I remember my grandparents making this exact same complaint: All of the new technologies during their younger years were amazing and improved the world. All of the technologies that came along in their later years were only complicating life after they had settled into comfortable routines.
In my hobbies and other real world activities I cross paths with people in their 20s a lot. It’s really refreshing to see their excitement about new technologies and the future, contrasted with all the cynicism you get when you spend time in places with a lot of jaded adults who wish the world would stop changing.
I think it’s natural to wish that technology would pause right at the point in your life and career where you’ve got it all figured out and lose your appetite for new things. It feels good to be on top of it all and feel like your knowledge, routines, and career skills are never going to go out of style. It feels uncomfortable when the world continues to change after you’ve settled into something familiar and routine.
Manufacturers could add modems to bypass the need for a wifi or cable connection, like they do in cars. I would expect by now that's a valid question to ask if I were to buy a new TV.
Don't feel that's it at all. Let's be more specific instead of just "tech" since that can be so many things.
I used to be very excited when new tech came out that empowered me to do new different things in more flexible ways that I can customize to be just perfect for me.
And you know what.. I'm still quite excited by new tech that does all of that! Latest for me is 3d printers (I know, I'm late to that game). Drawing and printing 3d objects is as exciting as when I discovered assembly language in elementary school in the 80s.
What's different? It used to be that most new tech fell into that category.
Today most new product releases are things that de-empower me, taking away flexibility, taking away my access, reducing configurability, further tighening the walled gardens, increasing dependencies on giant corporation clouds (which can block me in an instant), forcing in more and more spyware and advertising.
So yeah, no, I'm not excited about any of that garbage.
Let's say you were born in 1910. The revolutionary stuff (at the time) was applying electricity to stuff. Well, by the time you were 30, you'd seen all that. "X thing that we'd done before, but now done by electricity" wasn't a revolutionary idea any more. And by 1940, the really revolutionary advances in airplanes had mostly already happened (although the switch to jet engines was still to come).
What did it take to be revolutionary to a 30-year-old in 1940? Penicillin. Color television. The computer. There were still revolutionary things happening, but the bar was raised.
Or take the 1980s. It was revolutionary. Everything that people were doing anyway, they figured out how to do on a PC. I remember that time. Every month, there were new things possible, things that I didn't even think of trying to do on a computer.
By about 1990, that was over. Oh, you got the computer to do one more thing? I'm not surprised any more. I've seen that a hundred times over the last decade. It's just one more thing now.
Same with the internet. At first it was magic. Now, you can do one more thing on the internet? Yawn. Of course you can.
What's revolutionary now? AI. Twenty years from now, it will be a yawn too. Oh, you got AI to do one more thing right? No big news.
TL;DR: I guess that after a bunch of changes that can all be lumped into one bucket in your thinking, more changes in that bucket don't seem as interesting as the first few did.
How many new exciting things between 1950 and 1960? Color TV, jet airplanes, transistors, computers, early programming languages, nuclear power, artificial satellites, polio vaccine, credit cards, microwave oven, Xerox, fax machines.
How many new exciting thing between 2010 and 2020? AI, Netfix and crypto? Not sure I should be excited about that last one...
Transistors existed between 1950 and 1960. But they didn't really set the world on fire until the 1970s.
Computers existed in the 1950s, but they didn't explode into businesses until the IBM 360 series, and they didn't go into homes until the 1970s, and not in volume until the 1980s.
Xerox existed, but didn't explode until the 1970s.
And so on. It is decades from something being invented, to commercial availability, to widespread commercial use. And only when it becomes widespread does it change the world.
So I claim that the "revolutionary" part is when something already existing becomes widespread and applied. That was (in my previous examples) electricity in the 1920s and 30s, and personal computers in the 1980s and 90s. They already existed. But when they became widespread and used for everything, that's when the world changed.
So, what was that in the 2010s? I would say cell phones. Yeah, they existed before. But now everyone had them, which meant that everyone could be reached all the time, and everyone could take pictures, and read the news, and search the net, and watch sports, and listen to music, all the time, no matter where they were. That changed the world, or at least society, quite a bit.
