Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

For me it was when tech no longer served me and my interests. Anything tech does for me these days is usually just a means to get me to use it so that someone else can collect data, push ads, or control me. There's rarely a product or service that doesn't have some hidden cost or give someone else power over you.

Cars have internet, but track your location, can listen in on your conversations, and optional features or the engine itself can be remotely disabled. Phones are powerful computers in our pockets, but are mainly intended for media consumption and data collection. They are also heavily locked down and controlled. Updates are automatically pushed to our devices and software with no notification of what's been changed and no way to decline anti-features and user hostile changes.

I still have some hope for the future of tech, but we need to find a way to get tech to work for us again instead of also being used against us. So far things look like they're going to get much worse before they get better. More spying, more restrictions, more consolidation, fewer choices for consumers, less ownership, fewer customization options, less access and less accountability for companies when data gets leaked or people get hurt.

Things have stabilized a bit. I think the the 00's were exceptional on many fronts; Mobile phones went from huge phones to tiny feature packed gadgets, many other cool gadgets came to popularity (mp3 players, wireless headphones, portable dvd players, bluetooth headsets etc etc), web 2 and startups in general became a thing, HTML/CSS/JS got decent and took over, computing in general took off like nothing else. On many fronts there was massive acceleration.

I think the slow down start 10's ish. But it's not as much a slow down as more stabilizing. Innovation is still very much happening and much more advanced, groundbreaking and useful than it was, but maybe not as "new and shiny" as for example a motorola razr or nokia ngage. I think contrast is what's missing, from 0 to 100 is much intenser than 100 to 200. You can kind of predict what's coming so even though revolutionary, not as surprising or exciting.

But I still find tech very cool. The gadgets I have now are absolutely mind blowing if you think about it and they are actually useful, I pay with my watch, I have a laptop without fans and with a battery that runs all day, I talk to my watch to turn on the lights, I also work from home for a company in a different country with people spread across the world, I could go on.

There's a good Douglas Adams quote that explains this;

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

In my impression it really accelerated after the '08 financial crisis (+- a few years for all the people who left wall street and went to HBS) after being an ibanker was no longer cool or well paid and the people who would have gone there decided to come to Silicon Valley. That's a huge mass of people who are grinders who just want to make money and quick and have a totally different mindset than the people who wanted to build cool shit that solved their own and others problems. In my mind these are the people who did GSB/HBS, Google PM, failed at a startup that raised a bunch of money from their friends and network, and then became a VC. Not that these folks were all bad, they probably did help professionalize the tech industry and focus it on solving big problems (unfortunately imo that was overindexed on potential returns rather than potential positive impact) and brought huge amounts of capital to bear on the industry. But yeah, I left SF after the millionth pitch I heard of people who were going to build a world changing product and it ended up being on-demand laundry service or 10 minute grocery pickup while being in a city surrounded by homeless tent camps and people in such mental anguish that they would be screaming in the streets in broad daylight.

I agree with all the comments about this sentiment coming from maturity. That's been my experience. Tech feels less exciting the more I realize its limitations in affecting the human experience.

I would add though that exponentially increasing complexity adds a separation between the ubiquitous tech around us and the hobbyist tech we can just enjoy. It's hard now to find something cool, get your hands dirty as a hobbyist and have it be comparable to the majority of tech finding application in the real-world. The best you can do is dabble in the superficial applications and software abstracted away from the real underlying tech.