You don't think your life has been substantially improved by Google? Or the Internet more generally? You'd rather go back to the '90s, when you had to carefully watch how much Internet you consumed, so as to keep from running out of AOL hours? You want to go back to an era when you couldn't instantly pull up navigation direction in a foreign city? You like to to take photos on film, paying ridiculous prices for every photo you took, and then paying again to have some stranger paw through your family photos while developing them? You want to go back to an era when batteries were heavy, polluting NiCd bricks, which required special chargers that would completely discharge and recharge them in order to avoid things like the memory effect? You want to go back to a time when you had to call a person on a phone in order to book a flight. You want to go back to a time when, if you moved to a different country, you got to talk to your relatives in the homeland once a month, for five to ten minutes on a noisy analog phone line, because that's all the international long distance you could afford?

Don't get me wrong, I dislike social media just as much as anyone. But do I dislike tech? Would I give up the all innumerable ways that my life has gotten better thanks to Moore's Law, ubiquitous Internet, and the proliferation of tools and services that take advantage of the above two? Absolutely not.

The weird thing is that I never needed computer assisted navigation until it existed. In my local area I simply remembered where streets were, and when traveling I used a map book.

I also cherished photos and put more effort into taking them. Now I just spam the photo button and wait on Google to select the best one to automatically improve and remind me of later. Even then, I have so many that I never find myself flipping through them like I did with physical photos.

I read encyclopedias. The many volumes were an invitation to knowledge, dillineated by pages and sections. Online knowledge is an endless pit of knowledge of questionable value.

Really, it wasn't bad. I'd say peak value was around 98 or 99. Before XMLHTTPRequest became popular, when the web was still mostly documents and forms. NNTP still mattered, and Encarta was useful.

After that I've just felt like I am swimming upriver against an assault to my humanity.

>The weird thing is that I never needed computer assisted navigation until it existed. In my local area I simply remembered where streets were, and when traveling I used a map book.

You are extremely fortunate. It may not be apparent to you, but the advent of GPS, smartphones and Google Maps has been a game changer for so many people. My sense of direction is all right. I'm not a homing pigeon, but given a map, I can generally find my way around. But for other people such as my mom, every trip, outside of some well-traveled routes (like going to work, or going to the store) had to have detailed written directions, and be rehearsed ahead of time, because otherwise she'd get lost. For her, Google Maps has resulted in a substantial improvement in the quality of her life, simply by enabling her to get around in the world without the constant background terror of not knowing how to get home.

I do think those things are great but I would say that culture is substantially worse. People are less kind/patient, more disrespectful, more isolated, more narcissistic, less family oriented, more politically combative, have shorter attention spans, and are less happy than prior generations.

That’s a people problem. People can change. Technology just is.

Your observation about the culture being worse is accurate, but none of them are caused by tech.

Do you have evidence about that? Don't you think so many people being terminally online affects the way they act towards others?

Personally, I believe it does. It's even ironic to me that your comment was downvoted, like, why? Is this really how we think about the world nowadays? Dislike/like. No discussion.

Anyways, I have to say Hackers News has been the source of well spent evenings with this nice community, so there's at least one data point there that these changes in culture weren't caused by tech.

People are much more able to find community niches though, and jerks can be found quite publicly being jerks.

There's huge kindnesses enabled by tech and the internet, like organizing group support, and healthcare kickstarters and so on.

I think youve got rose coloured glasses about the past more than today being particularly worse

>I do think those things are great but I would say that culture is substantially worse.

Only if you aren't a misfit. If you had some "weird" hobby or interest, like anime, or science fiction, or heck, even computers, you'd have maybe one, two other people in your life who were interested in that. If you openly talked about your "weird" hobby, you'd be as likely as not socially ostracized and made fun of.

Today, thanks to the internet and social media, one can find forums and discussion groups for any hobby, no matter how weird or esoteric, and have fun conversations with people that have nothing to do with weather, politics, or sportsball.

I was (am) some sort of misfit and I get that it feels good to find community online, but not everything that feels good is the best for us or for society.

Having a village full of people who don’t engage with each other because they’ve found more interesting people online is troubling.

And I don’t know, but it’s plausible that learning a healthy way to integrate with your local community is an important life skill that gets disrupted by these online connections and makes the big picture of one’s life worse than it would have been otherwise. Connecting online may relieve stress the way alcohol relieves stress — genuinely useful in any moment, but easily problematic if you become too reliant on it.

>it’s plausible that learning a healthy way to integrate with your local community is an important life skill that gets disrupted by these online connections and makes the big picture of one’s life worse

Yes, let's go back and tell all the kids that were being bullied in high school merely for being different that their bullies are teaching them important life skills and that they shouldn't retreat into online spaces because that will make the "big picture" of their life worse.

>Having a village full of people who don’t engage with each other because they’ve found more interesting people online is troubling.

