71–80 of 495 posts
You can still live like what's described in this article. Get yourself a dumbphone and a paper atlas, only pay with cash, avoid loyalty cards, read paper books, newspapers, etc Now and then I do that, just to switch off from our hyper-connected world. Switching off is the new peace of mind.
Your friend won't wait an hour for you, though.
The unmentioned thing here is why? Why does the world with a smartphone and today's hyper-connectivity seem so different now compared to what it used to? Did people feel the same way when the railroad and other forms of rapid transport showed up? What makes things feel so different? Is it more competition, and for what? Is it that things are just faster, and the certainties have changed? Has it fundamentally changed…
The thing that rings out for me in this essay: "Once plans were made, I showed up without any further contact to check whether we were, in fact, “still on for tonight,”" I miss that. Used to be that if you made plans to meet someone, they would come to that time and place. Amazing! And the difference is not even limited to your friends and dating. Now we can't even count on regularly scheduled activities to happen as…
Now I feel old. I remember vividly running around with my first camera, looking for objects worthy of being photographed. The film cost money, so did developing it into pictures. I really had to weigh the pros and cons of taking a particular picture. And in a class of ~25 kids, I was one of three who owned a camera. Not that it was such a luxury item, but most people weren't into that. These days, (nearly) everyone c…
Nowadays, a physical album seems to have taken the place of your camera in the 90s. Not quite a luxury item, but you'd have to be "into that" to go to the trouble of making a physical album.
Now I feel old. I remember vividly running around with my first camera, looking for objects worthy of being photographed. The film cost money, so did developing it into pictures. I really had to weigh the pros and cons of taking a particular picture. And in a class of ~25 kids, I was one of three who owned a camera. Not that it was such a luxury item, but most people weren't into that. These days, (nearly) everyone c…
People our age only have a few childhood pictures, and they are warped by time on analog media. Those pictures of us as a kid look really old because they are naturally filtered. Soon people will wonder WTF old-pic filters are for, and some historian will have to explain why it's blurred and the colors are faded. Also why did people have clothes for each decade?
Our kids, by contrast, have had pictures taken of them every week at least. With metadata so you know where you were. And they're digital images that won't fade. When our kids are 40, they can look at an archive of how they looked pretty much every week of their lives. Not only that, they can already search the archive for particular situations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can always go back, any time! Get a dumb phone. It's great. Engage with others more authentically, more meaningfully, and more consistently.
Tried it, hated it. Everyone is using WhatsApp, Telegram, whatever. Try typing a sms with those tiny buttons, it sucks. There is a reason why some people have a smartphone but not a computer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> * Inane arguments in pubs about facts that couldn't be instantly googled. I don't miss those. Before the Internet, if it wasn't on an encyclopedia and you weren't at the library, you had no way of corroborating information. On the other hand, since facts are so accessible right now, those arguments have shifted to voicing their feelings and wishes because those can't be falsified.
The fundamental way that humans begin bonding is through favor exchange. I give you something. You give me something. Back and forth until eventually we lose count and realize we have become fast friends. Information sharing is an extremely low barrier kind of favor because when I give you some information, I still have it too. When we no longer need each other to learn about that hole in the wall restaurant, that ne…
And yet the best information is still person-to-person, old school. It lives in the cracks that software misses and where review systems are gamed. Finding good Indian food is hard - but the locals know. Who has an open mic night? Hard to say without connections. Maybe the ultimate example is real estate - deep knowledge of any given place comes after you've lived there, and understand it's history, is life. And that's impossible to represent online.
>cheap consumer goods
Yes: making everything in Shenzen is a problem because now it's the only community that knows how to make and fix things. (Obviously its not 100% the case, but its mostly the case.) That lack of distributed ability has follow-on effects that we don't understand yet -- most worryingly having to do with national security, but also about agency and curiosity and self-determination. Maybe we should have to pass a test before being allowed to use any particular object, showing that we at least know how its made and where it's constituent parts come from.
> I had no influence and never disrupted anything. Strangers did not wish me a happy birthday or “Like” me. My personal brand was invisible.
> I did not take photos of myself, was not filtered
These things have always been happening; society just previously only had enough resources to set its scorching eye on politicians, nobles, and celebrities, in such a way as to force these thoughts and behaviors as reaction. Now there's enough attention for everybody, whether they like it or not.
> There was no surveillance of the streets.
Sure there was. It was just the unreliable and biased eye-witness kind of surveillance. One of the main purpose of the "city guard" was patrolling and noting down suspicious behavior.
Pre-globalization, many large cities would by default have border walls and border checks, where you'd have to state your purpose of visit and get your entry/exit recorded in a logbook.
Also, there were a lot of curfews. Curfew laws used to be pretty common, enabling city guards to treat anyone who is out at night as a de-facto criminal, enabling immediate search-and-seizure.
> News was not breaking
Sure it was. There was less space to fill, and so "breaking news" was limited to things of wider relevance, but it still happened, and still spread quickly. Even pre radio, there was "breaking news" in newspapers, pushed into the edition at the last minute. The whole value-prop of the telegraph was to spread "breaking news."
> The only content users generated was letters to the editor.
Depending on the era, you're forgetting about:
• Usenet
• Public-access television
• Call-in radio shows
• Open-participation scientific journals and "societies of letters"
Also, people could just sit down and write a book. Or, more likely, a memoir. The interesting ones would eventually get discovered and published, if perhaps post-humously.
> I rarely got to feel outraged by the words of people I’d never met.
They were there, in books/memoirs. People who read a lot of this generally made a career (in Literary Criticism) out of it.
> The only bingeing I did involved alcohol. I’d wait an entire week to watch the next episode.
You could have been binging serial novels!
> acquaintances never asked me to finance their ... back surgery
Sure they did; they likely did it through by presenting their problem to the local church, who then asked you to donate on their behalf. They're still doing that, in fact. GoFundMe is communal charity for non-religious people.
> I didn’t think about wage gaps, redlining, gerrymandering, or the intricacies of romantic encounters.
People have been talking about all of these things (perhaps under different names) for centuries. They're hard to avoid, in fact, if you read the writings of "statesmen" of previous eras.
> My desk’s height did not adjust; I just sat in a chair and took it.
You could have just had one short desk and one tall one. Or a writing desk. Most people didn't, though. The real modern difference is a self-interested motivation to have good ergonomics.
> butts that were incapable of functioning as shelves.
Such butts certainly existed; they were just not evenly distributed. :)
Maybe is just me but I read this as a satire of modern days and not as a satire of the old days. Most things the author hints as awkward in the past, the “optimized” version sounds frivolous. I’m not a zealot of old times but if we are honest with ourselves we realize that most new stuff is crap. 90% somebody said. Few changes are net improvements.
But I appreciate the balance of the author, reminding us that there were shortcomings: always trusting police comes to mind.