Sorry if this is a dumb question, but does anyone else feel like technology - specifically consumer tech - kinda peaked over a decade ago? I’m 37, and I remember being awed between like 2011 and 2014 with phones, voice assistants, smart home devices, and what websites were capable of. Now it seems like much of this stuff either hasn’t improved all that much, or is straight up worse than it used to be. Am I crazy? Have I just been out of the market for this stuff for too long?
To quote one of my favorite authors:
“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
Yeah but Facebook was invented when I was a teen and I knew pretty quickly that shit was evil.
At 15 the thing i wanted most in the world was an escape hatch from all these other assholes I had to spend my time with everyday at school. Right around that time Facebook arrived ensuring they would have more access to me and the people around me more then any other time in history.
This is the answer.
This is the answer.
I beg to disagree. The answer is 42. The real issue being: to what question? :p
would be nice, but isn’t true according to Douglas Adams himself:
Inspiration for the number 42
Douglas Adams revealed the reason why he chose forty-two in this message .
“It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ‘42 will do’”.
personally, i think it’s way funnier that it is actually, completely, deliberately meaningless ;)
I think new tech is still great, I think the issue is the business around that tech has gotten worse in the past decade
Agree. 15+ years ago tech was developed for the tech itself, and it was simply ran as a service, usually for profit.
Now there’s too much corporate pressure on monetizing every single aspect, so the tech ends up being bogged down with privacy violations, cookie banners, AI training, and pretty much anything else that gives the owner one extra anual cent per user.
Aka “enshittification”
Enshittification was always a thing but it has gotten exponentially worse over yhe past decade. Tech used to be run by tech enthusiasts, but now venture capital calls the shot a lot more than they used to.
[off topic?]
Frank Zappa siad something like this; in the 1960’s a bunch of music execs who liked Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong had to deal with the new wave coming in. They decided to throw money at every band they could find and as a result we got music ranging from The Mama’s and The Papas to Iron Butterfly and beyond.
By the 1970s the next wave of record execs had realized that Motown acts all looked and sounded the same, but they made a lot of money. One Motown was fantastic, but dozens of them meant that everything was going to start looking and sounding the same.
Similar thing with the movies. Lots of wild experimental movies like Easy Rider and The Conversation got made in the 1970s, but when Star Wars came in the studios found their goldmine.
What’s crazy is that they were already making unbelievable amounts of money, but apparently that wasn’t enough for them. They’d watch the world burn if it meant they could earn a few extra pennies per flame.
Lots of the privacy violations already existed, but then the EU legislated first that they had to have a banner vaguely alluding to the fact that they were doing that kind of thing, and later, with GDPR, that they had to give you the option to easily opt-out.
You know this happened with cars also, until there is a new disruption by a new player or technology - companies are just coasting on their cash cows. Part of the market cycle I guess.
The question op is posing is:
Which new tech?
In the decade op’s talking about everything was new. The last ten years nothing is new and all just rehash and refinements.
ML, AI, VR, AR, cloud, saas, self driving cars (hahahaha) everything “new” is over a decade old.
There was a lot of pioneering in the 70’s. The first home computers, the first video games, the first mobile phones, all right there in the late 70’s. Most people ended the 70’s living like they did in the 60’s but now there’s cool shit like the Speak n’ Spell. The average American home in 1979 had no microwave oven, a landline telephone and a TV that might have even been color. There were some nerds who had TRS-80s, some of them even had a modem so they could 300 baud each other. Normies saw none of this.
There was a lot of invention in the 80’s. Home computer systems, video games etc. as we now commonly know them crystalized in the 80’s. We emerged from the 80’s with Nintendo as the dominant video game console platform, Motorola as basically the only name in cellular telephones and with x86 PCs running Microsoft operating systems as the dominant computing platform with Apple in a distant but solid second place. Video games were common, home computers weren’t that out there, people still had land lines, and maybe cable TV or especially if you were out in the sticks you might have one of those giant satellite dishes. If you were a bit of an enthusiast you might have a modem to dial BBSes and that kind of stuff, but basically no one has an email address.
