Technology has stopped becoming a tool and a utility and has instead become a form of control. Where we once felt freedom to explore the internet and learn about new things we now have. This technology turned against us to track our every second and control our every thought. Plus the endless crap updates that just make things worse over time instead of better, yeah I could see why people just gave up on this bullshit.

20 years ago, technically competent people had an integral role in the development and use of tech. That position is now infested with people who think economics is a science and money is real.

I have been told I am complaining too much about my company moving to windows 11 and that I need to grow up.

I will then watch those same people slowly but surely start to complain about changes and things not working. I got laughed at today for fighting the updates and windows 11 by a few people who are probably going to be made redundant by this change. (I'm not angry, making people laugh and being a loudmouth idiot is my favourite thing)

I have been in IT support since 2007 and I know that all the change is bad.

My personal computer is on Win10 LTSC IoT and I'm moving to Linux Mint (Thankyou to the people on this forum that recommended it).

Change in tech can be good but not when it's Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and HP making the changes.

Just came back from a 4 day camping trip in the mountains where I turned my phone off and forgot it existed and just sat back down in my seat in my cubicle at my IT job.

I'm fucking over this.

10 years ago, I privately refused a gifted Alexa after Christmas, explaining "Hey I work in the industry, I know people who work for FAANG, Amazon spending billions on very smart engineers building systems to harvest data is a bet that they will be able to extract even more money from me, is it still within the return window." My aunt told me to go live in a cave.

I’m mildly interested in one of those coffee mugs that heats your coffee, as I drink mine slowly while working.

But I don’t want an app for that. I just want a wireless charger puck and a temperature dial, with maybe a failsafe so it doesn’t overheat when empty.

So much tech should be small little closed systems, but then you lose the ability to shove pop up ad notifications at the user, or scrape and sell their location, or preinstall residential prices you rent to highly suspicious companies.

I still like technology. It's still possible to find technology that doesn't spy on you and that you can control yourself. I use Mint, by the way.

Techies stopped jumping on the newest gadgets when the newest gadgets became plastic slop that did nothing but track what you said, did, where you went, etc, and reported it back to the company so they could build a profile of you and sell that data.

normies buy the shit now because its affordable (Because of the afformentioned creepware) and because they cant be bothered to do a modicum of research to realize theres a 98.6% chance that the device will be non-functional in a year because the company collapsed (having harvest all the information it needed before rebranding as a new company to do it all over again) and took the online servers with it, because of course your fucking toaster totally needs online servers to operate.

Old tech wasn't spying on you and selling your data.

It's true.

I'm this 👌 close.

That's the biggest mindfuck for me.

In the 90s and 2000s, people made fun of me for constantly being on the computer whenever possible. Now those same people are completely hooked on their pocket computers and now I'm the one making fun of them.

I don't know how we got to this point, but all I know is that Steve Jobs is mostly to blame. The iPhone changed everything and now nobody knows how to interact with each other anymore, which is especially frustrating when trying to get assistance from anyone for anything. Even the simple process of returning a product to a store is now a lot more frustrating than it used to be, because the person running customer service absolutely refuses to interact with the customer.

Stuff like that was also kind of present in the past.

My non-gamer friends suddenly became gamers thanks to 3D games.

I remember people telling me not to buy a video game controller, because everything will be motion controls in the future.

My stepfather wanted to cut our cable TV internet the moment 3G modems came out. He even talked about Soviet TVs with wired remotes to try to convince me and my mother.

My late stepmother accepted that I won't go to a trade school to become some kind of repairman after Facebook became popular, although she thought "software developer" was the same as "CNC machine programmer".

I call this phenomenon "normietech", and AI is the worst example of it.

20 years ago, normal people avoided technology and techies would jump on the newest gadgets as soon as they could.

Now, normal people buy smart toasters & coffee mugs while every techie I know is on the verge of retreating to the forest

I just ordered a mechanical watch. Primarily because I think they're cool, but it not even having a battery feels as far away from a smartwatch as you can get to me, and I like that too.

If there's fiber and a nearby hospital in the forest count me in.

20 years ago was 2006.

I do not recall any tech resistance by the masses. In fact a couple years later there were people camping out overnight waiting for the release of the latest gadgets like the iphone.

Ffw to today…those same masses dgaf about their lives being tracked and monetized today; in fact, many are active and willing sycophants pushing being social media personalities as careers while using that personality to shit on higher education and intelligence.

I do agree that the limited tech community capable of independent thought and action are against the surveillance corporate state we’re headed into, but the rest are doing their best to hurry and profit off it while the dumpster fire flames get closer and closer to them.

12 years ago I had a board Chair of a major tech firm in my office and she explained how the future was going to be the internet of things. I divested stock within a week. My conclusion was they had zero innovation at that company, which extended to silicon valley.

Their stock then dropped 75% over the next decade.

Pry my old phone from my cold, dead hands

As a tech person, I try to do have a lot of smart devices that I can self host, try to use home assisntat, bridges to my own NAS, have some rpi for my own DNS filter (with pi-hole)

My TV is offline while I am using a Apple TV box for streaming

And yeah some stuff is unnecessary. I don’t have a smart fridge, but I have an old iPad with a custom home assistant dashboard in my kitchen

Re: running to the woods. We were here on the technology spectrum:

Not enough                                       Too much
|--------------[x]--------------------------------------|

Now we're here:

Not enough                                       Too much
|-----------------------------------------------[x]-----|

I'm not saying that techies are all neo-luddites in the making, but rather that everyone has a threshold for global-hyper-awareness and surveillance. At some point, it's just too much

60 years ago techies decided that technology couldn't be trusted, because it is programmed by humans. I've yet to meet any programming wizards or seasoned IT personnel that adopt the latest crap. We've always distrusted our creations. We know how many mistakes we made while making them, that we weren't able to fully fix.

Tech used to be fun for some reason and innovative and you knew when something new was made it was better than the previous model and you would notice the improvements, now when something new comes out there's no more excitement because it's the same shit with a new model number and that's why it seems like techies aren't interested in tech because they already tried everything 5-10 years ago and the new stuff just isn't "new" anymore, it was just simplified for non tech savy and rebranded as "new".

I mean its true.

But my 4K120hz VRR Oled just never connects to the internet. gAmInG-rig is on Linux. Pixel got the Graphene treatment. Homeautomation always seemed stupid to me(personally, if you have usecases, good for you). If there were ready to use iot devices which doesnt suck and respect my privacy by just beeing on the local network: sure i would think about it. But hacking together something good with arduinos wasnt worth my time for now atleast.

VR headset OS is hacked and nerved to the best of my knowledge.

For now there are still ways to enjoy tech even though overall its a fucking hellscape.

Me when new smart devices are created

Yeah, 20 years ago they weren’t a self paid tracker that reported my every action on the web - tracking was minimal and limited. But now maybe not a forest as much as just limiting what tech I have in my house - for instance last week I bought an analaog scale to replace my 15 year old smart one from Withings that has been without WiFi for years.

I also limit how much time I have my phone on my person, or total screen time.

20 years ago, the Patriot Act was already in place and privacy was essentially dead (and other countries were not exempt from US spying), people just didn't know the full extent until the Snowden leaks. But it was clear enough then, if you weren't gripped by the hysteria, that the "emergency measures" were there to stay, and get worse.

If it wasn't so difficult to do so legally, I would already be in the forest.