I am not so sure. The world of printing out driving directions or emailing photos sounds a lot more calm. Also, simply quite enjoyable. The current world is cramming too many events in too little time, it seems. Stress is quite bad for health so I am not so sure about these hundreds of millions of lives saved. It may also have costed quite a few.

By the way, I am old enough to remember that world. When I was young, people had fat books with maps of most large and medium size places in the country.

nah, that was ass. i think the really major negative has just been scrollable video. all these other things - uber, airbnb, grocery pickup, etc. have largely just made my life better.

Can you imagine sitting around waiting for a phone call these days? At home? With a landline? Lol. Or going to the video store to drop $20 (with inflation today: $48) on three movies that you had to actually return by driving. The romantic waxing about hanging out with people is hilarious. More often than not it meant coming home at 10 pm and watching shitty network tv by yourself. Now I can play games with all my friends across the entire world.

I never done any of those things. And I was there, I was old enough. I was not desperately waiting for phone calls or paid a lot of money to borrow movies.

Somehow, I occupied myself just fine, was meeting friends regularly and did activities regularly. There was no societally wide lack of entertainment.

I think you are probably an outlier if you've never rented a movie in the 90s and shouldn't generally be used as a good example of how life was. It's frankly absurd that you would even bring it up as a virtue.

I did not brought it up as virtue. Virtue is entirely your framing. I just was not renting movies nor were my friends nor family. Meeting friends and occupying yourself was completely normal, any average person did it. In fact, healthy people will create fun and entertainment for themselves no matter the technological level of the society.

Frankly, it is super weird that you see doing fun stuff as some kind of virtue.

nah, i distinctly remember family road trips as a kid. Driving was super stressful with my mom yelling about missing an exit as she reads the map, getting lost in a not so nice neighborhood, etc.

you're romanticizing the past

lol this still happens today

right - so imagine how much worse it would be with a paper map or printed instructions

No it doesn't. Not in a healthy relationship. Blink twice if you need help getting out of an abusive relationship.

It's possible to have both internet maps and photo web sites, and not have unregulated* social media.

*Or rampant or whatever other word you feel fits the current state of social media.

That's because you're measuring yesterday's worlds with today's demented expectations.

Because there was no faster way to do it, it was okay to wait for someone to send you those photos via email. If you were late for a meetup somewhere new, that was okay because people knew you might have missed the street a few times stopped for directions etc.

We have more convenient things, sure. But they come with increased and rather frenzied expectations.

How does not printing directions save hundreds of millions of lives?

Oh man I can tell you're young. Those directions weren't always right. You couldn't just pull out your phone and find the nearest hospital if something happened during your trip. Or call 911 and have them find you by GPS. And that's just one casual convenience you take for granted. People used to drive around asking random people to use their phone in emergencies. Not exactly fast when seconds matter.

I mean, you make it sound like a horrible horror movie, but none of that was perceived as large issue at all

Honestly legit response. I didn’t really think about the 911 tracking which is so precise now. It is a bummer though how that location privilege has been abused.

It was always an option to have the technology without the bullshit. We can have GPS without allowing Google or Apple to track our every movement. We can have useful websites without allowing the people running those websites to mine every scrap of data we upload and sell our private information to anyone willing to pay for it.

It's not a requirement or law of nature that every technology sold must be used against the customer, we just haven't reached a point where we say enough is enough and outlaw such consumer hostile practices. Instead we've been allowing the corporations who seek to screw us over at every opportunity to gain more and more influence over the governments that could constrain them making it harder for us to fight back against the abuses we're subjected to.

Everything you just said is readily available now. You can use a FOSS OS on a mobile device with an offline mapping program. They were available before Google Maps was even a thing on Android 1.x. I know because I used to download them and use them without even having mobile internet in rural areas. The only thing stopping you is yourself.

Those were wonderful times, I see no problem with driving by a paper map, emailing photos, and sending gpg-encrypted e-mails, which all the surveilling scum could go fuck themselves about, at all.

Convenience is the glue that got all the frogs stuck to their boiling pots.

> the technology we have now has saved hundreds of millions

Oh wow, are you sure it's not billions?

Has it? If we've saved hundreds of millions, then I would argue simply the amount of money spent in AdTech could have saved billions.

The Internet of the 90s and early 2000s was amazing. The Internet today is a dumpster fire of attention hoarding, regurgitated content and, now, slop.

Society as a whole may be better off without a lot of the convenience features we have, but I also don't agree that it's all or nothing. We could have an amazing tech relationship today. But a select few wanted to monetize it for themselves. Here we are, welcome to the free market.

Yes, I am from the olden times, the dark times… Times of fear and terror, printer not working, having to write things down by hand, ach, the horror… Today much better, says me, yass the foundations of democracy and fabric of society has been eaten away like by millions of worms, teenagers constantly fighting with mental illnesses, lies and disinformation, young strong lads drug or gambling addicts… but, the minor conveniences, my lad! Ach, those I would not live without. The minor conveniences…

> $230 notebooks, digital cameras and tiny dollhouse furniture: How Gen Z’s desire to get offline is a boon for businesses

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/03/going-analog-gen-z-desire-to...