If I think about my own use of social media (and I have a facebook account from waaay back in the day, shortly after they dropped the requirement for a US edu email address), I wonder what value it ever had, over and above just emailing those people I'd like to stay in touch with every-so-often (which is what I do now). The reason why facebook switched to an algorithmic feed is because the previous method was failing, people were starting to give up posting. Algorithmic feeds didn't kill social media, they were an attempt at keeping alive what was already moribund. Social media, in the strict sense (so, not just online clubs or societies), never needed to be invented.
Agreed. Though I hated it at the time, in retrospect I am grateful for how often I was bored, growing up in the 80s and 90s. I'm sure I owe my career to it, I started programming computers from a lack of anything else to do.
If you want to sum up the 90s in the UK for people like me who became adults then, it would be the song, "Things can only get better". A little embarrassing, yes? Naive? and yet there really was an optimism then. If things weren't great (and objectively it was a poorer country), they were getting better, and they could get better, and they would. Happiness is more about cake tomorrow than cake today, and in the 90s you really could believe it. Do we have that belief now? Managed decline, it feels like, is the best the UK can offer.
To make this a bit more pithy: in the 1990s we were excited about the coming 21st century. In 2025, do we think the 2030s are going to be better, really? Or are we looking down the barrels of one maturing catastrophe over another?
Exactly. I think everyone in the UK of a certain age would just think New Labour if they heard that song.
Also made a bit of a comeback with the Starmer govt, after it was played at the election announcement and tapped into the 90s revival with Oasis & Britpop coming back in vogue.
I haven't heard a frankly optimistic piece of pop music in a very long time - the example I can think of from the 80-90's in the US is 10,000 Maniacs ("These are Days" was a Clinton campaign theme song.) Some people bash them is trite "concern rock", but at the time there really was optimism that society could be (and would be) improved.
In the rosiest view, the rich give their children private tutors (and always have), and now the poor can give their children private tutors too, in the form of AIs. More realistically, what the poor get is something which looks superficially like a private tutor, yet instead of accelerating and deepening learning, it is one that allows the child to skip understanding entirely. Which, from a cynical point of view, suits the rich just fine...
A story that popped up in my Google Now (or whatever it's called these days) feed: "Princess Bride Still Cherished by Fans". With an image from the Fellowship of the Ring. And in tiny text at the bottom, "Generated with AI, which can make mistakes".
It's all so dispiriting: produced without thought, consumed without pleasure.
If I recall, in the novel Solaris, set largely on a spaceship orbiting a distant, sentient planet, one of the characters uses a slide rule.
Idea for a sci fi novel: total reliance on chatbots that predict what you want to hear based on the average of the internet ends the astonishing run of innovation we've had since the industrial revolution, and returns us to the situation humanity has been in for most of our history, in which technology develops slowly, if at all. What do things look like in a thousand years, when we're still relying on the current equivalent of slide rules and analog film?
On the one hand: I'm a software engineer, I know none of the engineers involved wanted to put out a bad product or are happy about the situation. On the other hand, my Sonos system became almost unusable with the latest update. One would think that the ability to control the _volume_ is part of a speaker's MVP. It's now unbelievably laggy, when it works at all.
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