What's something you miss/ are glad about nowadays?

[milkface]

The large majority of users on this forum are aged anywhere around 10-25 years older than I am and I was wondering whether there is anything from past decades that you miss (technologies, businesses, design styles etc.), or whether there are any recent technologies and other things that you wish were around when you were younger.

 

Has your life become easier as a result of the immediately modern world (2010s-present day)? Or is it harder? Let me know, cause I'm turning 20 next month and realised that not that much has been newly introduced in my lifetime, only improved upon (mobile phones, video game graphics etc.), many things used today such as internet forums and the internet in general, e-mail, touch screen etc. were around well before I was born and aren't seeming to budge any time soon.

[dingformung]

There used to be a website where you could order Jehovah's Witnesses to any address and they would actually show up there on time. Not possible anymore

 

[mcbpete]

Jeezus - That means I've been posting on here since the year you were born. That definitely doesn't make me feel old at all

I miss not knowing much about things - Naivety definitely made me happier back in the early 00s

I miss web 1.0 with every site being in a lovely closed bubble and not the huge social media screaming match that the internet has now become

[beerwolf]

Crowds. There doesn't seem to be any mystery in the world anymore with regards to quiet places to discover. Access to places and getting to places, all this information is available at the touch of a button, so therefore more people are there. Also everybody seems obsessed with telling the world where they have been (on social media) or showing pictures of themselves (on social media). Look where I am, look what I'm doing. So places I've know for years which were fairly quiet outside of perhaps main school holiday seasons have turned into a fucking circus. This I think is more of a problem in the UK, I'm sure big countries its not as bad. Some places are even closing down access to the public because what a nightmare/noise/rubbish has become. Maybe it doesn't help that cycling or being outdoors dressed from head to toe in a load of expensive gear (with your cunting stupid cup of Costa coffee) has become a mega trend. I hate it.

[d-a-m-o]

28 minutes ago, mcbpete said:

Jeezus - That means I've been posting on here since the year you were born. That definitely doesn't make me feel old at all

I miss not knowing much about things - Naivety definitely made me happier back in the early 00s

I miss web 1.0 with every site being in a lovely closed bubble and not the huge social media screaming match that the internet has now become

 

2 minutes ago, beerwolf said:

Crowds. There doesn't seem to be any mystery in the world anymore with regards to quiet places to discover. Access to places and getting to places, all this information is available at the touch of a button, so therefore more people are there. Also everybody seems obsessed with telling the world where they have been (on social media) or showing pictures of themselves (on social media). Look where I am, look what I'm doing. So places I've know for years which were fairly quiet outside of perhaps main school holiday seasons have turned into a fucking circus. This I think is more of a problem in the UK, I'm sure big countries its not as bad. Some places are even closing down access to the public because what a nightmare/noise/rubbish has become. Maybe it doesn't help that cycling or being outdoors dressed from head to toe in a load of expensive gear (with your cunting stupid cup of Costa coffee) has become a mega trend. I hate it.

True.

[zkom]

Not being expected to be able to be contacted 24/7.

I'd say the time before social media, but I'm not really in social media much anymore. But god it was nice when the internet and the BBSs before that were their own kind of parallel reality that didn't have much connection with real life.

20 minutes ago, mcbpete said:

I miss not knowing much about things - Naivety definitely made me happier back in the early 00s

As a teenager I also knew very few people living anywhere outside my home country. So all foreign news were kind of distant things that happened far away. Now it's completely different and the 24h news cycle makes it worse. Everything now gets much more personal.

Being able to eat tons of crap without gaining (much) weight. Now it's like "oh no you had a pizza better fast for a week or go run a marathon".

Hangovers used to last less than a day.

