This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The worst damage to computers was done by U.S. Congress in 1972 when they fired ARPA IPTO that invented the Internet and the foundations of everything we now have in enshittified form. The direction was fantastic until then.
The sick sad history of computer-aided collaboration
https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
(long story)
Is it "discomfort", or a full rejection of the values represented by the enshittified tech companies and their LLM-cronies?
The sad thing is they aren't really equipped to live in any world but the one being created for them. All the education indicators are trending down. They can't do much without an internet connection and apps
Tbf non Gen-Z would also struggle if we'd remove their internet sevices suddenly.
It feels like everyone in the cushy countries more or less forgot how to exist outside their world
If I was gen z I would purely hate how I grew up. They got the worst if it. Well, them and alpha.
No wonder so many want to go back, I do as well! Give me all of our civil rights of today (minus US idiocy, I mean actual first world countries ) and take me to 1995-05 somewhere.
I am the oldest of Gen Z having been born in the late 90s. I got the tail end of what the world was like pre-smartphone and gotta say it was better…
Gen Xer born in 1967 checking in. Totally agree the world pre-smartphone was better. People just seemed to be more aware of their surroundings and each other. I don't blame Gen Z for getting dumb phones and, like, actually engaging with each other. We abuse our tech, and big tech abuses us.
Modern technology is great. It's massively cheaper and more performant for orders of magnitude less money.
Consumer technology on the other hand, is cursed.
The problem is that nobody needs to know how to use technology anymore. Every piece of consumer hardware and software is designed so that the company does all of the work for you and then rents you the fruits of the technology. Now you're eternally dependent on someone else to operate your technology for you because you're constantly paying the people that are ensuring your technological ignorance.
Don't worry about learning how to store mp3s or manage your music Library! Just pay Spotify, YouTube Premium, or Apple Music $10/mo!
Don't worry about needing to learn how to backup your data or to store you photos, just give Apple $29.99/mo! Shopping for hardware is hard, learning the difference between a Megapixel and a Megabyte is for nerds! Just buy the iPad, iLaptop, iCamera, iEarbuds, it only costs 50% more than it should!
Dealing with .mp4 and .mkv files, too complicated! Don't worry about needing to learn anything about movies, Netflix/Hulu/Disney/Paramount/Amazon/AppleTV/etc will gladly take your $20/mo and do everything for you!
Don't like your computer's OS being filled with advertising, spyware and AI? Too bad! Your only options are 1. Live in Apple's Walled Garden, 2. Put your entire life's worth of private data on the auction block for the lowest bidding advertiser for the benefit of Microsoft's shareholders or 3. Give your cellphone provider and Google root access to your entire life!
Yes, this is a 'Just use Linux' comment.
It's universal man. They fucked everything up, don't blame us (everyone) that we don't want to use your garbage tech. What do you expect to happen when you suck all the soul and humanity out of everything, out of daily living? People want that, need that, desire that, well, most people.
It's not really discomfort. It's the fact that any benefit technology would give us is being monetized and abused to the point where it's not enjoyable. I have this phone because employers expect to be able to contact me 24/7, and because governments want to spy on me, and companies want to harvest my data so they can profit from me. In return im given just enough to make it to the next day, and a screen to distract me from how fucking pointless our society is.
A skilled/educated American worker should be able to retire comfortably at 50 without having to worry about how they'll afford healthcare.
Companies make millions off you, then you give a few thousand because they know if they ever paid you a fair share, we'd all realize how much they've been robbing us this whole time.
Technology has become a way for the rich to extract more wealth from parts of other people's lives they have no business being in. I sincerely hope we can all get away from that side of it.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that the problem is not the technology, but who controls it.
If we actually taught digital literacy in schools, and democratized access to technology, people could be making their own software made for solving problems instead of capturing attention!
