For me personally it was from 2010-2016. It might have just been that I was younger and didn’t care as much what was going on in the world but I still felt like the world was improving. Technology felt like it was making the world better without being overly bombarded with algorithms and ads. A lot of early streaming services were still very affordable and actually good. Online multiplayer games were a great time to play without every game feeling like you need to play full time to keep up with the meta. Sure Russia invaded crimea in that time, and the U.S. was bombing children in the Middle East but compared to today it felt like the world was mostly at peace.
Yes it would. Looking back I think the time machine wouldn’t buy us more than those few years, though. The things that made it accessible, fun and (sometimes artificially, unnaturally) useful were the exact same things that made it easy to repurpose into the monstrosity it gradually became.
The Wild West period was scattered and had shitty accessibility. Companies like Google inevitably arrived to make the process of browsing smoother, but as of 2010 hadn’t started being evil yet. The alternate timeline that doesn’t suck probably would have involved email growing directly into a version of ActivityPub in the 90’s, and website dominance being bypassed entirely. (Although ISP struggles would have taken on a whole new dimension)
For me personally it was from 2010-2016. It might have just been that I was younger and didn’t care as much what was going on in the world but I still felt like the world was improving. Technology felt like it was making the world better without being overly bombarded with algorithms and ads. A lot of early streaming services were still very affordable and actually good. Online multiplayer games were a great time to play without every game feeling like you need to play full time to keep up with the meta. Sure Russia invaded crimea in that time, and the U.S. was bombing children in the Middle East but compared to today it felt like the world was mostly at peace.
That’s where I’d go too. It was really the calm before the storm.
Exactly. And if we could stop the storm… Wouldn’t that be great?
Yes it would. Looking back I think the time machine wouldn’t buy us more than those few years, though. The things that made it accessible, fun and (sometimes artificially, unnaturally) useful were the exact same things that made it easy to repurpose into the monstrosity it gradually became.
The Wild West period was scattered and had shitty accessibility. Companies like Google inevitably arrived to make the process of browsing smoother, but as of 2010 hadn’t started being evil yet. The alternate timeline that doesn’t suck probably would have involved email growing directly into a version of ActivityPub in the 90’s, and website dominance being bypassed entirely. (Although ISP struggles would have taken on a whole new dimension)