There was a lot of evolution in the 90’s. With the possible exception of the world wide web which was switched on in August of '91, there weren’t a lot of changes to how computing worked throughout the decade. Compare an IBM PS/2 from 1989 with a Compaq Presario from 1999. 3 1/4" floppy disk, CRT monitor attached via VGA, serial and parallel ports, keyboard and mouse attached via PS2 ports, Intel architecture with Microsoft operating system…it’s the same machine 10 years later. The newer machine runs orders of magnitude faster, has orders of magnitude more RAM etc. but it still broadly speaking fills the same role in the user’s life. An N64 is exactly what you’d expect the NES to look like after a decade. Cell phones have gotten sleeker and more available but it’s still mostly a telephone that places telephone calls, it’s the same machine Michael Douglas had in that one movie but now no longer a 2 pound brick. Bring a tech savvy teen from 1989 to 1999 and it won’t take long to explain everything to him. The World Wide Web exists now, but a lot of retailers haven’t embraced the online marketplace, the dotcom bubble bursts, it’s not quite got the permanent grip on life yet.
There was a lot of revolution in the 2000’s. Higher speed internet that allow for audio and video streaming, mp3 players and the upheaval those caused, the proliferation of digital cameras, the rise of social media. When I graduated high school in 2005, there were no iPhones, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Youtube. Google was a search engine that was gaining ground against Yahoo. The world was a vastly different place by the time I was through college. Take that savvy teen from 1989 and his counterpart from 1999 and explain to them how things work in 2009. It’ll take a lot longer. In 2009 we had a lot of technology that had a lot of potential, and we were just starting to realize that potential. It was easy to see a bright future.
There was a lot of stagnation in the 2010’s. We started the decade with smart phones and social media, and we ended the decade with smart phones and social media. Performance numbers for machines kept going up but you kinda don’t notice; you buy a new phone and it’s so much faster and more responsive, 4 years later it barely loads web pages and takes forever to launch an app because mobile apps are gaseous, they expand to take up their system. A lot of handset manufacturers have given up so now there are fewer options, and they’ve converged to basically one form factor. Distinguishing features are gone, things we used to be able to do aren’t there anymore. The excitement wore off, this is how we do things now, and now everyone is here. Mobile app stores are full of phishing software, you’re probably better advised to just use the mobile browser if you can, mainstream video gaming is now just skinner boxes, and by the end of the decade social media is all about propaganda silos and/or attention draining engagement slop.
Now we arrive in the 2020’s where we find a lot of sinisterization. A lot of the tech world is becoming blatantly, nakedly evil. In truth this began in the 2010’s, it’s older than 4 years, but we’re days away from the halfway point of the decade and it’s becoming difficult to see the behavior of tech and media companies as driven only by greed, some of this can only come from a deep seated hatred of your fellow man. People have latched onto the term “enshittification” because it’s got the word shit in it and that’s hilarious, but…I see a spectrum with the stagnation of the teens represented with a green color and the sinisterization of the 20’s represented with red, and the part in the middle where red and green make brown is enshittification.
From an old geek; spot on.
Feels the same with lot of other tech too: space voyage, cars & motorcycles, robots, most are just like last year with some small cosmetic change or 7% more of this or that.
Sure, things are getting better but it doesn’t feel like it does any more.
Edit: hey, Lemmy & the decentralised fediverse is quite cool new tech.
Dial-up could still be pretty exciting. Or at least for me.
I am just amazed by data transfer via sound. When I found SSTV I was amazed by the ability to transfer analog images by sound. I was playing around with it for hours for months. I can get amazed by random crap like that. I can hear the image as it’s being transferred. So cool!
