We used to get excited about technology. What happened?

It&#x27;s the lack of control.<p>I used to feel excited about new screen technology and I used to upgrade my TV &#x2F; monitor for watching movies pretty regularly. But now that all the newer models are &quot;smart&quot; which effectively means they limit my freedom, spy on me, and shove ads into my face, I&#x27;m trying to avoid upgrading as much as I can.<p>Similarly, I used to feel enthusiastic about all the cool new stuff Apple would put into MacBooks. But then they became more and more totalitarian and by now with Gatekeeper, Signing, mandatory App Store, and all that image scanning plans, I feel like I&#x27;m at best a tolerated visitor on MacOS, but I&#x27;m very far away from the power that root granted me when I was a kid.

Brief excerpt from the article:<p>&gt; It’s not enough for a refrigerator to keep food cold; today’s version offers cameras and sensors that can monitor how and what I’m eating, while the Roomba can now send a map of my house to Amazon.<p>I can only answer subjectively here. At some point in the past 20 years, the quality of products deteriorated. We have more options than ever before, but much of it is cheap, plastic garbage. It spies on us, or comes with terms and conditions where we actually own nothing, or is chock full of complexity.<p>We purchased a bathroom scale from Amazon during COVID. I can’t remember but either Wire cutter or Consumer reports gave it top scores.<p>The damn thing required installing a mobile app and wanted to connect to my Wi-Fi, and though it gave me an option to skip this step, I couldn’t get it to complete “setup” until I connected it. Once I connected it, there was no option to disconnect it. The scale works okay, but I had to go into my router settings to block it from connecting.<p>When you think about it, products and services today are drowning in complexity and outright stupidity. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the economics and the race for endless growth. It often feels like innovators are either out of ideas, or maybe because of the few companies who dominate specific industries, it’s just too damn impossible for any new innovative ideas to come to fruition.

Peak tech.<p>This feels rather behind the curve, like the author is just figuring out what we&#x27;ve been saying here for many years now. But the difference is that it&#x27;s now <i>okay</i> for an MIT professor of AI Ethics to say it.<p>That&#x27;s the crucial change. People are saying it. At the school. At the hospital. Out in public amongst friends one used to &quot;keep up appearances&quot; for. I can discuss it with my boss. Even my aged but highly intelligent mother pesters me about it....<p>&quot;Digital technology creeps me the fuck out and I just don&#x27;t want it in my life any more&quot;.<p>The emotional, spiritual even social disadvantages now outweigh the purported advantages. For me, that&#x27;s &quot;peak-tech&quot;, which is not necessarily about demand or economics. It&#x27;s the cultural turning point we&#x27;re at.<p>We built this stuff. So we better start thinking about how we&#x27;re going to fix it.

Last week I cancelled Apple Music. I found that my previously large music collection, which I had before joining Apple Music and its convenient web upload, was in tatters. Most albums were gone, and of the few ones still there, many had missing songs. Is that progress? Luckily I found the missing music as part of the backup of a laptop I decommissioned in 2016.<p>Much technology is becoming too difficult to judge properly. There are too many side effects and circumstances involved. Technology likes to pretend it is smart, but it is usually anything but. It is pushed upon people nevertheless.

In the 80s and 90s (when I grew up) there was still a sense that technology was capable and going to be empowering people and making lives better, healthier, more convenient. Even though in many ways this wasn’t really true at the time either, the rise of social media and digital advertising as the primary examples of “big tech” I think really changed how people internal and external to the industry think about how technology intersects our lives.<p>When you think about science fiction and the promises of technology and then look at what we actually got (mostly platforms to sell us things) I feel like it’s natural people are discouraged.

I blame venture capital for a lot of this. A bootstrapped tech company can keep making products for consumers at a modest profit. A vc backed startup has to grow and grow, so selling out their customers is just an expected part of that journey.<p>It sucks. I hate it.<p>Maybe we will see the rise of some label that companies might adopt, to signal that they are not trying to profit from what they know about you, they just want to sell you the product.

