Sorry if this is a dumb question, but does anyone else feel like technology - specifically consumer tech - kinda peaked over a decade ago? I’m 37, and I remember being awed between like 2011 and 2014 with phones, voice assistants, smart home devices, and what websites were capable of. Now it seems like much of this stuff either hasn’t improved all that much, or is straight up worse than it used to be. Am I crazy? Have I just been out of the market for this stuff for too long?
To quote one of my favorite authors:
“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
Yeah but Facebook was invented when I was a teen and I knew pretty quickly that shit was evil.
At 15 the thing i wanted most in the world was an escape hatch from all these other assholes I had to spend my time with everyday at school. Right around that time Facebook arrived ensuring they would have more access to me and the people around me more then any other time in history.
This is the answer.
I beg to disagree. The answer is 42. The real issue being: to what question? :p
Man, the toys invented around that time are the best… But that’s probably all you’re really paying attention to at that point.
And for kids now? Well they have things like Skibidi Toilet to keep them occupied.
But for a more serious answer I think that’s when they’re in their most creative mindset and everything is new to them and they’re learning how things work.
Obviously the exact age at which someone starts to take an interest in tech is going to be different from person to person. For me, I was a fan of reading popular science magazines at a younger age as well as manuals on all of the different setting/functions/features of operating systems…
I think new tech is still great, I think the issue is the business around that tech has gotten worse in the past decade
Agree. 15+ years ago tech was developed for the tech itself, and it was simply ran as a service, usually for profit.
Now there’s too much corporate pressure on monetizing every single aspect, so the tech ends up being bogged down with privacy violations, cookie banners, AI training, and pretty much anything else that gives the owner one extra anual cent per user.
[off topic?]
Frank Zappa siad something like this; in the 1960’s a bunch of music execs who liked Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong had to deal with the new wave coming in. They decided to throw money at every band they could find and as a result we got music ranging from The Mama’s and The Papas to Iron Butterfly and beyond.
By the 1970s the next wave of record execs had realized that Motown acts all looked and sounded the same, but they made a lot of money. One Motown was fantastic, but dozens of them meant that everything was going to start looking and sounding the same.
Similar thing with the movies. Lots of wild experimental movies like Easy Rider and The Conversation got made in the 1970s, but when Star Wars came in the studios found their goldmine.
But even then, there were several gold mines found in the 1990’s, funded in part due to the dual revenue streams of theater releases and VHS/DVD.
You’ve got studios today like A24 going with the scatter shot way of making movies, but a lot of the larger studios got very risk adverse.
The question op is posing is:
Which new tech?
In the decade op’s talking about everything was new. The last ten years nothing is new and all just rehash and refinements.
ML, AI, VR, AR, cloud, saas, self driving cars (hahahaha) everything “new” is over a decade old.
Well it is literally not going as fast.
The rate of “technology” (most people mean electronics) advancement was because there was a ton of really big innovations at in a small time: cheap PCBs, video games, internet, applicable fiber optics, wireless tech, bio-sensing, etc…
Now, all of the breakthrough inventions in electronics have been done (except chemical sensing without needing refillable buffer or reactive materials), Moore’s law is completely non-relevant, and there are a ton of very very small incremental updates.
Electronics advancements have largely stagnated. MCUs used 10 years ago are still viable today, which was absolutely not the case 10 years ago, as an example. Pretty much everything involving silicon is this way. Even quantum computing and supercooled computing advancements have slowed way down.
The open source software and hardware space has made giant leaps in the past 5 years as people now are trying to get out from the thumb of corporate profits. Smart homes have come a very long way in the last 5 years, but that is very niche. Sodium ion batteries also got released which will have a massive, mostly invisible effect in the next decade.
Electronic advancement, if you talk about cpus and such, hasn’t stagnated, its just that you don’t need to upgrade any more.
I have a daily driver with 4 cores and 24GB of RAM and that’s more than enough for me. For example.
It has absolutely stagnated. Earlier transistors were becoming literally twice as dense every 2 years. Clock speeds were doubling every few years.
Year 2000, first 1GHz, single core CPU was released by nvidia.
2010 the Intel core series came out. I7 4 cores clocked up to 3.33GHz. Now, 14 years later we have sometimes 5GHz (not even double) and just shove more cores in there.
What you said “it’s just that you don’t need to upgrade anymore” is quite literally stagnation. If it was a linear growth path from 1990 until now, every 3-5 years, your computer would be so obsolete that you couldn’t functionally run newer programs on them. Now computers can be completely functional and useful 8-10+ years later.
