The saddest thing for me about modern tech’s long spiral into user manipulation and surveillance is how it has just slowly killed off the joy that people like me used to feel about new tech. Every product Meta or Amazon announces makes the future seem bleaker and grayer. 1/n
— Shannon Vallor (@ShannonVallor) August 16, 2022
The same for me. I used to fucking love tech. You have no idea. The first time I saw an Amiga in Gainesville, Florida, in 1986 was like a religious experience. I could never afford one but when I saw that bouncing beachball on the screen the future felt real.
It’s definitely not nostalgia, to answer a tweet further down in Shannon’s thread; things have truly gotten worse, and of late much, much worse. I dread new product announcements and any mandatory upgrade. You know it’ll make the product more ad-filled, surveillance-infested, and less functional — meanwhile, as with Mozilla, it’ll be combined with complete lies about how much more powerful the product is.
There is nothing in tech that’s the least bit interesting to me now. I miss the days when it improved my life with every new release rather than making it vastly worse.