What is it for the 2020s? It could be AI. That is, plausibly, exploding. If it continues to do so, it is likely to change everything. mRNA vaccines may become a thing that changes everything, at least as much as the polio vaccine, but we are not there yet - at this point it's still a maybe. SpaceX lowering the cost to orbit is a big deal. Starlink may be; I'm in the US, where internet rarely depends on satellites, so I'm not in a good position to judge that one.
When I was a kid in the 90s, my grandparents never wanted to get cable television, despite watching a lot of local broadcasts. Their children (and grandchildren) thought they would truly enjoy it: more live sports, history documentaries, and so on. They thought it would be low quality trash.
As a birthday gift, my mother tried to give them a lifetime cable subscription so they could see what they were missing. When the technician from the cable company showed up at their door, my grandmother stared at him through a slit in the blinds and refused to let him in or otherwise acknowledge him. I pitied them, and we joked behind their backs about how stuck in their ways they were. (Writing this as an adult, I can't imagine why my mom would insist on trying to give them a gift that they had overtly rejected.)
Years later, my grandparents gave in to cable. We were right: they did enjoy watching more Big 12 football. But they also enjoyed watching endless hours of Fox News. They became increasingly isolated, paranoid, and overtly racist. I won't blame 100% of this change on Fox News, but their transition toward hate absolutely poisoned their relationships with most of the family. I don't think that's exactly what my grandmother expected when she refused the cable man on her birthday, but she was still right.
So your grandparents were caught in the 'Fox News' bubble and as a result of that you state they became 'isolated, paranoid, overtly racist and [hateful]'. Sounds dire...
Have you considered that it may be just as true that you are caught in another bubble - say the 'CNN-MSNBC/MSNOW-ABC-CBS-NYT-WaPo' bubble or something similarly bent and twisted? That as a result from that you have become in the eyes of those outside that bubble 'naive, gullible, overtly anti-western, suicidally empathic and disdainful of those with a different view', especially given that your grandparents are from a different generation which uses different words (and words differently) and has a different frame of reference? That to me seems more likely than that your grandparents have been turned to the dark side by watching cable television.
I don't see how you get this from what I wrote. The grandparent poster only mentioned the 'Fox bubble', I made clear that this is not the only one and that it is likely he was caught in one of the other ones. I neither stated nor implied that it was the only 'non-dangerous' one, that is something out of your own imagination.
I can see now that my reading was uncharitable. Though I disagree with the last sentence of "not likely". Grandparents becoming FOX zombies is not a rare thing.
Perhaps people that are older have seen that sometimes new technology is not all benefit. You are trading something. Once you are old enough, and have seen it happen enough times, you start considering all the good and exciting things that have been traded away over the years.
It goes beyond that: what we call technology is inherently "abstraction of service", (ultimately all of which is related to boiling water for some reason???) and at a certain point too many layers of abstraction is more complicated than helpful in terms of reducing the amount of time spent interacting with the "work reduction layer".
Your grandparents complaint is essentially that "github is good, but writing tests, and using CI/CD is too abstract and complicated". Which is fair, especially if you aren't talking about something for intelligent people in specific. Compare ordering milk with a milkman vs. the modern way. Previously the loop was
1. call milkman
2. get milk & pay for next milk
now it can be a number of various paths (all of which are correct, confusingly!) to get milk delivered to one's door. Too much abstraction is no longer serving as a means of replacing work at this point, and managing the abstraction becomes a form of work.
That's the real complaint. Happy 2 hear ur thoughts about this 1.
Short answer is yes. Most grandparents resisted computers, internet, cellphones or online banking until the network effect left them with little choice but to participate. You also see them glom onto popular platforms (Faceboook, WhatsApp) and not experiment much with alternatives (Discord, Snapchat). Driven by the same effect, they're only there because that's where their families and friends are.
Comments
I remember my grandparents making this exact same complaint: All of the new technologies during their younger years were amazing and improved the world. All of the technologies that came along in their later years were only complicating life after they had settled into comfortable routines.
In my hobbies and other real world activities I cross paths with people in their 20s a lot. It’s really refreshing to see their excitement about new technologies and the future, contrasted with all the cynicism you get when you spend time in places with a lot of jaded adults who wish the world would stop changing.
I think it’s natural to wish that technology would pause right at the point in your life and career where you’ve got it all figured out and lose your appetite for new things. It feels good to be on top of it all and feel like your knowledge, routines, and career skills are never going to go out of style. It feels uncomfortable when the world continues to change after you’ve settled into something familiar and routine.
