I remember connecting to the internet frim a Windows 3.1 pc using Trumpet Winsock that I downloaded from a BBS to get on gopher and look up the song lyrics to a Kate Bush song, Running Up That Hill.
I know this seems trivial but at the time it felt like a superpower.
That struggle is what built a generation of competent tech users. The prior generation largely just never picked up on the new tech, and the younger one didn’t have the struggle, so neither of them really know what’s going on with their devices in most cases. Us nerds that struggled through the earlier years of all this between probably the 1970’s to 90’s are overwhelmingly the tech literate ones in our respective families.
What also really didn’t help was bigtech trying to ultra-simplify everything in their capitalistic favor as much as possible to capture the largest audience, so most technology just became stuff-consumption devices to sell attention, rather than sophisticated tools you could learn to wield.
I remember connecting to the internet frim a Windows 3.1 pc using Trumpet Winsock that I downloaded from a BBS to get on gopher and look up the song lyrics to a Kate Bush song, Running Up That Hill.
I know this seems trivial but at the time it felt like a superpower.
The amount of effort we put into using tech was definitely something. There was struggle, but it was rewarding.
https://sals.place/blog/indieweb-and-bad-roads
That struggle is what built a generation of competent tech users. The prior generation largely just never picked up on the new tech, and the younger one didn’t have the struggle, so neither of them really know what’s going on with their devices in most cases. Us nerds that struggled through the earlier years of all this between probably the 1970’s to 90’s are overwhelmingly the tech literate ones in our respective families.
That’s a really good way of putting it.
What also really didn’t help was bigtech trying to ultra-simplify everything in their capitalistic favor as much as possible to capture the largest audience, so most technology just became stuff-consumption devices to sell attention, rather than sophisticated tools you could learn to wield.