But recently I was playing around with QSSTV and found HamDRM. Same thing, but digital. And it’s not only for digital images, it can take any binary file. Sadly, no Android apps for HamDRM unlike analog SSTV. So, I just saved it as wav, moved it to my phone and played it to my laptop.
Holy shit! I transferred a 55kB document in 5 minutes using sound! It just feels so crazy and awesome. It sounds basically like random noise, static, but there’s real data in it. If only there was an Android app to do this, I could play around it for hours transferring small data back and forth over the air, using sound waves!
But hey, I can even be excited by a large QR code. 2 seconds of 8kbps MP3 in a QR code, pretty cool!
Any websites or projects showing the 2 sec of audio in a QR code? Sounds cool!
Oh, I just simply used the data URI with base64-encoded MP3. It can be pasted directly into browser.
However, you could get far more with codec2, although it’s very much a speech only codec. It goes as low as 700bps. So… roughly 20 - 25 seconds the same way, although you’d have to use the codec2 decoder instead of browser.
Sample: https://www.rowetel.com/downloads/codec2/hts2a_700c.wav
“These days a chicken is a rare dish”Anyway, back to the MP3…
Just paste it into a browser.
- a lot of pioneering in the ’70s*
- right there in the late ’70s*
- Most people ended the ’70s* living like they did in the ’60s*
- a lot of invention in the ’80s*
- crystalized in the ’80s*
- We emerged from the ’80s*
- lot of evolution in the ’90s*
- a lot of revolution in the 2000s*
- a lot of stagnation in the 2010s*
- Now we arrive in the 2020s*
- In truth this began in the 2010s*
- the sinisterization of the ’20s*
But you got it right for “TRS-80s” & “August of ’91”!
I didn’t sign up for an English class this semester, and I’m certainly not paying tuition. You gonna pretend you didn’t understand what I meant?
Tech has definitely become worse since megacorps killed the little guys & sucked the fun out of everything. Open source & self hosting is becoming/has become the only way. So glad I taught myself how to do it
Its called enshitification. Its a process that’s been happening in all areas of tech for a while now.
Nah new tech is great. Flippers, steam decks, nano drones. Bluetooth was a joke a decade ago. Now we can do devices over wifi! Much of the tech from that era barely worked and was practically DIY levels of reliability. Rose colored glasses etc…
Which isn’t to say that somethings haven’t gotten outright shitty (M$, apple products, etc…). But widely, things are much much better. I think it depends how “mainstream” you are shopping. But if you were shopping “mainstream” then, it was just as shitty as it is today.
I feel like smartphones + internet peaked about 10 years ago and has now steadily become enshittified. I have never used “google assistant” because it takes less time to just type something in to my phone or tap the setup for my alarm.
So yes, definitely feel that way. Consumer tech had less bullshit masking as improvements ten years ago.
Your BS radar has simply improved I’m guessing. Go through a few hype cycles, and you learn the pattern.
Hardware is better than ever. The default path in software is spammier and more extortionist than ever.
The technology has not peaked, the user experience has peaked
The default user experience maybe. Get better software, enjoy the better hardware.
I blame the big tech companies. 10-20 years ago they were not that big so they didn’t buy every competition to kill them. Now any time we get a new company or product that could change the world, one of the big 3 (apple, amazon, google) will buy them to keep the tech, code, or people for themselves.
Wanna see what not being bought by big tech is like? Look at what FOSS is doing. Look at Home Assistant, Jellyfin, AOSP is doing, it’s making huge leaps without big tech.
In my opinion as an engineer, methods like the VDI2206, VDI2221 or ISO9000 have done irreparable damage to human creativity. Yes, those methods work to generate profitable products, but by methodizing the creative process you have essentially created an echo chamber of ideas. Even if creativity is strongly encouraged by those methods in the early stages of development, the reality often looks different. A new idea brings new risks, a proven idea often brings calculable profits.
