to adopt it as well, or live with the ever-increasing social costs of abstaining. Remember pay phones? What about your DVD collection?
But there are deeper changes. A hundred years ago there were thousands of varieties of fruit and vegetables, hundreds of breeds of domestic animals. Almost all of those are extinct, along with all that biodiversity and local adaptiveness. They have all been replaced with the very few varieties that are amenable to new agricultural technologies that produce the most profit for global corporations. So new technologies dictate what you can buy in the grocery store – that’s but one example. Every aspect of your life is limited by technologies you have zero choice about participating in.
The only way to opt out of a technology typically involves adopting a complex regimen of extra labor, research, time, networking. For example, you can eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables not available in markets by growing your own from seeds either from a seed-savers exchange or a niche seed company. Almost everything is like that.
You can argue that before the new technologies everyone had to work that hard, but that’s not quite the case. The world was then organized around such work, which made it far easier to make happen. Just like pay phones.
I don’t have illusions about the halcyon days of yore. I just see the horrible damage of modernity. I don’t remember a time when I did not.
Born in 1973, so I’m peak Gen-X. I was on “the scene” in the early-mid 80s with BBSes, I had a CompuServe account when it was actually its own thing, I remember FidoNet and all those services that connected BBSes in the middle of the night to transmit data.
I’ll keep the internet. Both personally and work related (emailing contracts is actually pretty awesome). What I’d give up:
-I don’t love the constant connection of the phone. I resisted a cell phone early on because I noticed that once you have one, people get upset when you don’t want to be bothered. Noticed that in my personal life at first, but it really ramped up with work.
-I don’t like the silos that the internet creates. It’s way too easy to build yourself a world that’s nothing but self-validating. I see this with a relative who is always going on about things he “knows” that are not correct, usually in the half-true sense.
I was born in late ‘63. We part of the sane micro generation that is neither Boomer nor X. Generation Jones.
It would be great to take away all of the bad things and keep the good things but given the binary choice of keep everything or dump it, the choice is easy. I’d never go back. I love the web.
Interesting! I had never heard of “Generation Jones”. So we’re sort of a ‘lost generation’ stuck between the boomers and the Gen-Xers, eh?
Wonder if that’s what all the Mr. Jones songs are about:
You raise up your head and you ask, “Is this where it is?”
And somebody points to you and says, “It’s his”
And you say, “What’s mine?” and somebody else says, “Well, what is?”
And you say, “Oh my God, am I here all alone?”
But something is happening and you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?
–Bob Dylan
Mr. Jones and me
Looked into the future
Yeah, we stare at the beautiful women
She’s looking at you
I don’t think so
She’s looking at me
Standing in the spotlight
I bought myself a gray guitar
When everybody loves me
I will never be lonely
I will never be lonely
Said I’m never gonna be lonely
–Counting Crows
Mr. Jones
Put a wiggle in your stride
Loosen up
I believe he’ll be alright
Changing clothes
Now he’s got ventilated slacks
Bouncing off the walls
Mr. Jones is back!
–Talking Heads
I miss the freedom of leaving the house and enjoying the day. No one knew where I was or could reach me until I got home. I had a answering machine for messages
Pay phones were available if I needed help.
I guess its possible to carry a shut off phone for emergencies. It’s not the same. People expect answers to texts and calls.
I do like access to news and weather. The internet does have useful features.
Having searched for employment in the pre-internet days, I can firmly state I would not go back. I had to mail resumes to employers and wait in my apartment during business hours for a potential call.
Also, I am much more relaxed having my phone on me and therefore knowing there are no emergencies in my personal or professional life. The routine stuff can be ignored. Know the shit has not hit the fan while I’m out and about is a huge relief.
As far as I can tell, the internet has given far, far more than it has taken from me personally. So no, I don’t want to go back to before the internet.
Yes. By the mid-'90s it was already quite clear that the Internet “sucked” in the sense of not ushering in a global utopia with free access to true information and eliminating barriers and prejudices, opening people’s minds, and in fact was quite ripe for abuse and for bad actors to exploit the general public.
Sure, if your career requires you to use the Internet, you cannot simply “opt out”.
But, I know I am being optimistic, but if people are being crushed by industrialization and modernity, that is a cultural problem that could be changed, not something inherent to humans being tool-users.