Huh? I still am excited about technology. Technologies I&#x27;m awaiting keenly:-<p><pre><code> * Electrolysed hydrogen for iron smelting and fertilizer making * Reverse osmosis fresh water production * Cell-cultured meat * Robots in pedestrian spaces &#x2F; robots around people (hospital and university delivery bots, fruit picking bots, re-taskable robots in factories, etc.) * Bio-inspired textiles like artificial spider silk and vegan leather * Much better and cheaper assistive technologies (hearing and vision aids, movement aids, cognitive and memory compensation) </code></pre> Oh, you mean social media and cloudy stuff? Yeah, never was into that.

From my perspectives 20 years ago, the context was passion and excitement. Those are the only ones who had an idea of the future. And, people thought they were weird. Nothing has changed. There’s still passion and excitement out there. Just like back then, these people are in the fringe, with exciting predictions of the future, and called weird. VR, blockchain, etc.<p>Related, the growing majority of people I work with choose tech because it pays well. In the beginning of my career, nearly everyone was in tech because it was their passion.

The mainstream commercialisation of tech may be tedious, but life on the tinkering fringes is about as exciting and engaging as ever.<p>There&#x27;s a lot more noise to filter out, of course. Perhaps that falls under &quot;careful what you wish for&quot; - that is, as 80&#x27;s&#x2F;90&#x27;s youngsters we all wished that the world was more tech and computer -centric. Well, we got our wish.

In so many wayswe don&#x27;t own the technology we buy anymore, and playing with someone else&#x27;s toys doesn&#x27;t invite the same enthusiasm, especially long term where ecosystems are involved.

We thought the future was gonna look like a movie, or something like The Jetsons. The future like actually much more mundane, and predictable. It&#x27;s curved tv screens and smaller phones. That&#x27;s kind of cool, but nothing special. I think part of it is people had very big expectations for the future and those are only rarely met.<p>I also think we already got a lot of the low hanging fruit. Growing up, I used to dream of being able to use my computer anywhere. Now I can, as a modern phone is even more capable than my computer back then. Phones used to regularly come out with cool new features that put it in front of competitors. Now most phones are identical-- they have all the features and apparently no one has any ideas for any new ones. I can run doom on my fridge and I don&#x27;t care, but Dall-e impresses me.

Everything comes with a catch these days.<p>Our relationship with brands used to be closed-end. Widget Mark II is 30% faster than my old Widget Mark I? Here is a stack of dollars for it, and we&#x27;re done until five years from now when I&#x27;m ready to consider Widget Mark III+ with Chili and Lime.<p>Now everyone&#x27;s all about the back-end relationship. It&#x27;s gotta come with some subscription service, account, or back-end drip revenue from harvesting data. Half the time it&#x27;s deliberately crippled to serve some business interest.<p>It&#x27;s hard to be as wide-eyed when you have to be reading the fine print to see exactly how you&#x27;re being screwed.

For me, Intel Management Engine was the Rubicon where computing lost its luster.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Intel_Management_Engine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Intel_Management_Engine</a>

It&#x27;s the consumption of our limited attention, and how our social life has become mediated by tech. It&#x27;s how is it not solving our problems and overloading us with undesirable crap like forms and checks.

I think the problem is that too many critics have a voice. There’s a cadre of dedicated naysayers for every new piece of technology that comes out that creates too much noise to get too excited about. Couple this with technology being used for environmental destruction, racist pursuits and job displacement and you have a generation that’s too jaded to get excited.

Simply: most everything got overrun with ads. Also, IP law is stifling innovation.

Because we no longer own it. We are licensed it.

because we don&#x27;t really need anything else?

People can say what they want about RMS being a creep. But we continue to piss and moan about these things restricting our freedom and take over our lives.<p>Tada, the writings on the wall

This all depends on your perspective. If you want to believe tech has gone to the doldrums, that reality will manifest for you. Meanwhile people will be creating Raspberry Pi server clusters in their bedroom and hacking the planet regardless of surveillance capitalism.