Maybe we should think creating a world where everyone can move around and form the sorts of villages they like.

I would give up all these things if I could. In fact that's my life plan, I want to get enough money to be comfortable (not necessarily financially independent) and move into the countryside in some temperate climate country. This is not my retirement plan, it's my life plan.

My retirement will be spent isolated from society, although that's another matter for another day. But seriously, perhaps my perspective is warped by the fact that I'm used to all these things already. Kind of like how the best software is the one you never hear or think about since it doesn't get in your way.

What a superficial collection of things to care about. Those things may tickle you a little when you’re taking advantage of them, but they really don’t make a substantial difference in whether you’re spending your days well and happy.

The 1990’s weren’t some dreary hellscape. You worked, you talked to people, you went out for dinner, you did some chores, you traveled. You had some crises that sent your life reeling, and some magical moments that made you grateful for what you had.

It was quite fine.

And in the ways that it was characteristically different(not better or worse), people were more engaged with what was right in front of them, had more shared experiences of life and media to relate about, and were less flooded with constant stimulation.

All the things you mention as accumulating in the years since are about as meaningful as the aisles and aisles of plastic toys I longed for at Toys-r-us as a kid. I thought they mattered, but they really don’t.

>The 1990’s weren’t some dreary hellscape.

You can totally still live a '90s lifestyle today. Cancel your high-speed Internet and tether to your phone for everything. Give up watching YouTube. Give up looking things up on Wikipedia. Film cameras are a dime-a-dozen on eBay, with even high-end SLRs from the '90s selling for less than a hundred dollars. Disable Google Maps and Google Search. Stop posting on Hacker News.

If you think the '90s were better than they were today, by all means, go back.

EDIT: For what it's worth, you can find people in the 1930s saying the same things about electricity and indoor plumbing. Every current generation's necessity is the previous generation's excess frivolity.

You're deluding yourself if you think you would get the same lifestyle by giving up your own post-90s technology. The world as a whole has moved on. Maybe map books aren't at every gas station now. Even if you don't have a phone, the people you talk to are going to be checking theirs while dining with you, or distracted when they get a notification.

I suspect you're not old enough to properly remember the '90s if you really think this would be the equivalent.

I'm not saying it was all sunshine and rainbows (people smoked everywhere, did tons of cocaine, and were probably more openly homophobic/misogynistic/racist, and if you got in an argument over a factual detail you couldn't look up the answer right away).

The 90s has my youth, so...of course they were better.

I remember discovering gopher on university library computers in 1993, like I discovered the fun of CPM on my Dad's Osbourne in 1982. There was a nice mystery back then, things are definitely "better" now, except for prices and traffic.

I’m close! And the more I’ve done so, the less ruminative and anxious I’ve found myself.

Would recommend.

There was a Tweet from Andreessen the other day about how tech is heading toward a $100 full wall TV while college (a tech resister) to $1 million [1] - supposedly because of regulation or some other nonsense. Guess what - a college education is worth a great deal more to society and the individual that gets it than a TV of any size will ever be worth IMHO. It is this Tech fixes everything/software eats the world attitude that is pissing people off. The only people that think it is a great thing are people that never have to waste 20 minutes of their time finding their way through a phone menu at a bank because they have a minion that does everything for them and lets them avoid the very tech they create. Disruptive companies make the most money even if they really don't improve people lives.

Tech is reaching a stage where the garbage/useful ratio is > 1. This is actually what I use to like about Musk when he pretended to run his companies and smoked cigars at the Playboy mansion. He actually tried to get truly innovative and useful technology worked on. Not anymore.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-warns-colleg...

> Guess what - a college education is worth a great deal more to society and the individual that gets it than a TV of any size will ever be worth IMHO.

Indeed, but capitalism does not care about society, but rather is there to make the person selling you the TV even richer.

I don’t think OP is suggesting tech has been an unmitigated negative. I think most of the things that were positives were invented 1995-2008. Beyond that major tech companies seemed to transform into whores to the advertising industry, privacy was destroyed, and for this we got social media, poorer search results, constant communication, etc etc - mostly negatives.

I sometimes joke that computers were a mistake but the older I get the more I believe it.

I agree with you, but I don't think we're ever going back to simpler times. While I'm not religious, I have often wondered if this is what the "Garden of Eden" story warned us about. Or more cynically, "Industrial Society and Its Future".

   > Or more cynically, "Industrial Society and Its Future".

I always see myself calling the unabomber crazy, but then I remember he was a mathematician which studied in the MIT and he was probably much smarter than I could ever dream of being. "The Industrial society and it's consequences was a disaster for the human race" is something that passes through my mind somewhat often, sometimes jokingly, sometimes not. Maybe he did have a point.

edit: He studied at Harvard, not the MIT, memory failed me there. I don't condone any of his actions (i.e. bombing people).

Your problems in life come from computers because your life is computers.

If your life was cars you would soon find most of your problems in life come from cars.

