Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

> If you look at the newest operating systems (Android, iOS, ChromeOS, Fuschia), they're all extremely same-y

Agreed. This is the central argument present in the old "Unix Haters Handbook". It describes Unix as a virus.

> Go, Swift, Kotlin etc - all nice langs but very much of a muchness and avoid new ideas

Agreed. This is what I think Greenspun was getting at with his "tenth rule".

> iii. Hardware: also stagnant outside of mobile.

Agreed, but I sure hope it doesn't stay this way.

I still want real smart glasses that look like regular glasses, but perform as well as an expensive VR headset.

My wife still wants digital nail polish like the receptionist in Total Recall (1990) has.

> Web ideology has been fading with time and Google's dominance.

I'm not sure that "web ideology" was ever really a thing outside of those responsible for describing why the WWW took off. The reason I say this is that people have been trying to shoehorn it into an application delivery platform since almost day #1. If something akin to Java applets had taken off, then I think we'd be looking at a very different, significantly-less-open web today.

Things weren't universally interesting years ago either. There was plenty of corps being late to industries, producing bad products or services that were out of touch and clearly hadn't consulted with real-world users.

We just tend to remember the victors. Have a skim through some old computer magazine archives, or old audio gear magazine archives, you'll soon realize that there was a lot of junk even 40 years ago, let alone plenty of inappropriate uses of tech that never caught on in any meaningful capacity. The industry has always been full of solutions in search of problems.

Some sick, demented part of me loves seeing whacky and weird over-engineering of decades-past. Another part of me loves being humbled by realizing the potential of something that simply never caught on, but is now lost in terms of patent limbo or IP ownership. I've bought a few old bits of tech, loved them and make regular use of them.

Satanic panic happened in the US, UK and that's it. The ills of the modern internet are globally distributed.

It's significantly less exciting when you know that the economics of generative AI means that it's largest and most popular use case will be for uninteresting things like automating the graphics for a block of Facebook ads.

Counter point to this, is that centralized mass media enabled early 20th century fascism and communism to thrive. Hitler's head of propaganda, Goebbels, supplied subsidized radios to the Germans and used it to funnel propaganda into German households at the speed of light. Goebbels had this to say about it:

"It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio....It is no exaggeration to say that the German revolution, at least in the form it took, would have been impossible without the airplane and the radio. ...[Radio] reached the entire nation, regardless of class, standing, or religion. That was primarily the result of the tight centralization, the strong reporting, and the up-to-date nature of the German radio....Above all it is necessary to clearly centralize all radio activities, to place spiritual tasks ahead of technical ones,...to provide a clear worldview"

While a decentralized internet may host extreme views in certain pockets, it also enables a diversity of viewpoints to be expressed, which more often than not serve to regulate those in power as well as inform those without.