i think a lot about those kinda boomers who want to harken back to the good old days before smartphones existed. because i'm at a stage in my life where i'm starting to form contrary opinions about popular developments in tech, and i wonder if what i feel now is similar to how those previous generations felt?

tech was just cooler and better before. i hate streaming services; i hate how they rip off artists, i hate how music disappears from them because of their awful bureaucratic distribution systems, i hate all the fake copyright claims, i hate how they log all your listening data. i hate phone manufacturers; i hate how headphone jacks aren't a thing anymore, i hate how i have to buy a shitty dongle that i have to charge separately that loses connection if i put my hand in front of it just to listen to music, i hate how the other option is getting a new pair of (also separately charged) headphones that i won't like because they won't sound like my DT-770s, i hate how phone manufacturers control what options the consumer is given just based on what's trendy rather than what is actually useful.

i'm in the market for an iPod. i'm straight up considering buying tech from over a decade ago and tinkering with it to make it fit my needs. i run a cassette tape label. i buy my friends music on cassette tapes. cassettes are so cool! people send me Spotify links and then i always have to remind them that i can't listen to it, because i've never had a Spotify account. my media library lives on my server PC, where i have all the audio files i need in the highest possible quality. i buy so much music from Bandcamp. i still buy CDs regularly just to rip them in the highest possible quality; heck, i still even rip music from YouTube sometimes if i can't find it in anything higher. in that sense, i still acquire music the same way i did in 2011, i never stopped doing it.

i also fucking hate generative AI. i fucking hate generative AI! people will call you a luddite for that (without even realizing the larger implications of what they're saying). your friends and your grandpa and your mom and your coworkers all think it's so funny that they can generate a picture of Donald Trump as a piece of broccoli, right? it's becoming so normal now. it's the next big thing. but these developments in tech will cost people their jobs — something that was previously said about the rise of home computing. these developments in tech will further alienate us from eachother — something that was previously said about the rise of smartphones. yet i sit here behind my keyboard, thinking computers and smartphones are absolutely very cool tech. they are! all the work i do wouldn't have been possible without them. my whole world revolves around them.

and maybe the generations after me live in worlds that revolve around phones and Instagram and Spotify and SHEIN and TikTok. we all know the stereotypes and tales surrounding them. they don't know how to use a file explorer. they can only watch videos with Subway Surfers gameplay displayed right next to it. there's thousands of stories of "iPad kids", growing up with parents who just shove them behind an iPad where they get subjected to brain-hemorrhaging slop 24/7. and that's a really awful development!

but then my generation is the one that was addicted to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Call of Duty. the news was always filled with thinkpieces on how videogames are brain-hemorrhaging slop that ruins the minds of kids all over the world. my boomer parents once debated whether they should send me to a troubled teens camp in the Ardennes for my "videogame addiction". i never suffered from anything like that! i was extremely depressed, and my parents were so emotionally distant from me that they could never figure that out, so they blamed it on those darn videogames instead. i turned out fine! but will the next generations turn out fine, though? are my concerns even valid, knowing that i could easily be misplacing the same concerns my boomer parents had for me onto those kids?

i grew up using phpBB forums. i had a personal website in one form or another since i was, like, 10 years old. i've had a YouTube account since 2006 — which has been rendered inaccessible due to it being linked to an email address from an ISP which hasn't existed for over a decade now. for the longest time, most of my gaming friends were on Hamachi, which we used to play multiplayer rounds of Midtown Madness 2 together. i still can't believe the original Nintendo DS is a retro console already. i still miss Hyves .

there used to be a time where the internet was a place that users created together. those phpBB forums didn't belong to any big corporation, they were all ran by the community members themselves, often with a monthly donation loading bar in a banner on the homepage. everything is a subreddit now, everything is a Discord server now. everything is being enshittified for profit by venture capitalists, and the end users are being locked out from having a say in any of it. now i'm sure gen Z'ers and after aren't all happy about this either, but i'd reckon that most also just don't have the historical context of what the internet and popular tech were like before all of that. they've grown up within enshittification. just like how i grew up within the mass adoption of home computers and smartphones.

all these newer generations are growing up while having all this bullshit pushed on them by corporations as the current technology meta. generative AI, in-app purchases, streaming services, digital rights management, bluetooth headphones, YouTube Kids, enshittification, et cetera. they won't know a world without these things! but then again, isn't the same thing also true for me? i don't know a world without smartphones, phpBB boards, Twitter, iPods, peer-to-peer filesharing, software piracy, CDs, Windows XP, PS/2 keyboards, et cetera. i think that's the last time tech was ever really good. because i grew up with it. gen Z'ers will think what they're experiencing will have been the last time tech was ever really good. boomers will think the mass adoption of TVs and record players was the last time tech was ever really good. i wonder if we're all any different.

watching a generational divide construct itself in real time is honestly kinda horrifying.