Technology has gotten objectively worse in the last few years.
I know I’m dangerously close to becoming an old man yelling at the Cloud. That every generation is uncomfortable with the next generation’s technology — everyone has a level of tech they’re used to, and things introduced later become increasingly foreign. But I’m pretty sure my perspective is still valid: I grew up with the Internet, I helped make little corners of it, and I still move fluidly and comfortably within most technology environments (VR, perhaps, being an exception.) So I think its reasonable for me to declare that cyberspace is kinda crappy right now. A few examples:
Video Games
When I was young, we jammed a cartridge in the Nintendo, and hit the power button and the game started. On a bad day, when it would glitch, we would blow in the cartridge believing we were getting dust out of it (most likely, it was just re-seating the game in its slot that did the trick.) Games were a diversion you could spend hours on, but also ones you could play for a few minutes between homework and bed time. The amount of time they sucked from you was a function of your free time, and your parent’s opinion on the healthiness of staring a glowing tube.
In contrast, the other day Ben and I had an hour together, and wanted to spend some time on a two-player game we’ve been working on. This is what happened when we put the disk in our modern gaming machine:
Playing together now a means an hour of downloading content from an online service before the game even starts — and this particular game is an entirely offline one! There isn’t even a good reason to be forced to do this download. This is objectively a worse experience than I grew up with (and it costs a whole lot more too.)
Social Media
Its really hard to remember how wonderful Facebook was when it first took off. Its predecessor MySpace made a mess of both design and technology, but it created a place for people to connect. Facebook was a cleaner, more rational place where you could find long lost friends, old classmates, and connect with distant family. I have old phones where Facebook was still positioned as your online phone book — one that was illustrat
