Yesterday’s post on a Zoomer using only 1980s technology for a week elicited lively commentary on changing tech and its effects.
Without further preamble, here’s what you are saying about the tech of yesteryear …
Commenter Bayou Bomber writes:
I heard a saying once from a motivational speaker don’t take your work home with you and don’t take home to work with you. I.e – everything has its place.
I think the division of labor with older technology kept us sane and less prone to ADD. With a smart phone, it does EVERYTHING. No matter what you’re doing with a smart phone, chances are you’re being bombarded with a thousand other distractions. Talking with someone on the phone? Here’s 100+ messages about your IG post that just went viral. Wait there’s more, while you’re checking that out TikTok just called, your bestie just made a new post for the day. Round and round, it’s mental abuse what we are doing to ourselves. We are programming our brains into ADD because we habitually can’t focus on one thing for a fraction of a second.
Even since I swapped back to using a flip phone, I’ve felt more at peace. Even if I’m bored at work with nothing to do, I have little to no reason to pull out my phone and I’m forced to look into other things to keep me occupied. I feel like the non smart phone alternatives to entertainment feel cleaner.
At most, I use my old smart phone as a gaming device bc there’s still a game I play on there that I’m invested in, but that engagement stays at home where it belongs.
The only thing people are losing by using older tech is time, but let’s be real here, that time they are gaining isn’t being put to better use in most cases.
Marx was wrong. No amount of quantity adds up to quality.
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Rudolph Harrier comments:
Here’s something that’s easy to overlook: He’s using all this technology that has been “obsolete” for decades… and it all still works (well, with the exception of the smoking TV.) Now obviously stuff has broken down forever, but this is consistent with my searches through thrift shops and getting decades old technology that obviously hasn’t been maintained well but which works just fine. You can start to see the cracks by seeing what you can’t get easily used. Some newer technology, like blu-ray players, works fine for a long time and you can find easily in pawn shops and the like. MP3 players are almost entirely absent, because they break down. Same thing with smart phones. I guess Apple in particular is responsible for a lot of this.
Beyond stuff outright breaking, when you get to software, streaming and “cloud storage” you run into the problem where the thing you bought required connecting to an online server which has since been shut down, meaning that you can’t use it ever again. In contrast a SNES will still play games just fine if you put in the proper cartridge. A book is even more resilient; as long as the paper and ink themselves are fine nothing is going to prevent you from reading that book. I have books that have been passed down in the family since 1900, and only need a bit of repair to the binding.
It was quick, but also note him going through the Mac manual and noting that it is actually comprehensive and useful. Old software manuals really were works of art, and they had to be when the user might never get help from outside of the manual. Now we are in the age of “lol, someone might be able to help you on our discord channel, idk.”
When we win, full-color print instruction manuals will be mandated by law.
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To which Dandelion adds:
I have never adopted smartphones. Still have a flip.
I have been given THREE smartphones by well-meaning people who don’t understand that choice, and… for a while I use them as camera, guitar tuner, couple geeky apps like astronomy, and they are cool… and then they die, for no apparent reason. Screen bricks up so the only bit you can see is part of the clock at the top. Or it won’t turn on anymore at all. Dead. Unusable. I’ve not had one last more than six months. No idea why anybody’d pay $300-$400 for one. How often do you typically replace them?
Meanwhile, I find one of the easiest ways to entertain my kids and introduce stealth learning into their lives is to buy them old tech. They have a tape recorder, a record player, an electric typewriter, a whole series of quite nice but outdated digitcal cameras… and they’re now very familiar with a variety of classical composers (records are a dollar at the St VdP) (they really like Bach and Tchaikovsky), they’re teaching themselves to touch-type, they’ve recorded a whole bunch of random interviews with each other, made little books and newspapers and menus, worked out a few sound and visual effects, trick photography, they make little movies where they work out a storyline, make costumes, write a script, and then film scenes. They troubleshoot their own tech when it isn’t working right. And they’ve learned *so much* just because the devices were there for them to use. It helps that they all cost next to nothing. They can take all the risks they want. If it breaks it breaks, oh well.
Young relatives who live in a ‘smartphone house’ come to visit now and then, and the contrast is stark. They have a device in their hand that could do most of those things: the trick photography, the movie filming and editing, access to every composer who ever lived, self-publishing… all that in their pocket.
And they use it to watch youtube and talk to Character.ai all. day. long. Zero learning, zero creative output, and they can’t be bothered to talk to the actual people in the same room because it doesn’t give them a big enough dopamine hit. It’s like their souls have been excised.
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Small correction (assuming that I’m correct about which quote you mean):
“Quantity has a quality all its own” is actually a quote from Stalin, not Marx.
Thank you.
Your starting pic: yeah, it’s like that. I was born in 1980. I keep trying to give my kids some of the great things I had in my childhood in a working-class neighborhood, but there’s one huge thing that eludes us: the freedom.
My same-age neighbor and I used to just take off on weekends on our bikes, and head to the park, the library, the school playground, our relatives’ houses (some of them reliably had cake!), mostly in the 1-2 miles away range. No cell phones to track us. If our parents worried, they never let on. We didn’t even lock our bikes at the library, just left them on the rack and nobody messed with them because kid bikes aren’t worth anything.
I can’t do that for my kids, and that breaks my heart.