However. Stagnation isn’t bad at all. It always open source and community projects with fewer resources to catch up and prevents a shit ton of e-waste. The whole capitalistic growth growth growth at any cost is not ever sustainable. I think computers now, while less exciting have become much more versatile tools because of stagnation.
There was a lot of pioneering in the 70’s. The first home computers, the first video games, the first mobile phones, all right there in the late 70’s. Most people ended the 70’s living like they did in the 60’s but now there’s cool shit like the Speak n’ Spell. The average American home in 1979 had no microwave oven, a landline telephone and a TV that might have even been color. There were some nerds who had TRS-80s, some of them even had a modem so they could 300 baud each other. Normies saw none of this.
There was a lot of invention in the 80’s. Home computer systems, video games etc. as we now commonly know them crystalized in the 80’s. We emerged from the 80’s with Nintendo as the dominant video game console platform, Motorola as basically the only name in cellular telephones and with x86 PCs running Microsoft operating systems as the dominant computing platform with Apple in a distant but solid second place. Video games were common, home computers weren’t that out there, people still had land lines, and maybe cable TV or especially if you were out in the sticks you might have one of those giant satellite dishes. If you were a bit of an enthusiast you might have a modem to dial BBSes and that kind of stuff, but basically no one has an email address.
There was a lot of evolution in the 90’s. With the possible exception of the world wide web which was switched on in August of '91, there weren’t a lot of changes to how computing worked throughout the decade. Compare an IBM PS/2 from 1989 with a Compaq Presario from 1999. 3 1/4" floppy disk, CRT monitor attached via VGA, serial and parallel ports, keyboard and mouse attached via PS2 ports, Intel architecture with Microsoft operating system…it’s the same machine 10 years later. The newer machine runs orders of magnitude faster, has orders of magnitude more RAM etc. but it still broadly speaking fills the same role in the user’s life. An N64 is exactly what you’d expect the NES to look like after a decade. Cell phones have gotten sleeker and more available but it’s still mostly a telephone that places telephone calls, it’s the same machine Michael Douglas had in that one movie but now no longer a 2 pound brick. Bring a tech savvy teen from 1989 to 1999 and it won’t take long to explain everything to him. The World Wide Web exists now, but a lot of retailers haven’t embraced the online marketplace, the dotcom bubble bursts, it’s not quite got the permanent grip on life yet.
There was a lot of revolution in the 2000’s. Higher speed internet that allow for audio and video streaming, mp3 players and the upheaval those caused, the proliferation of digital cameras, the rise of social media. When I graduated high school in 2005, there were no iPhones, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Youtube. Google was a search engine that was gaining ground against Yahoo. The world was a vastly different place by the time I was through college. Take that savvy teen from 1989 and his counterpart from 1999 and explain to them how things work in 2009. It’ll take a lot longer. In 2009 we had a lot of technology that had a lot of potential, and we were just starting to realize that potential. It was easy to see a bright future.
There was a lot of stagnation in the 2010’s. We started the decade with smart phones and social media, and we ended the decade with smart phones and social media. Performance numbers for machines kept going up but you kinda don’t notice; you buy a new phone and it’s so much faster and more responsive, 4 years later it barely loads web pages and takes forever to launch an app because mobile apps are gaseous, they expand to take up their system. A lot of handset manufacturers have given up so now there are fewer options, and they’ve converged to basically one form factor. Distinguishing features are gone, things we used to be able to do aren’t there anymore. The excitement wore off, this is how we do things now, and now everyone is here. Mobile app stores are full of phishing software, you’re probably better advised to just use the mobile browser if you can, mainstream video gaming is now just skinner boxes, and by the end of the decade social media is all about propaganda silos and/or attention draining engagement slop.
Now we arrive in the 2020’s where we find a lot of sinisterization. A lot of the tech world is becoming blatantly, nakedly evil. In truth this began in the 2010’s, it’s older than 4 years, but we’re days away from the halfway point of the decade and it’s becoming difficult to see the behavior of tech and media companies as driven only by greed, some of this can only come from a deep seated hatred of your fellow man. People have latched onto the term “enshittification” because it’s got the word shit in it and that’s hilarious, but…I see a spectrum with the stagnation of the teens represented with a green color and the sinisterization of the 20’s represented with red, and the part in the middle where red and green make brown is enshittification.
From an old geek; spot on.
Feels the same with lot of other tech too: space voyage, cars & motorcycles, robots, most are just like last year with some small cosmetic change or 7% more of this or that.
Sure, things are getting better but it doesn’t feel like it does any more.
Edit: hey, Lemmy & the decentralised fediverse is quite cool new tech.
Dial-up could still be pretty exciting. Or at least for me.