[Cryptowen]

the biggest change i notice (and this might just be the natural tracjectory of little kid -> almost 30) is that i feel like in the 90s a lot of ppl were still genuinely invested in the cultural narrative. now it feels like contemporary culture is largely a process of recognizing contemporary culture itself as performative, silly, corrupt, alienating, etc. And yet ppl still get extremely invested in some narrative, myself included probably

things i miss about being a kid: nothing really. uh maybe having better than 20/20 vision, and going to the beach

things i prefer about my life now: knowing how to do some things artistically, being in better shape than in the first 25 years of my life, trusting my own judgement over external opinions, better able to satisfy myself emotionally, can create my own entertainment, can control my impulses better

[zlemflolia]

i miss not owning a computer of any type

[brian trageskin]

porn is miles better nowadays

[beerwolf]

8 minutes ago, brian trageskin said:

porn is miles better nowadays

millions of miles better 

[joshuatxuk]

7 minutes ago, brian trageskin said:

porn is miles better nowadays

It is and it isn't.

It's cool to immediately look up both new and old niche content but there's a titillation and novelty of the really small and even innocuous stuff that stirs arousal in youth. I know it still exists, I see memes about like how thicc the mom on Incredibles is but there is the reality that the longer gradual quest for porn is much shorter than it was pre-streaming, pre-web, pre-cable. I think about how so much lore and urban legend used to surround things like nudity in films or hidden stuff in video games (Duke Nukem strippers, anyone remember that?). That has been lost to time. 

[toaoaoad]

Inb4 this turns into porn thread

[joshuatxuk]

43 minutes ago, Cryptowen said:

the biggest change i notice (and this might just be the natural tracjectory of little kid -> almost 30) is that i feel like in the 90s a lot of ppl were still genuinely invested in the cultural narrative. now it feels like contemporary culture is largely a process of recognizing contemporary culture itself as performative, silly, corrupt, alienating, etc. And yet ppl still get extremely invested in some narrative, myself included probably

I wrestle with this a lot, the upside is that niche interests and taste are far easier to explore than ever but it's offset with a see of noise in terms of media now. I partly try to moderate my social media scrolling not just because of the nefarious shit but also because it's like overdosing on superficial and redundant media. It's a lot of curated ersatz over the more rewarding poking around I used to do in book stores or web 1.0 sites or libraries. Even thift stores are not what the used to be, those have been mined for vintage coolness and/or relegated to utilitarian minded goods. That sweet spot of finding obscure or odd things in the wild has declined.

I'm very happy about how things are now because all the things I miss from my youth can still be revisited mentally. I think about much I miss the 90s before social media and how literally my headspace and thinking and self-aware state of imagining and perceiving things was different. If I turn off my phone and unwind a bit I can return to it. Ironically I can transport to actual substantive nostalgia that way than by binge-scrolling "retro and nostalgia" 80s and 90s content on reddit or IG which doesn't hit 99% of the time or is stuff I've seen a lot. There's so much from the past was far, far worse. I have kids and I'm actually very optimistic about their future because despite loud exceptions most zoomers and alphas are more inclusive, empathetic, and open-minded than they were 10, 20, 30+ years ago. 

We're in a weird time, one of massive and still to be determined sea change. The world is both becoming overwhelming homogenous while likewise unique and interesting niches are flourishing. More reason to reflect on how much I have improved my own life and honed in on core values, beliefs, tastes, etc. - not but trying to be a certain way but rather being a better version of myself. 

Edited January 26, 2021 by joshuatxuk

[joshuatxuk]

Also, FYI turning 35 tomorrow. I have a taste of pre-internet world that I remember but was not fully engrossed in more formative years. There's a lot of memories or memories / passive or second hand appreciation of the 70s and 80s for me via old books, vhs tapes, tv reruns. Something that strikes me with younger kids and adults is they don't have the same arbitrary but helpful cutoffs when it comes to pop culture and fads.  It's def true of those cusping gen x and millenial, and millenial and zoomers - like a couple years and people can have wildly different shared memories and nostalgia. With some exceptions someone closer to 38 or 39 or 31 or 32 will have very different shows, video games, and movies as favorites than I will.

My kids - 2 and 5 - they have a far more varied and potentially timeless appreciate of media that will be unprecedented. 