Most days it feels like we’re sprinting just to keep up. We’re literally the only family on our street where the kids live with both of their biological parents. Our neighborhood most days feels like the outskirts of the apocalypse, with all the hoodie-clad bicycle zombies cruising by. No, I don’t let my kids bike out of my sight. There’s a perfectly good park around the corner, where no kids ever play. Most of the kids on our street play in my yard, which includes the apparently-empty lot next to our house (where I cleaned up broken crack pipes when we moved in). It’s the safe zone.
We now have a shocking number of homeschooling families at our church, and we’re working on a co-op. I’ve been teaching mine for 6+ years now and don’t have a lot of concerns about their academic progress, but whatever church comes up with, we’ll be there, because I want as much of their social existence to revolve around church as humanly possible. It’s the only place they go where married two-parent families and kids who aren’t zombie screen addicts are the default. That needs to be normal: we want healthy grandkids. How did we get to a point where it isn’t?
Two main things about modern tech that concerns me:
1) for all its power, it’s fragile. Most things integrated into our infrastructure require an internet/wifi connection. Turn that off and everything shuts down. Best examples are modern gaming consoles and thermostats which need to connect to wifi in order to play a game even if the game doesn’t have online capabilities. (also why tf does a bbq need to update??????!1!!)
2) We’ve reached a pinnacle of technological relationship that it’s no longer a tool to be used, we are owned by the technology. You can’t do many things these days without a smart phone and I’m sure the days of not having one are numbered.
I can see a scenario where America specifically will be too prideful to let this technology go and when it all crashes, we will see a true dark age. No one will know how to do anything. Meanwhile, other countries will endure decades of being called backwards or fascist for regulating such technologies and will turn out ok for when the crash does actually happen.
As the recent Crowdstrike fiasco demonstrates, the smart fridge would probably be better off not updating. I don’t understand why a bbq grill should be programmable in the first place, so the problem is not so much that there is a patch for the firmware as it is that there is firmware to patch at all. While ‘hacker terrorizes family by breaking into their home network after finding their bbq grill on shodan’ sounds like the plot of a bad tech-heavy police procedural show, I grant. It’s on the far side of plausible. On the other hand, hackers have terrorized families by finding baby monitors on shodan and taking control of them.
Speaking generally and professionally, smart devices are a very dumb idea.
My brother-the-appliance-repairman is fond of pointing out: CIRCUIT BOARDS HAVE NO BUSINESS IN HEAT-GENERATING APPLIANCES. Whether that’s a dryer, a stove, a dishwasher, or a BBQ, the heat is eventually going to kill the circuit board. And by the time that happens, the company will have discontinued that model, and you will not be able to find a replacement part.
Generally speaking the dependence on the company is the real feature, and the advertised “features” are thought up after the fact by the marketing team.
We saw this happen in gaming. The 2013 version of SimCity was infamously online only, and EA defended this by talking about how the neighboring cities in your region would be actual player controlled cities, which would not be possible if you were not connected to the internet. But obviously that feature was unnecessary, especially when comparing to older games in the franchise, and was only added to justify the decision to force players to always be online.
Similarly when a company makes a “smart” device for something that shouldn’t need to be updated, like a barbecue or washing machine, the real reason for it being smart is to allow the company to track your usage to get data to sell, and to allow them to remotely limit or destroy the functionality of your device. This may be done for planned obsolesce reasons or (especially in the case of thermostats) as part of government contracts to “protect the environment” or whatever. They will advertise about being able to patch in new features, being able to use the device when away (even on stuff where you still need to be there to use them, like washing machines), using cloud based AI to optimize the device, etc. but these are all just advertising gimmicks to hide the fact that the company needs the product to be online to screw you over.
I am sure that they will continue to try to make smart phones mandatory. But not having one is far less limiting than you may think. I’ve never owned one and have gotten by fine. Occasionally I’ve encountered something stupid like a restaurant only having a menu via QR code and which has no paper alternative, at which point I simply don’t go there. Other times it has been a minor inconvenience, like needing to go to a kiosk to process a ticket in a parking ramp rather than using the smart phone app from my car.
Not having a CELL phone would be a problem due to having required two-factor authentication for various things that needs to be sent through a phone call or text message. But a flip phone works for that stuff.
There are people who say “cash is on its way out” and this feels similar to me. While obviously you can’t use cash online or for really big purchase stuff, you can use it in most places in real life. (I’ve only encountered a couple of “we don’t accept cash” places, though maybe it’s different in big cities.) But if you never carry cash it will FEEL like there are no cash alternatives, since you never use them. In the same way there is a definite push to require smart phones, there is also a definite push to eliminate case, but at the moment there are too many people without smart phones and who prefer to use cash that this is infeasible. (Cash elimination also has the problem that businesses like getting cash to avoid credit processing charges.)
Maybe we will be forced into a smart phone only, no cash society (though I don’t think such a thing will last long.) However, each person that refuses to use a smart phone and insists on paying cash slows down their ability to force that society on us.
Amen!
The big difference from my perspective is that in the early days of the home computer revolution, it was a hobby. These days the tech is just a tool. In the 80’s you needed to do research and learn things before the tech worked. You had to pour your heart and soul into it.
These days my 6 year old grandchild can just pick up the phone and be online in seconds. No personal investment needed.
August of 93 is infamous among oldheads online for a reason.
“why tf does a bbq need to update??????!1!!”
This is the only time I’ve ever seen where “lolwtfbbq?” Is actually the proper response.
Congratulations! With this comment, you have won the Internet for the day. Unfortunately, it is currently in the middle of a firmware update.