I am just amazed by data transfer via sound. When I found SSTV I was amazed by the ability to transfer analog images by sound. I was playing around with it for hours for months. I can get amazed by random crap like that. I can hear the image as it’s being transferred. So cool!
But recently I was playing around with QSSTV and found HamDRM. Same thing, but digital. And it’s not only for digital images, it can take any binary file. Sadly, no Android apps for HamDRM unlike analog SSTV. So, I just saved it as wav, moved it to my phone and played it to my laptop.
Holy shit! I transferred a 55kB document in 5 minutes using sound! It just feels so crazy and awesome. It sounds basically like random noise, static, but there’s real data in it. If only there was an Android app to do this, I could play around it for hours transferring small data back and forth over the air, using sound waves!
But hey, I can even be excited by a large QR code. 2 seconds of 8kbps MP3 in a QR code, pretty cool!
Any websites or projects showing the 2 sec of audio in a QR code? Sounds cool!
Oh, I just simply used the data URI with base64-encoded MP3. It can be pasted directly into browser.
However, you could get far more with codec2, although it’s very much a speech only codec. It goes as low as 700bps. So… roughly 20 - 25 seconds the same way, although you’d have to use the codec2 decoder instead of browser.
Sample: https://www.rowetel.com/downloads/codec2/hts2a_700c.wav
“These days a chicken is a rare dish”
Anyway, back to the MP3…
Just paste it into a browser.
Nice summary! I’ve been here through that whole time period. If it had stopped at the stage around 1995-2000 (before FB & web 2.0 took over the internet, before every business model became about bombarding us with ads and spying on us), our lives would be much better today.
- a lot of pioneering in the ’70s*
- right there in the late ’70s*
- Most people ended the ’70s* living like they did in the ’60s*
- a lot of invention in the ’80s*
- crystalized in the ’80s*
- We emerged from the ’80s*
- lot of evolution in the ’90s*
- a lot of revolution in the 2000s*
- a lot of stagnation in the 2010s*
- Now we arrive in the 2020s*
- In truth this began in the 2010s*
- the sinisterization of the ’20s*
But you got it right for “TRS-80s” & “August of ’91”!
It all went downhill when the expectation of an always-on internet connection became the norm. That gave us:
- “Smart” appliances that have no business being connected to the internet
- “Smart” TVs that turned into billboards we pay to have in our homes
- Subscription everything as a service
- Massive zero-day patches for all manner of software / video games (remember when software companies had to actually release finished/working software? Pepperidge Farm remembers)
- Planned obsolescence and e-waste on steroids where devices only work with a cloud connection to the manufacturer’s servers or as long as the manufacturer is in business to keep a required app up to date
- Every piece of software seemingly sucking up all the data it can about you and feeding it back to the mothership so you can be profiled and sold to advertisers
- Pretty much everything Apple does is designed to further lock you into their ecosystem and/or remove a port that’s standard in order to pocket the savings and sell you a dongle for $29.99
- Dwindling / disappearing availability of physical media you effectively own forever in favor of digital libraries that you only have a flimsy license to access at the company’s whim (even though you “bought” the title for the same price it would have cost on physical media). Those have been ruled non-transferable (e.g. if you want to leave them to someone in your will) and the company going under leaves you with no rights or ability to get a refund or physical copy of things you supposedly bought but can no longer access.
Other than hardware getting more powerful and sometimes less expensive, every recent innovation has been used against us to take away the right to own, repair, and have any control over the tech we supposedly own.
Edits: I keep thinking of more things that annoy me lol.
And to force subscriptions, ads and tracking, the tech is getting more and more locked down.
Not just flashing phones and wifi routers, but you may not even watch high quality video, even though you’re paying a subscription if your device’s HW and SW don’t conform.
If something gets discontinued, it’s not just that it may be unsafe to use or be too slow for modern use, no, look at cloud-managed network gear. The company decides it’s a paperweight, and it is. And this is going to just extend further.
Not discounting anything you listed, but I overcome lots of this by being patient. I find it best to let the dust settle on everything now. I don’t even see new movies till like, the next year. Why be a beta tester for enshittification
I’m not sure about the touch displays on cars.
How long does a Chinese tablet last, 10, 12 years ? If you keep it safely stored and don’t drop it.
The things in cars seem to be even cheaper, they only use phone uPs designed to last no more than a few years. And they’re roasted in hot weather, frozen and shaken to bits.
Good luck finding one of them in a few years, assuming they can be taken out at all without ripping up the dash.
Tech has definitely become worse since megacorps killed the little guys & sucked the fun out of everything. Open source & self hosting is becoming/has become the only way. So glad I taught myself how to do it