[zkom]

Programming before the internet was so much more difficult. You had to buy books to learn even the simplest things. No easily accessible APIs you could download or anything. You want to change a color in the VGA graphics mode? Yeah, they are in the registers that are accessed by ports 3c7h to 3c9h. Remember only the 6 most significant bits count. Didn't you read the fucking technical reference? And a lot of graphics programming in MS-DOS was based on unofficial modes in the graphics card that allowed things like double buffering or smooth scrolling. So even if you had all the technical data the real arcane knowledge was to know how to change the addressing modes of the video memory and things like that. So digging that shit up took ages. Then you were happy just to be able to move a picture smoothly across the screen. Let alone some 3D vector graphics where you had to learn vector algebra to do anything worth while and then get stuck writing fast fixed point implementation of trigonometric functions.

(I actually broke my computer desk while programming in the 90s)

[joshuatxuk]

^ This kind of dives into that discussion. 

 

More broadly I revisit Mark Fisher Capitalism Realism (and Zero Books' videos that reference it). I need to check out The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. I see it mentioned a lot as a reference point.

[joshuatxuk]

Regarding the lost truly "nerdy / geeky" ethos of cult following type fans and hobbyists that is still around but no longer as desperately unique or inherently intimate as it was before the internet:

 

Regarding the day to day pre-social media zeitgeist lost to time:

 

[toaoaoad]

I miss POGs

[toaoaoad]

53 minutes ago, joshuatxuk said:

I have a taste of pre-internet world that I remember but was not fully engrossed in more formative years. 

Definitely this. Being "first wave millennial" or whatever puts us in this sort of grey zone where we still remember oldskool computers (Oregon Trail!) in the elementary classroom, learning to use the internet for the first time in middle school, pirating music in highschool etc.. A lot changed just in ten years and if you were born a few years apart on either end your experience could vary quite a bit. People just a little bit younger than me don't remember ever not having the internet. 

I'd also say that with hindsight a lot changed significantly in my life and perception of the world with a) social media and b) smart phones. As others have said I miss being naive. I was fully addicted to facebook during university and my productivity was hurt a lot by it. (I've been mostly off it now for years and there was a noticeable improvement in my outlook on life.) And ever since getting my first smartphone my attention span has completely gone to shit. 

[Alcofribas]

something i feel nostalgic for from my youth (i was born in 82) is how comparatively limited things were and how that went hand in hand with a sense of wonder and surprise. so like, when i was getting into books and music there was no internet to provide all the answers so i used to be able to go to tons of different shops from giant sprawling places to little places the size of a small living room (like "medusa's head" which was the smallest cd store i've ever been in, they sold only goth cds lol). there was even a cd store in some guy's house where he sold tons of cool "imports" and bootlegs from some racks in his living room and you would get wooden tokens after spending a certain amount that could be used toward future purchases (this shop was called "busy bee"). i got the nin broken videos on vhs from a tiny little store and the guy who worked there took my dad aside and was like "hey, just fyi this is kind of fucked up so maybe watch it first before letting your idiot kid check it out." this made watching it so fucking thrilling - is this...real??? there were a few bookstores that only sold occult books, one of which had been open in chicago since 1918. you'd walk in there and it was legit like something out of a movie, it was absolutely amazing.

limits made it so that it was the kind of thing where you assembled knowledge more slowly and specifically and where chance played a major role. i would build little mental replicas of the inventory of different places - remembering that one bookstore had a particular volume that i would check out later or that a specific record store had a lot of a certain kind of record that i didn't know anything about and i would come to it in the future. you also met people this way, i got jobs at record stores and bookstores just bc i'd go in there and talk to people. so in this sense the process of discovery was more immersive and environmental and made up of unique physical places you could make a day out of visiting. the neighborhood was a place where you could just wander around and as you became interested in new things there was always a place to check out that would help you on that journey.

