Was chatting last night about the current state of of technology, and what occurred to me is that I'm angry about the future that's been taken from me.
Thirty years ago I was a keen reader of monthly technology magazines, where I'd see all the cool new stuff that was coming along. Music players that could hold your entire library, video players that could slip into your pocket. Wifi was becoming commonplace, and computers could do all manner of things.
It all felt so utopian. Many were already well-versed in the art of The Internet, while many more of us were taking our first steps online, where we could collaborate on things, and share ideas.
Then smartphones came along, and it was cool because suddenly all of those things were one thing. One thing to carry, one thing to charge. One thing to buy.
But then it all began to change. Gradually, over the past fifteen-odd years, almost every new tech product has become just another way to siphon off data, or provide training for LLMs and military uses. Even the fucking television sets have been pitched against us.
Our utopia was stolen.
Sure, we can still hang out online, in spaces like this, but people using Mastodon are very, very much the minority.
And more and more I feel like my use of technology is adversarial. Constantly having to grapple with my personal balance between necessary and evil. Having to learn how to be my own sysadmin because I can't trust cloud-based products to not steal all my data then put the prices up as well. Having to accept a compromised mobile phone experience, because I don't want to give literally everything about myself to Apple and Google.
It's undeniably the shittest time to be someone who grew up in the '80s and '90s loving the awesome new technology we could see on Tomorrow's World.
It's exhausting feeling like I have to care so much, and not being able to just...not.
DJDarren
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2026-09-24 12:58:11 UTC
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