In addition to that, thanks to the chinese, product life cycles have gotten incredibly short, meaning, that to generate a constant revenue stream, a new product must have finished development while the previous one hasn’t even reached it’s peak potential. As a consequence, new products have only marginal improvements because there is no time for R&D to discover bigger progressive technologies between generations. Furthermore the the previous generation is usually sold along side the next one, therefore a new product can not be so advanced as to make the previous one completely obsolete.If you really want to see this with your own eyes, get a bunch of old cassette players from the 90s from different manufacturers. If you take them apart you can easily see how different the approaches where to solve similar problems back in the day.
TV resolution peaked about 10 years ago with 1080p. The improvement to 4K and high dynamic range is minor.
3D gaming has plateaued as well. While it may be possible to make better graphics, those graphics don’t make better games.
Computers haven’t improved substantially in that time. The biggest improvement is maybe usb-c?
Solar energy and battery storage have drastically changed in the last 10 years. We are at the infancy of off grid building, micro grid communities, and more. Starlink is pretty life changing for rural dwellers. Hopefully combined with the van life movement there will be more interesting ways to live in the future, besides cities, suburbs, or rural. Covid telework normalization was a big and sudden shift, with lasting impacts.
Maybe the next 10 years will bring cellular data by satellite, and drone deliveries?
Sorry to make you feel old but 10 years ago 4k was already mainstream, and you would have already had difficulty finding a good new 1080p TV. That is roughly the start of proper HDR being introduced to the very high end models.
Also, maybe you’ve only experienced bad versions of these technologies because they can be very impressive. HDR especially is plastered on everything but is kinda pointless without hardware to support proper local dimming, which is still relegated to high end TVs even today. 4k can feel very noticeable depending on how far you sit from the TV, how large the screen is, and how good one’s eyesight is. But yeah, smaller TVs don’t benefit much. I only ended up noticing the difference after moving and having a different living room setup, siting much closer to the TV.
I wouldn’t call 4K mainstream in 2014 - I feel like it was still high end.
I didn’t have a 4K TV until early 2019 or so when unfortunately, the 1080p Samsung one got damaged during a move. Quite sad - it had very good color despite not having the newest tech, and we’d gotten it second-hand for free. Best of all, it was still a “dumb” TV.
Of course, my definition of mainstream is warped, as we were a bit behind the times - the living room had a CRT until 2012, and I’m almost positive all of the bedroom ones were still CRTs in 2014.
I’ve been using a 720p tv up until last year
Design wise, absolutely peaked in the 90s/2000s. Now everything looks like a copy of each other with uninspired designs across the board.
In terms of what it has to offer, I personally don’t think so. Couldn’t imagine going back 10-20 years ago and not having a device like my Steam Deck that can play computer games on the go (laptop not included since when are you realistically pulling out a laptop on a drive when heading out for errands?) or having a laptop not as thin as my current laptop or even just the touchscreen feature. I also couldn’t imagine going back 20 years ago and not having a 1 or 2 TB portable external hard drive (or if they were out, being a lot more expensive than now).
The PSP is 20 years old now. Absolutely massive game library, and definitely on par with the console and PC games at the time.
The game library is well worth revisiting on something like a retroid pocked with upscaling.
As someone who didn’t have a PSP back then or even now, I’ll take your word on it.
- Bang. We needed to stop right effing there!
Yes.
Computers are the worst in my opinion, everything is tens to hundreds of times faster by specs and yet it feels as slow as it did in the 90s, I swear.
Network speeds are faster than ever but websites load tons of junk that have nothing to do with the content you’re after, and the networks are run by corpos who only care about making money, and when they have no competition and you need their service, why would they invest in making their systems work better?
You grew up in a time of huge technological innovation, so you see anything else as unusual
Boomers grew up in stagnation, and expect tech to keep progressing at the same rate.
Both are 100% normal ways for our brains to expect shit to go, but neither fit modern society.
