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

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.

I think new tech is still great, I think the issue is the business around that tech has gotten worse in the past decade

I’ve been saying this for a while, and have estimated a similar 10-year time frame.

Most new tech (except for medical advancements) doesn’t really benefit the average person. Instead, it just gives corporations and governments more data, more control, and the ability to squeeze more money out of us. They don’t represent actual improvements to society as a whole or to individual users.

Did they have this tech 10 years ago?

I rest my case

I’m in an area that uses Waymo a lot. My head exploded last year when I watched a driverless car make a left turn in front of me. 100% impressed that day.

SpaceX catching the super heavy rocket -that was also mind-blowing. Space tech tends to be what spurs in the tech we use ourselves, so I think the privatization of space travel has been a net good. We’ll have another explosion of tech over the next few years because of it

Not really peaked. More like we entered the era of diminishing returns which btw is great if you are not blinded by the marketing. Mid to low range phones are fairly cheap and more than adequate for almost anything . Do you know how shit even mid range phones were 10+ years ago and how fast they were getting too old to be usable. Right now its more than reasonable to use any smartphone for a 3 to 5 years and probably even longer ( before only champions like samsung Galaxy note 4 could even hope to match that ). Everything you talk about is cheaper and more afforable than ever before( if you do the usual and not buy overpriced brands beacuse of a brand like apple , galaxy phone , roomba robot vacuums etc… ). The only thing thats a shitshow right now are websites and computer prices precisly beacuse right now the current hype is LLM( which makes graphic cards really f expensive and kinda hits website by ricoshet due to the negative LLM influence ).

Actually even as smartphones go there is a progress. Folding phones. Coincidently they are less relaiable and not as long lived . Exatcly as smartphones were 10 years ago.

Also smartphones were something much grander than a simple tech innovation. They were truly a society changing innovation like cars, trains , planes or a computer. They just peaked much faster than cars , trains or planes. In fact they probably had bigger impact on society than computers.

I just had to book a flight.

Frontier forces you to download an app now to check in (there is a well hidden option to do it on web, but the page never loads on laptop nor mobile in multiple browsers).

I tried to rent a parking spot, and 2/4 places would not load quotes at all (again web and mobile and multiple browsers). I probably would’ve used one of the two that didn’t load if their sites had worked. Their loss I guess.

I’d just like it to not feel like each interaction I have with technology, and I guess by extension the world, is becoming increasingly adversarial. The tech itself seems to keep getting better though.

I’m 22 and I feel the same way. 2012-2014 PC hardware was better and I do not care what anyone says. It’s probably the software that was better but damn nowadays my 6 core 12 threaded CPU feels so ass in any task compared to my old ass Pentium. I have 32 gigs of RAM and shit can still be slow and unresponsive. Games are poorly optimized because they just focus on making it pretty but it barely looks better. Best example is counter strike 2 vs CS:GO. I played csgo on integrated graphics then on a 1050ti game was always smooth and looked good. Now CS2 looks blurry even with taa off. Runs like shit and sure it looks better but not that much better for it to run how it does.

Edit: another example is vermintide 2. I upgraded my hardware since I played the 1st one but it runs way worse than the 1st one.

I used to customize my desktop like crazy with the dumbest 3D effects. I was on a Pentium using Ubuntu 14.04, integrated graphics. Now I can’t run discord and 3D effects without noticing the difference in performance.

Software is getting worse. Because it’s getting more and more complex. Now even basic things back then are rough to do now.

I don’t have proof or know enough to prove it but I can feel it.

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

I work in VR and AR. I traveled to a conference this week to showcase demos of my work.

I have in my backpack a headset that’s costing few hundred bucks and can spawn in front if your eyes 3D models you can directly manipulate with your hands or a pen.

It just works.

I even use it offline while flying.

This didn’t exist 10years ago. It’s amazing.

Technology is still evolving at break neck speed. On the other hand, companies are degrading/restricting these new techs to make more money.

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.

Yes you are correct, it’s worse now. At first it was creative, innovative products that made things more convenient or fun, or at least didn’t harm its users. Now all the new things are made by immature egotistical billionaire techbros: generative AI which has ruined the internet by polluting it with so much shit you can’t get real information any more, not to mention using up all our power and water resources, the enshittification of Web 2.0, Web 3.0 that was pure shit from the get-go, IOT “smart” appliances like TVs, doorbells, thermostats, refrigerators that spy on you and your neighbors, shit “self-driving” killer cars that shouldn’t be allowed on the roads, whatever the hell that new VR Metaverse shit is, ads, ads, ads, ads, and on and on. It’s a tech dystopia.

Have you heard the good news of selfhosting? Tech is better than ever, especially the free open-source stuff. The big corps behind it are what have gotten worse.