I never thought i'd side with Gen Z in how they think, but ...

2026-07-25T10:14:11Z

I never thought i'd side with Gen Z in how they think, but when it comes to analogue devices, we are very much in sync.

Vinyl's back. Mechanical watches are back. Gen Z reads more physical books than the algorithm and tech bro's wearing patagonia would like.

I'm here for it.

I remember being with nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpqdrnhdwspurvkaptrjmhs4u5crz8r34stfr9ewnhqwwapwj5fc0ps2strtw (nprofile…trtw) in London talking about cars and tracking a while ago and it has always been in the back of my mind.

I'm not anti-tech, I'm just anti-tech for techs sake. I own a modern car, it's from 2009 and it's the newest I have and have ever had actually.

It has knobs. It has sliders. There's no stupid ipad in the display. I don't have it snitching on me. I don't have a sub to warm

Turns out I'm not just being sentimental about this. From January 2026, Euro NCAP won't give a car five stars unless it has physical controls for indicators, hazards, the horn, windscreen wipers and such.

physical knobs. wild I tell ya

Their own research found touchscreen tasks can take 20+ seconds, enough to cover half a kilometre at motorway speed without your eyes on the road.

Then there's the data, and this is the part that actually worries me professionally. Mozilla tested every major car brand's privacy practices. Every single one failed. Their conclusion: cars are the worst product category they've ever reviewed for privacy (https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260513-your-car-is-spying-on-you-its-about-to-get-worse)

None of this is a human underwriter looking at your file anymore. It's a model turning your braking patterns, night trips and cornering speed into a risk score and quietly adjusting your price.

Insurers are moving further into AI-processed pricing and claims, and even within the industry the reasoning behind a given decision is often described as a "black box" that's hard to unpick

So I'm not being precious about buttons for the sake of it. I'm against tech that fails silently, phones home without asking, and quietly builds a profile of me that I'm not allowed to read. Tech for tech sake is what VC's and tech bros want and the reality is, most others dont

And that's the part I can't get past, being on the inside of this stuff. I know exactly where that data goes. It's not sitting in a drawer somewhere. It's a row in a Postgres table, or an embedding in a vector database, waiting for some frontier model to slurp it up

Often with shoddy security engineering processes and "oh crap we got hacked but no honestly, we DO take your security seriously" lines we've all heard to death.

So here's to more analogue, less tracking and less bloody data generation

If you got this far, watch Julia James Davis (she's very cool, I like her series on the death of beauty)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7GKFmAbTB8&t=1s

Anyway here's to hacker summer camp, tinkering and breaking and hacking.

Nostr notes by Daniel Cuthbert

I never thought i'd side with Gen Z in how they think, but ...