it's obvious the internet has really killed so much of this kind of experience. of the many stores i used to visit hardly any still remain standing. the potential of discovery now is so much greater but it also has lost the sense of adventure, everything is mediated by a flat screen where all of your input comes from. i'm not against this, not saying it sucks necessarily. but i do hope that future generations will get back to physical communities a bit more. it is kind of depressing that neighborhoods seem to be way more dull and corporate where the unique stuff pops up and then disappears swiftly after not being able to pay rent. no one wants to even open a little store bc it's so difficult to live a good life on regular ass wages. but it's kind of like, what is a city for if everyone just does everything on their phone?

i'm not bleak about it though because i do think younger generations seem as interested in the world as any, and like josh said as a whole they seem more empathetic and intelligent. my worry is more that the owners of society will just continue to abandon any responsibility to the public and we'll all just live in physical environments that are nothing but corridors between our microscopic living quarters to unsustainable gig work. 

Edited January 26, 2021 by Alcofribas

[chenGOD]

2 hours ago, mcbpete said:

Jeezus - That means I've been posting on here since the year you were born. That definitely doesn't make me feel old at all

 

Didn't you post on joyrex.com?

[Cryptowen]

1 hour ago, joshuatxuk said:

The world is both becoming overwhelming homogenous while likewise unique and interesting niches are flourishing.

on the one hand you see the global homogenization happening irl - that thing Mark Fisher had a term for (can't remember it off the top of my head) where you can go a city anywhere on the planet & you'll see the same chain stores, the same re-used layouts, people referencing the same media, acting out the same personas etc. But on the other hand the internet allows for the emergence of all of these incredibly niche communities which would never have been able to exist previously. perhaps there's a kind of music, or philosophy, or spirituality (or porn) that only speaks to a few dozen people out of a global population of several billion. thanks to the internet they can still find each other & sustain a network of sorts

i think this does tie into what i've been saying in AI threads about the changing nature of artist identity, authorship, social roles & motivations etc. The internet is ushering in a new era of human identity & we happen to be living at just the right moment to really see the change beginning to occur. We got to catch a glimpse of the old world, and will probably spend the rest of our lives observing the emergence of the new (like specifically i think boomers & millenials have two distinctly different kinds of brains, with GenX being either or depending on how young they managed to get on the wired). By the end of this century I really do feel like there will be a new sense of identity that isn't tied to the individual & a new sense of community that isn't tied to location.

[mcbpete]

6 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

Didn't you post on joyrex.com?

Aye, but that makes me sound even older

[d-a-m-o]

One thing I miss is the pre 9/11 feeling of "relative peace", I remember smocking a spliff with my friends after class then back home turning the TV on and thinking "WTF is this Die Hard 3 ?" then realizing it was real life... 

[joshuatxuk]

33 minutes ago, Alcofribas said:

something i feel nostalgic for from my youth (i was born in 82) is how comparatively limited things were and how that went hand in hand with a sense of wonder and surprise. 

limits made it so that it was the kind of thing where you assembled knowledge more slowly and specifically and where chance played a major role. i would build little mental replicas of the inventory of different places - remembering that one bookstore had a particular volume that i would check out later or that a specific record store had a lot of a certain kind of record that i didn't know anything about and i would come to it in the future.

Thanks for articulating this, honestly when some people seem truly pining for the old days I think might be hitting on experiences and perspectives like these. there's an incredible flooding of memories I get when I revisit old reference books I had or even old niche magazines - I would pour over every detail so much so I would often both get a good understanding of a subject while simultaneously using assumptions and imagination to fill in the gaps. Seeing certain images from said media in other context is a bit of mindfuck. That's totally non-existent now, where you can google search and image or keyword. 

There's a lot of extreme anecdotes to this in the late 20th century. World pop being forged from the selected Western rock and pop that they could get their hands on. Wild speculation of Soviet tech by the U.S. pre-1989. I remember seeing a documentary on Geoff Rowley and part of his incredible skill as a skateboarder stemmed from the fact that he was relentlessly diligent in doing tricks right everytime. He never thought that all the pro skater vids he watched as a kid in the UK were edited to only include the skaters nailing tricks and not hours and hours of falls and run up practicing. So when he came to SoCal he was arguably the most consistent skater active despite being a newcomer.