Perhaps, but as I said I also see it around me. Many of their problems also arise from computers. There are two way I see people dealing with this:

- It's normal, I don't need to do anything. These people are the ones who were born 90s or later. They see computers as a simple fact of life.

- It's not a problem, at least we have something. These people will generally be older and I think fail to see the incredible potential benefits of tricking a rock into thinking for you.

These are all generalizations of course, not social facts but simply representations of how I experience reality. The thing that really ticks me in the wrong is that people in other industries don't always see the things they do as a net negative for humanity.

For instance, most types of engineering such as civil, eletrical, chemical, etc. have real net positive benefits in the way I and everyone around me experiences life. I've never seen a civil engineer say they hate how we built bridges. I've met very few computers scientists who were confident about the way we deal with computers.

Anyways, this is just a long way of saying I agree, but that I don't think it invalidates what I talked about tech companies not being a net positive.

> most types of engineering such as civil, eletrical, chemical, etc. have real net positive benefits in the way I and everyone around me experiences life

They do _now_. During their exponential-growth phase I think there were lots of negative externalities? (Pollution, etc). And we still have to regulate them heavily to avoid societal problems.

Another post in this thread mentioned it's all the closed-platform/walled-garden/attention-grabbing/rent-seeking behavior which is the worst aspect of "tech"... honestly I have the feeling we just haven't gotten around to learning how to regulate these well yet, just like it took a while to figure out how to control (local) pollution (I mean, even this is still a huge problem with global carbon pollution).

>I've never seen a civil engineer say they hate how we built bridges.

You must not have spoken with any of the civil engineers I've spoken with. They all describe an absolute wasteland of arbitrary and capricious regulations, competing stakeholders, and last minute requirement changes that require extensive redesign and often very expensive rework.

Software engineering really isn't all that different from all engineering, for better and for worse.

> If your life was cars you would soon find most of your problems in life come from cars.

I understand your point but take for examples:

1. 20 years ago I was never locked out of my car because my phone's battery was dead.

2. 20 years ago I never wasted 20 minutes going through a phone menu at a bank only to lose the connection or eventually talk to a human which is what I wanted in the first place.

3. 20 years ago I couldn't work while on vacation because I just couldn't.

4. 20 years ago lies didn't spread through the Earth's population so fast it that it was a political tactic to lie soon - lie often.

Sure there are a lot of advantages and good things that have come out of tech - much better medicines for example. We will likely cure most cancers in the next 50 years. But it has also caused a lot more wealth to be concentrated in fewer people. Not everyone can be an Entrepreneur but deserve to live decently. Just because something becomes cheaper for everyone doesn't mean it is better. Ask the plastic filled Ocean.

> 20 years ago lies didn't spread through the Earth's population so fast it that it was a political tactic to lie soon - lie often.

Only just barely true, the RAND report that identified the Russian “Firehose of Falsehoods” propaganda model which got picked up quite quickly by other actors noted that it began being used shortly after the initiation of the 2008 invasion of Georgia.

I disagree. I wasn't even thinking of foreign intervention. I was thinking more like our current roques gallery of Congressman and Presidential candidates that understand that people tend to over weight as true the first thing they hear concerning some subject. It is now de rigueur for a politician to simply get out a lie on Twitter or Fox as quickly as possible simply because they know this.

It has always been this way but it never use to be free and so rapid.

We've enabled authoritarian beliefs, fostered genocide, damaged the social fabric and that's just Facebook.

We've actively made the world worse.

Yeah, before the rise of the computer, none of those things really existed. /s

Right, but "It happened before us" isn't a valid defense if we keep enabling it. JFC.

of course it is. You think progress should be stopped if it has any downsides at all?

And we ruined the internet with advertising.

The world is much better than it used to be, you’re just more aware of all the present evil because the evidence is so much easy to gather, disseminate, and search for.

Nobody was aware of the extent of police criminality before everyone had a camera in their pocket, as just one example.

No. Advertising and the need to drive engagement has made the world worse.

At the root of most evil in the western world is advertising, it is just hidden well because it is good at moving the blame to, e.g, tech.

Also those movements were there before tech.

Came to say this, glad someone else is doing down in flames with me ;)

To all the "yeah but what about all the good it's done" comments: I would gladly give all that up if it meant going back to the standards we had before around 2007 (though for me the 90s was the best time, I don't know how much of that has to do with the rose tint that teenagerhood gives you).

Even some of the good it's done is questionable. I can now order exactly what I want from a range of online shops at 2am, instead of going to the single jeans shop in my town and having to settle for the wrong size in the wrong brand. The flip side is that local shops have gone out of business, resulting in a loss of community, with all the ills that brings. Besides which, psychologists would argue that getting what you want isn't a good thing (and after years of getting what I want, I can confirm).

Anti-Tech Revolution and Technological Slavery are both amazing books and must-reads.