Reformed computer programmer here (born in the 70’s, techie in the 90’s). My laptop is 16 years old and runs Linux. My phone is an 8-year old refurb I got off Amazon for $80. And I now do ham radio. I even send emails over RF just because I like knowing I can communicate with voice or text without needing cell service or an internet connection.
That’s the biggest mjndfuck for me.
In the 90s and 2000s, people made fun of me for constantly being on the computer whenever possible. Now those same people are completely hooked on their pocket computers and how I’m the one making fun of them.
I don’t know how we got to this point, but all I know is that Steve Jobs is mostly to blame.
20 years ago, I remember phones were cool and never had a crazy price-tag before the iPhone showed up. Tech in general was affordable and made sense. I mean look at the market now, you see companies forcing new tech upon us by skipping the rule of “need vs want” while making a purchase.
On a side note, I miss those fancy slider phones from the 2000s.
At least the phones from the 2000 had character, not like today’s simple cuboid phones.
Life long techie here. I have retreated to the forest.
I did it. I’m in the forest now.
I am one of the few people in my office that still has a normal (digital) wristwatch.
My G-Shock is my everyday watch. Solar powered and multiband 6, nothing is more accurate.
i am retyrn to monke
As a tech person, I try to do have a lot of smart devices that I can self host, try to use home assisntat, bridges to my own NAS, have some rpi for my own DNS filter (with pi-hole)
My TV is offline while I am using a Apple TV box for streaming
And yeah some stuff is unnecessary. I don’t have a smart fridge, but I have an old iPad with a custom home assistant dashboard in my kitchen
Yeah, just setup a zigbee or z-wave network for your smart home, and just block the MAC address of the controller on your router.
None of the IoT devices will be able to contact anything on the internet, and you can still access them while you are connected to your own wifi.
Home assistant is so fucking good.
Just came back from a 4 day camping trip in the mountains where I turned my phone off and forgot it existed and just sat back down in my seat in my cubicle at my IT job.
I’m fucking over this.
Hear me out… anti-WiFi trees.
They grow towards any RF signals and their leaves are specially shaped to attenuate anything over 900MHz. They use the extra energy to increase their density to better resist harvesting and increase their height.
I read about a fungus found near the reactor in Chernobyl that seemed to be using the radiation as an energy source, so it seems plausible for a plant to evolve to absorb RF energy.
The actual energy in the RF is basically nothing. The sun has been outputing RF since the beginning of existence I’m pretty sure something would have evolved to make use of it if it had any sufficient energy density.
But if you think about it your phone is generating an RF field off the back of a tiny lithium ion battery, almost all of that power is going to power the screen anyway, the dribble of power that so left over is transmitted and then spread out over 50 kilometers of area. Anyone location is receiving less power than it would if it just absorbed power from sound waves
Re: running to the woods. We were here on the technology spectrum:
Not enough Too much |--------------[x]--------------------------------------|Now we’re here:
Not enough Too much |-----------------------------------------------[x]-----|I’m not saying that techies are all neo-luddites in the making, but rather that everyone has a threshold for global-hyper-awareness and surveillance. At some point, it’s just too much
I’m still onboard with more tech but not where it has the wrong answers:
- do I actually own it?
- what master does it serve?
I personally see all this bastardized tech as components in need of liberation, techno-mage style.
If I could get my hands on a flock PCB, I’d be writing custom drivers to allow others to liberate their own hardware. Alas, nothing local, and eBay has not been kind.
Deflock knows where you can get one…
12 years ago I had a board Chair of a major tech firm in my office and she explained how the future was going to be the internet of things. I divested stock within a week. My conclusion was they had zero innovation at that company, which extended to silicon valley.
Their stock then dropped 75% over the next decade.
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10 years ago, I privately refused a gifted Alexa after Christmas, explaining “Hey I work in the industry, I know people who work for FAANG, Amazon spending billions on very smart engineers building systems to harvest data is a bet that they will be able to extract even more money from me, is it still within the return window.” My aunt told me to go live in a cave.
My brother has/had a Google nest router, and that absolutely floored me.
I was gifted an Alexa by a (previous) girlfriend. I haven’t even opened it because I have very little use for an AI companion. And I too know people working in FAANG and how invasive those smart devices are.
Has she seen the price of caves lately?
“Alexa, list local cave prices.”
“If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”
duh… you don’t buy a nice cave, you buy a starter cave and install grey click flooring and a pot faucet over the stove.
Then paint the whole thing flat white, really splurge on a granite counter top for the kitchen, and a deep single basin sink. (Single basin sinks were made by the devil to torment me)
Things like this is why I don’t even bother.
“Thanks Aunt!” then just chuck it into the trash at home.
