Technology

This is also pretty common. People tend to think like that about everything they had in their formative years.

It's nostalgia plus a realization of how entrenched tech bureocratic processes have penetrated their lives, oftentimes making them worse, not better (many of the improvements are taken for granted).

But my point is you can take this "old times were better" in most of every case when doing these surveys. About music, TV and everything.

What people really want are the benefits without some of the cons that they've very willingly accepted out of laziness and/or ignorance.

They've lost a ton of privacy and rights and ability to discourse and act by being so heavily surveilled and "panopticon'd" into superficial uniformity of opinion.

Many of the things they complain about they can still do "non tech/non online" but it requires more effort than pretending that there should be just one way so they don't have to choose.

no thanks

Eh. I like the internet and the connections it allows us to form. I think internet access for all is a good thing.

I do miss a time when cellphones weren't ubiquitous, though. They have their purpose but there's a certain social expectation to always be available, and I think that is a bad thing. I miss disconnecting. I guess, in principle, I could literally just do that.

I'm just thinking about going to the movie rental place and trying to pick something to watch. The stakes were way higher back then.

Everyone can do it for them-self, just don't use a smartphone or a cell phone if you want to go more hardcore.

(TDLR: Technology (in its infancy) was something new, exciting, fun and enjoyable. Today, it is manifested more as an overlord whose primary capacity is to spy, intrude and take your personal information in order that they might gain from it.)

I grew up in a world before all of the modern day technology took over. They were good times, but when technology did eventually begin to develop, it effects were initially benign. It was initially adopted by those who were considered 'geeks' and people who were willing to spend money on it (even IBM clones such as the Tandy 1000 were going for $1,000 back in the day).

I remember when pagers were coming on the scene and allowed people to reach out to each other if they weren't at home or at work (which were the only places they had access to a reachable phone number). It gave greater freedom for those who were in positions where they were on call 24x7 - it allowed them to go places and still be reachable instead of being stuck at home and waiting for a phone call that might never come.

Of course, things grew from there which provided many other benefits including access to a huge repository of information. Nowadays, that access to information has become a means of harvesting information from the very individual seeking to obtain it. The innocence of what was once revolutionary has been been upended by and ideology that has figured out and embraced how to consume its own consumers.

I spend more time today figuring out how to keep my data and personal information private and secure. Using Linux on my computer, running GrapheneOS on my phone as well as other considerations all in an attempt to keep at bay invasive companies and their ever evolving techniques in order to pry and spy upon me. It's a shame that what was once fun and exciting is now something to be feared.