The difference is that their TV wasn't spying them but our TVs definitely are (aka ACR).
They all had stories of friends, family members, and siblings who died at young ages from conditions that are treatable with modern technology.
My grandfathers both benefited greatly from new technology of their times like hearing aids and various cardiac interventions.
I don’t like a TV reporting analytics either, but if we’re looking at technological advancements as a whole that seems like small potatoes.
My TV isn't connected to the Internet
How do you know? Seriously.
Manufacturers could add modems to bypass the need for a wifi or cable connection, like they do in cars. I would expect by now that's a valid question to ask if I were to buy a new TV.
Don't feel that's it at all. Let's be more specific instead of just "tech" since that can be so many things.
I used to be very excited when new tech came out that empowered me to do new different things in more flexible ways that I can customize to be just perfect for me.
And you know what.. I'm still quite excited by new tech that does all of that! Latest for me is 3d printers (I know, I'm late to that game). Drawing and printing 3d objects is as exciting as when I discovered assembly language in elementary school in the 80s.
What's different? It used to be that most new tech fell into that category.
Today most new product releases are things that de-empower me, taking away flexibility, taking away my access, reducing configurability, further tighening the walled gardens, increasing dependencies on giant corporation clouds (which can block me in an instant), forcing in more and more spyware and advertising.
So yeah, no, I'm not excited about any of that garbage.
What new technologies are they excited about?
Telling that op didn't respond to this simple question.
“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
Does not check out. One of the things I was highly excited about was RF communication. It still is. Another thing was LASERs and it still is.
Computers also was one of them. But modern media boxes are not exciting. Microcontrollers though, are still exciting.
Yeah, TV was around long before I was born. It sucks, always has.
I know a tall Asian man, that doesn't mean that the average Asian is tall though.
It may be based on your mental categories.
Let's say you were born in 1910. The revolutionary stuff (at the time) was applying electricity to stuff. Well, by the time you were 30, you'd seen all that. "X thing that we'd done before, but now done by electricity" wasn't a revolutionary idea any more. And by 1940, the really revolutionary advances in airplanes had mostly already happened (although the switch to jet engines was still to come).
What did it take to be revolutionary to a 30-year-old in 1940? Penicillin. Color television. The computer. There were still revolutionary things happening, but the bar was raised.
Or take the 1980s. It was revolutionary. Everything that people were doing anyway, they figured out how to do on a PC. I remember that time. Every month, there were new things possible, things that I didn't even think of trying to do on a computer.
By about 1990, that was over. Oh, you got the computer to do one more thing? I'm not surprised any more. I've seen that a hundred times over the last decade. It's just one more thing now.
Same with the internet. At first it was magic. Now, you can do one more thing on the internet? Yawn. Of course you can.
What's revolutionary now? AI. Twenty years from now, it will be a yawn too. Oh, you got AI to do one more thing right? No big news.
TL;DR: I guess that after a bunch of changes that can all be lumped into one bucket in your thinking, more changes in that bucket don't seem as interesting as the first few did.
But look at the rate of it.
How many new exciting things between 1950 and 1960? Color TV, jet airplanes, transistors, computers, early programming languages, nuclear power, artificial satellites, polio vaccine, credit cards, microwave oven, Xerox, fax machines.
How many new exciting thing between 2010 and 2020? AI, Netfix and crypto? Not sure I should be excited about that last one...
Yeah, but...
Transistors existed between 1950 and 1960. But they didn't really set the world on fire until the 1970s.
Computers existed in the 1950s, but they didn't explode into businesses until the IBM 360 series, and they didn't go into homes until the 1970s, and not in volume until the 1980s.
Xerox existed, but didn't explode until the 1970s.
And so on. It is decades from something being invented, to commercial availability, to widespread commercial use. And only when it becomes widespread does it change the world.
So I claim that the "revolutionary" part is when something already existing becomes widespread and applied. That was (in my previous examples) electricity in the 1920s and 30s, and personal computers in the 1980s and 90s. They already existed. But when they became widespread and used for everything, that's when the world changed.
So, what was that in the 2010s? I would say cell phones. Yeah, they existed before. But now everyone had them, which meant that everyone could be reached all the time, and everyone could take pictures, and read the news, and search the net, and watch sports, and listen to music, all the time, no matter where they were. That changed the world, or at least society, quite a bit.