Or try replacing the brains with a Raspberry Pi, idk.Something tells me that aunt calls for help when they have tech issues.
Maybe just personal experience…
For help, you know what you talk about. But if it is about privacy or safety, I am hyperbolic… apparently
Caves seem pretty cozy tbh
20 years ago was 2006.
I do not recall any tech resistance by the masses. In fact a couple years later there were people camping out overnight waiting for the release of the latest gadgets like the iphone.
Ffw to today…those same masses dgaf about their lives being tracked and monetized today; in fact, many are active and willing sycophants pushing being social media personalities as careers while using that personality to shit on higher education and intelligence.
I do agree that the limited tech community capable of independent thought and action are against the surveillance corporate state we’re headed into, but the rest are doing their best to hurry and profit off it while the dumpster fire flames get closer and closer to them.
In 2006, cell phones were cool, smart phones like PalmOS and Blackberry devices existed but they were for nerds and/or businessmen who just could not wait to get back to the office to send an email. iPods were huge, it was the glory days of DVD, youtube launched that year, Facebook is where the cool kids were, you didn’t need an invitation to get a Gmail account anymore. You could buy more than just books on Amazon now. It was…possible to say things were getting better. It was easy to see a future of increasing convenience and capability.
Looking back I’m not sure where the tipping point was.
I think the tipping point was in the early 2010s when all of a sudden everyone and everything hitched their wagons to Facebook. Facebook as SSO, Facebook messenger instead of email or SMS, Facebook marketplace dethroning Craig’s List, etc. Once people from elderly relatives to local business centralized all of their online identity into Facebook, it was over. To this day, Facebook is still the only way to see info for community events and small businesses (and instagram is the platform Facebook used to sequester musicians and artists).
It didn’t have to be Facebook, of course, but there needed to be a networked service that people trusted enough to give it every thing. Remember check-ins? People would post their location at restaurants, jobs, theaters, and shops. Public profiles that listed jobs, homes, family members and relationships, pets, children’s photos, and hobbies all under real names (I remember when Facebook started the purge of pseudonyms and aliases).
I deleted my Facebook account over a decade ago and people panicked and warned me that it was a bad idea. The craziest thing someone said to me was that it would make me un-hire-able since there’d be nothing for people to snoop to see if I was a good fit. The only “bad” thing that happened is that I lost contact with some old acquaintances, but that’s just life.
Regardless of all the other tech stuff in the past 20 years, I think that convincing people that it was okay to let a company like Facebook exist will the explicit goal to transparently harvest personal data was what opened the floodgates. Facebook (and other social media) demonstrated that people will willingly exchange privacy for digital errata. Once governments and corporations saw that, the future wrote itself.
The tech resistance slowly faded away with the first smartphones released after the iPhone I would say and really took off after the release of the iPhone 3GS. Think back to the boomers who complained about young people staring at their phones all day, now they do that themselves.
Techies were just in the loop enough to see what happened to technology.
If they mean 20 years ago in the Covid Timewarp sense that the 90s were twenty years ago, then yes.
Literally 20 years ago the horror was already upon us. It was around that time that fear of the government chipping us to track our every movement was peaking, and hey, by the way, please buy and pay a monthly cost for this tracking device that has audio and video recording but also plays silly cat videos ANYWHERE!!!
20 years ago was 2006. I will point out that at that juncture the original iPhone wasn’t even out yet. It released the following year. Normal people who were not turbo-nerds or high powered businessmen did not own smartphones in any significant number at that point.
If your device was even capable of downloading a cat video, we were still in the era when your cell phone carrier would have charged you $1.99 to do it.
If your device was even capable of downloading a cat video, we were still in the era when your cell phone carrier would have charged you $1.99 to do it.
Or companies like Jamba/Jamster would have buried a clause in their T&Cs allowing them to send you periodic promotional texts and bill the fuck out of you for it.
What you think is them selling a $1.99 video of an anthropomorphic frog with a visible schlong making car noises is actually a predatory subscription scam.
2004 I payed 5€ to play a Splinter Cell game build with java on my SonyEricsson Walkman cell phone.
Remember having to pay for custom ring tones?
I remember them wanting me to pay for that, but I also remember getting a cable that allowed me to connect my PC to my phone and do whatever I wanted with the filesystem. The ringtones were in a different format but I got a converter and had the FF7 battle music for a ring tone.
I also recall some phones supporting MP3s for listening to music (though storage space was tiny) but not supporting them as a ringtone once connecting to PCs to share files was more common.
They also sold wallpapers, emoticon packs, and themes.
Yes, but I was fortunate enough to never actually get as far as ponying up the 99 cents. I got an MPX200 pretty early in my cell phone career which ran Windows CE and basically let the owner do whatever the fuck they wanted, including using .wav or .mp3 files as ringtones.
