When did technology stop being helpful 📦

2    26 Oct 2020 15:36 by u/asdfa

I am GenX. I grew up with the promise that technology would give us nuclear energy, men on mars, hoverboards, and ever-faster computers that would make human life easier. Instead we got cellphones, social media, mindrot, and social decline. My work requires that I buy the fastest computer I can afford. I have not noticed an appreciable improvement in performance achieved by upgrading my PC since I installed my first SSD in 2010. Brainpower is being wasted on the next iphone and better ways to categorize us through social media.

5 comments

3 u/None 26 Oct 2020 16:40
Around the time of the 2nd gen ipod. When they took away the physical click wheel. Mostly downhill after that. Web 3.0 with private companies aggressively monetizing user generated content was a huge catalyst for spam and fuckery. Bootstrap made 80% of all websites look the same, all most all of it low effort content. At least with GeoCities people would customize their shit lol.
3 u/_Account_vz5 26 Oct 2020 17:35
about 2005 when social media was invented. Then all of a sudden a bunch of fuckwads who have no business even using a computer started to.
2 u/None 26 Oct 2020 15:39
The internet pre-web I'd say was still a valuable piece of technology that was used productively, but the Web suddenly made a major facet of the modern world all about feeding porn addictions, stalking your ex on social media, ranting about political events thirty seconds after they happened instead of reading a newspaper thus triaging your rage, streaming movies because we're insomniacs and sending dick pics.
2 u/_Account_6ym 26 Oct 2020 15:40
It stopped being helpful when it was being built to break...
2 u/Somanysockpuppets 27 Oct 2020 00:42
I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.