As Western civilization decays, it’s easy to forget that the errors that inaugurated a new dark age were sold as steps toward a shiny, sexy utopia. Progress is essential to the Death Cult’s moral myth much as salvation informs Christian teleology.
The Cult’s brand evangelists prophesied that technological advances like the microchip, the pill, and the internet would help us build a post-scarcity, post-national, post-Christian world.
Poverty, racial divisions, and in time, death itself, would be conquered by the march of science.
Modernism can be thought of as a grand experiment to see if science could survive cut off from the Christian cosmology that birthed it. The tech and medical establishments’ catastrophic response to what should have been a moderate public health emergency hints at the answer.
The decline in consumer electronics and software illustrates the consequences of divorcing science from Christian metaphysics. Each new generation of smartphones lacks basic features and even removes previous functions. Not that much substantive difference exists between the two kinds of phones besides price.
If any market epitomizes the false choice to which consumer tech has devolved, it’s computer operating systems. Windows users and Mac users once constituted distinct rival markets. Now, the latest version of Windows is a brazen Mac OS ripoff. Home computer users now have as many OS choices as Model T owners had color options.
The lack of variety might not be so bad if anything worked anymore. Instead, search engines spit out sponsored, censored results. Online content consumers are at the mercy of haywire algorithms whose corporate owners couldn’t fix them if they wanted to. Each new software update breaks users’ devices while increasing the extent to which they’re spied on.
Some might feel dismay at this retrogression trend. But others recognize it as an invitation to cleanse their lives of needless, even harmful, junk and embrace simplicity. Pitch the spying device in your pocket. Ditch the AAA mud genre for retro games. Go outside.
Another reason to take heart in the hastening technological decline is that the Death Cult bet all its chips on tech. Their combination of blank slate equalism and promissory idealism isn’t producing the micromanaged world they wanted. It turns out that replacing smart innovators with linear thinking diversity wasn’t the formula for a tech utopia. It was the setup for a Michael Crichton novel.
That’s not to say we’ll get off scot free. The Death Cult’s attempt at a totalitarian system will end like all their predecessors’. They’ll fail, but they’ll take millions down with them trying.
Pray, and get ready for chaos.
The action of Mobile Suit Gundam meets the intrigue of Tom Clancy.
Some gamer friends and I have specifically disabled certain motherboard features that are required for windows 11 to prevent auto-update from taking us there from windows 10, but I didn’t think there were _that_ many changes. Yeesh. Talk about “improving the user experience” being a euphemism for everything getting worse.
Baron,
What bugs me the most is Win 10 was supposed to the last new version. Just concentrate on updates but nope. Win 11 is one nobody asked or really wants.once again, the nerds cavillerly break workflows to impose user experiences no one asked for. I miss the days of programmers actually talking to users and programming real useful features.
xavier
I recently installed a virtual copy of Windows 3.1 so that I could run some old software from my childhood (both games and stuff like encyclopedias.)
At the same time I got frustrated with the Windows 10 start menu and started changing it as much as it could be changed. I eventually disabled almost everything and ended up with a bunch of program groups having my most frequently used software, with a prominently displayed file explorer being used to go to the other stuff.
After doing this I realized that this is exactly how I browse Windows 3.1: a bunch of program groups with the most commonly used software and the file explorer for everything else. Except the Windows 3.1 version has a better user experience since I can open only a single program group at a time, rearrange windows, etc. I can’t even just click a group in Windows 10 and choose an “add program” option; you have to find the program first and then “pin to start” and THEN put it in the right group. Over 20 years later and I’m back to the beginning.
To be fair Windows 10 does have features which would be nice to have in 3.1, most notably the task bar. But at the same time, the default Windows 10 start menu is so horrible that it’s definitely a worse user experience. I still have no idea why they would put a complete alphabetical list of programs as the default main entry of the menu, with a search that is theoretically supposed to help you get through that but in reality only gives you useless web searches.
Rudolph
Back in the Win 3,1x days I used Norton desktop. Today I use the Open shell program. It brings it back to the Win 7 startvbutton. Stardock has many mini programs that improve Win 7-11. If you want really poweful Windows explorer, there’s Opus directory. It’s pricey but very powerful. It reminds me of Norton’s
xavier
Xavier,
Does Microsoft design trendy but terrible UIs for Windows because they expect the more advanced users to install their favorite third-party UIs? I can live with that, but I need to know whether or not Microsoft expects me to do that.