What is it for the 2020s? It could be AI. That is, plausibly, exploding. If it continues to do so, it is likely to change everything. mRNA vaccines may become a thing that changes everything, at least as much as the polio vaccine, but we are not there yet - at this point it's still a maybe. SpaceX lowering the cost to orbit is a big deal. Starlink may be; I'm in the US, where internet rarely depends on satellites, so I'm not in a good position to judge that one.
OK, but does any of that invalidate my argument?
Were they wrong?
When I was a kid in the 90s, my grandparents never wanted to get cable television, despite watching a lot of local broadcasts. Their children (and grandchildren) thought they would truly enjoy it: more live sports, history documentaries, and so on. They thought it would be low quality trash.
As a birthday gift, my mother tried to give them a lifetime cable subscription so they could see what they were missing. When the technician from the cable company showed up at their door, my grandmother stared at him through a slit in the blinds and refused to let him in or otherwise acknowledge him. I pitied them, and we joked behind their backs about how stuck in their ways they were. (Writing this as an adult, I can't imagine why my mom would insist on trying to give them a gift that they had overtly rejected.)
Years later, my grandparents gave in to cable. We were right: they did enjoy watching more Big 12 football. But they also enjoyed watching endless hours of Fox News. They became increasingly isolated, paranoid, and overtly racist. I won't blame 100% of this change on Fox News, but their transition toward hate absolutely poisoned their relationships with most of the family. I don't think that's exactly what my grandmother expected when she refused the cable man on her birthday, but she was still right.
So your grandparents were caught in the 'Fox News' bubble and as a result of that you state they became 'isolated, paranoid, overtly racist and [hateful]'. Sounds dire...
Have you considered that it may be just as true that you are caught in another bubble - say the 'CNN-MSNBC/MSNOW-ABC-CBS-NYT-WaPo' bubble or something similarly bent and twisted? That as a result from that you have become in the eyes of those outside that bubble 'naive, gullible, overtly anti-western, suicidally empathic and disdainful of those with a different view', especially given that your grandparents are from a different generation which uses different words (and words differently) and has a different frame of reference? That to me seems more likely than that your grandparents have been turned to the dark side by watching cable television.
Which one is it? Bubbles are dangerous but not the Fox bubble?
I don't see how you get this from what I wrote. The grandparent poster only mentioned the 'Fox bubble', I made clear that this is not the only one and that it is likely he was caught in one of the other ones. I neither stated nor implied that it was the only 'non-dangerous' one, that is something out of your own imagination.
I can see now that my reading was uncharitable. Though I disagree with the last sentence of "not likely". Grandparents becoming FOX zombies is not a rare thing.
Their cutoff point for where technology stopped being good and exciting was prior to when this author thought technology was fun and exciting.
It’s a personal feeling. Once you get comfortable with the way the world is, you start wishing it would stop changing.
Perhaps people that are older have seen that sometimes new technology is not all benefit. You are trading something. Once you are old enough, and have seen it happen enough times, you start considering all the good and exciting things that have been traded away over the years.
It goes beyond that: what we call technology is inherently "abstraction of service", (ultimately all of which is related to boiling water for some reason???) and at a certain point too many layers of abstraction is more complicated than helpful in terms of reducing the amount of time spent interacting with the "work reduction layer".
Your grandparents complaint is essentially that "github is good, but writing tests, and using CI/CD is too abstract and complicated". Which is fair, especially if you aren't talking about something for intelligent people in specific. Compare ordering milk with a milkman vs. the modern way. Previously the loop was
1. call milkman 2. get milk & pay for next milk
now it can be a number of various paths (all of which are correct, confusingly!) to get milk delivered to one's door. Too much abstraction is no longer serving as a means of replacing work at this point, and managing the abstraction becomes a form of work.
That's the real complaint. Happy 2 hear ur thoughts about this 1.
Short answer is yes. Most grandparents resisted computers, internet, cellphones or online banking until the network effect left them with little choice but to participate. You also see them glom onto popular platforms (Faceboook, WhatsApp) and not experiment much with alternatives (Discord, Snapchat). Driven by the same effect, they're only there because that's where their families and friends are.