Technology has gotten objectively worse in the last few years.
I know I’m dangerously close to becoming an old man yelling at the Cloud. That every generation is uncomfortable with the next generation’s technology — everyone has a level of tech they’re used to, and things introduced later become increasingly foreign. But I’m pretty sure my perspective is still valid: I grew up with the Internet, I helped make little corners of it, and I still move fluidly and comfortably within most technology environments (VR, perhaps, being an exception.) So I think its reasonable for me to declare that cyberspace is kinda crappy right now. A few examples:
Video Games
When I was young, we jammed a cartridge in the Nintendo, and hit the power button and the game started. On a bad day, when it would glitch, we would blow in the cartridge believing we were getting dust out of it (most likely, it was just re-seating the game in its slot that did the trick.) Games were a diversion you could spend hours on, but also ones you could play for a few minutes between homework and bed time. The amount of time they sucked from you was a function of your free time, and your parent’s opinion on the healthiness of staring a glowing tube.
In contrast, the other day Ben and I had an hour together, and wanted to spend some time on a two-player game we’ve been working on. This is what happened when we put the disk in our modern gaming machine:
Playing together now a means an hour of downloading content from an online service before the game even starts — and this particular game is an entirely offline one! There isn’t even a good reason to be forced to do this download. This is objectively a worse experience than I grew up with (and it costs a whole lot more too.)
Social Media
Its really hard to remember how wonderful Facebook was when it first took off. Its predecessor MySpace made a mess of both design and technology, but it created a place for people to connect. Facebook was a cleaner, more rational place where you could find long lost friends, old classmates, and connect with distant family. I have old phones where Facebook was still positioned as your online phone book — one that was illustrated by people’s latest profile photos, and animated by what they had shared most recently. Facebook was a data source for experiences, it brought personality to technology experiences, through its open APIs.
Now Facebook is pure poison, and its descendants, like TikTok, are tools of nation-state level manipulation. Your friends and family still connected this way consume and share misinformation in a self-affirming echo chamber of increasingly extreme bias and partisanship, while in the US, company’s buy and sell their data to shill crap, and in China, the government uses it to oppress and control. Social media is now an objectively horrible part of the Internet that no one’s children should use (and most adults — including billionaires — should probably abstain as well.)
Vehicles
My dad used to complain about power windows. I’m not sure if this was out of jealousy, because our 14 year-old Buick LeSabre had only manual windows, or if it was another case of an Old Man Yelling at a Cloud, but he would explain that in an emergency, he’d rather have the ability to crank down a window and get out of a car, than be trapped by a mechanism that wouldn’t work in an electrical failure. In truth, the evolution of vehicle technology has not been a good one over-all. Even nice-to-have features have been plagued by poor implementations, and dubious architectural decisions. But there was a point slightly before that of diminishing returns, when it was close to “just right.” A driving experience made more comfortable by technology, but not damaged by it.
New cars have everything on a touchscreen — like auto manufacturers noticed a trend from 2007 of phones moving to touchscreens, and decided a decade later that vehicle controls would benefit from the same evolution, never once considering that fumbling through a touchscreen UI in a rainstorm, trying to find the windshield wiper controls is an objectively worse experience than flipping a lever next to a steering wheel.
And if my dad thought power windows were a bad idea in an emergency, wait’ll he discovers what happens to a Tesla’s door handles if its battery dies (or worse, bursts into flames.)
The common trait amongst all these examples is its not actually the evolution of technology that has made things worse — its the application of that technology that has ruined everything. My modern Xbox is undoubtedly superior to a Super Nintendo in every technical aspect; but its not more fun. The number of humans connected to the Internet has increased, and their connection points have gotten faster, and that should be a good thing — but the tools given them to connect to each other have been optimized wrong, and the result is worse. And modern technology thoughtfully applied to cars is capable of amazing improvements to safety; but it can also be used with astounding stupidity.
I have more examples I’d like to talk about. Things like how Microsoft Office used to be a great product that you’d buy every couple years, and now its a horrible subscription offering that screws over customers and changes continuously, frustrating your attempts to find common UI actions. Or like how Netflix used to be a great place to find all sorts of video content on the Internet, for a reasonable monthly price that finally made it legal to stream. And now its one of a dozen different crappy streaming services, all regularly increasing their prices, demanding you subscribe to all of them, while making you guess which one will have the show you want to watch. I could rant at length about how “smart phones” have gotten boring, bigger, more expensive, and more intrusive, and only “innovate” by making the camera slightly better than last year’s model (but people buy them anyway!) Or how you can’t buy a major appliance that will last 5 years — but you can get them with WiFi for some reason! Or how “smart home assistants” failed to deliver on any of their promises — even the commercial ones — and only got dumber the more skills they added. I could rant about all that, and more, but I won’t, because this is all just a Preface for the real topic: AI, and how its not all its cracked up to be.
But I can’t do it here, because the algorithm that reviews my blog posts for readability says I’ve already gone on too long. So come back for Part 2…
they will laugh at you, but you are absolutely on the money with this one.
Thanks for expressing sanity.
Good points, I agree with all of them (and I think a not-insignificant amount of people have voiced similar opinions over the past five years). I’m interested in what we can do as individual contributors to fix the problems. It feels like a systemic problem with no real answer. I fear I’m going to spend to rest of my life watching something that was special and important to my childhood simply continue to move in a worse direction.
You can still buy a Nintendo (currently Switch), put a Card and play without any waiting.
Yes and no. I own a Switch, and any game I have on a card still downloads updates. However, they are often smaller and far between enough that they don’t bother me too much.
I regret spending time to read this crap.
very stupid article.
Interesting. All of the replies here are polite, thoughtful, and reasonably well written. Only yours presents itself as badly punctuated, ungrammatical, illiterate garbage.
Telling.
My husband recently bought a new Subaru to replace the one he’d owned for
12 years. We are rather elderly and he is overwhelmed by all the tech choices, to the point that I said “If you don’t stop thinking out loud to me about your new car, I will cry”.
Wonderful post.
Somehow you managed to miss almost the entire history of videogames. We have been using games which required installation longer than we have had cartridges.
Now, I have plenty to complain about the dumpster fire that is the current industry and how it uses updates to paper over mistakes they ought to have fixed before launch. But maybe you should have framed your argument around that, instead of one which is historically laughable?