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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.
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.
As someone else mentioned, in 2006 the overwhelming amount of ‘tech’ was not designed with slop and spying in mind. If you bought a super high end stove/oven or toaster it would NOT need constant software updates or Internet connection and be forced to give telemetry and have microphones or cameras to listen and watch you as you use it.
The absolute first ‘always online’ device was the juicero in 2013 and it was an abject failure on every level. Not only were people confused as to why it needed to be online in the first place, it was a horribly designed and extremely inefficient machine… Someone at the time brought in the proprietary bag of juice it uses and squeezed it out by hand, and he was faster and more efficient in doing it than the machine was.
I personally did not hear about online appliances until I took a course on IoT in late 2020. And that one showed how you can use an arduino to make device an internet connected device.
But even then… Both young and old heads just don’t like this shit. A toaster does not need to be online… A lamp and its lightbulb do not need to be internet connected. I am confident that if and when they make it legally required to do so (as they are absolutely going to do with cars) there will be so much disregard for the law that it will be unenforceable.
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.
Has she seen the price of caves lately?
Caves seem pretty cozy tbh
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
Techies on the verge of retreating into the forest are an absolute minority, blown out of proportion by people on internet forums like this. most techie people still like gadgets.
Come on, this isn’t facebook, we should be better than this type of post here.
Gargling corporate nutsack every time they release a new smartphone and rushing to install the latest spyware in your home doesn’t make you a techie.
I know a game developer who works for Roblox who sends me Twitter links all the time and uses copilot. Blows my mind.
4 years ago I quit my career in IT, moved out of the city, and now live in the woods. There are dozens of us.
20 years ago, the Patriot Act was already in place and privacy was essentially dead (and other countries were not exempt from US spying), people just didn’t know the full extent until the Snowden leaks. But it was clear enough then, if you weren’t gripped by the hysteria, that the “emergency measures” were there to stay, and get worse.
Exactly. The War on Terror was the beginning of the end of personal liberty in the West.
Now we live in a world of panoptic surveillance and illusory freedoms.
Me when new smart devices are created
Satan’s got your back, mate.
Beyond what’s been said about data harvesting, 20 years ago new devices very often represented genuine improvements in form and function on each new iteration. Physical and functional differences were easily apparent between each model of early smartphones.
The only thing we have right now that’s similar was model releases from AI labs. And it seems like even those are slowing down because the urgency to release anything incrementally better undermines huge, stable jumps.
Nah, there are still good products being produced. You just have to look for them and they will never be the most popular option since they get advertised like crazy by big corporations.
If there’s fiber and a nearby hospital in the forest count me in.
There’s lots of tendrils and medicinal mushrooms, will that suffice?
Deal
We can do shrooms and connect with each other!
The hospital thing is a big one. My wife and I had considered moving to a remote location but the risk of significant injury without nearby medical facilities was one thing that changed our mind. It’s hard to accept that risk, even when you think it would probably be worth it. Medical problems ƒ suck.
Mate so true. 20 years ago there was no ai. Now we don’t know where will we go. There are so many face ai as well so idk what’s good and what not.
This weekend, found my old motorola phone. For giggles, i plugged it in- still boots! Can I do anything with it or did I just wasted a bit of electricity on nostalgia?
If it’s 3g-only, it won’t get a network signal anymore. So mostly it’s a novelty that can play badly written Java games.
Depends on what the other poster meant by “old”. Motorola made Android phones from very early on, and those would definitely be considered old. You can probably do some possibly useful stuff with those even if they are stuck on 3g.
I still like technology. It’s still possible to find technology that doesn’t spy on you and that you can control yourself. I use Mint, by the way.
It’s not the technology that’s the problem (mostly), it’s the corporations that control 99% of it.
I use mint too! Only switched last year and i have never looked back.
Normal people never avoided tech. TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Nintendos, Atari 2600s, Colecovisions, Selectavisions, DirectTV, WebTV, Tivo, Cell phones, beepers, the list goes on and on. If you’re using a smartphone to read this, you’re using a glorified Blackberry. This stuff was what Dr. Stephen Falken from War Games and the real life people the character was based on were fleeing to the woods from in the 20th Century.
If you call websites “apps” and download them from a store, you’re not using tech. I don’t view my Smartphone as “tech” anymore than a VCR was “tech”. Smartphones are just a crappier version of landlines and computers. They try to be both and they’re not good at either.
Yeah, the premise of this post makes no sense.
People owned flip phones in 2006. Kids were expected to graduate high school with basic computer skills. There’s a good chance they got a laptop for college. The internet was already a standard part of life.
Apple made tech cool in 2001 with the iPod and in 2007, “normies” went apeshit for the iPhone. Not to mention how half the business world was using Blackberries and the early Windows-on-a-phone (forgot the name lol) already.
I mean its true.
But my 4K120hz VRR Oled just never connects to the internet. gAmInG-rig is on Linux. Pixel got the Graphene treatment. Homeautomation always seemed stupid to me(personally, if you have usecases, good for you). If there were ready to use iot devices which doesnt suck and respect my privacy by just beeing on the local network: sure i would think about it. But hacking together something good with arduinos wasnt worth my time for now atleast.
VR headset OS is hacked and nerved to the best of my knowledge.
For now there are still ways to enjoy tech even though overall its a fucking hellscape.
< Homeautomation always seemed stupid to me
Home Assistant is a great way to achieve home automation without handing everything over to random organisations. Not perfect, but better than relying on Amazon.
I can only speak for myself, but the things that home automation usually automates don’t spark joy for me. Like they’re the kind of friction that I don’t hate, and ideally would want to just have more time to do.
Also I guess I just like being able to go somewhere in my house and there are no computers there
And ESPhome works very well together with Home Assistant if you want to build stuff yourself.
Just get an ESP32 and a sensor or other device that is supported by ESPhome and you will be able to program and connect it very quickly.
There are also ways to use sensors that are currently not supported by ESPhome by writing a custom component, but that is something that I don’t do, too much effort and it’s not that easy.
It’s also crazy just how many different devices can be connected to Home Assistant. If it is at least somewhat widely used chances are good that someome has already written a plugin to make it work.
All my “smart home” devices are local access only. I keep ignoring the occasional prompts to enable external access.
