Yesterday was a big "Think back 20 years!" kind of day for a lot of people in the US.

Twenty years ago, we had... well, actually, just about all of the internet features we take for granted today, though video wasn't nearly so nice, and we didn't have all of it in our pockets (though we still had perfectly good cell phones that let us talk to people and lasted multiple days on a charge, plus would generally bounce down a flight of stairs and laugh off the damage). We could talk to people across the planet, share documents (somewhat, Google Docs wasn't a thing yet), view websites, publish and read other people's content in a "social" sort of way (LiveJournal, MySpace, etc), and... it was still something you did in discrete time chunks, as opposed to the aether literally everything was mediated through.

Fast forward twenty years, and we still do the same, but now almost all of it is being intermediated by companies that have a desperate drive to monopolize absolutely as much of your attention as they can claw away from the rest of your life, and they more often than not have access to you, 24/7, no matter where you are, via your cell phone.

LiveJournal didn't pester you to log in because someone you met once at a party had a birthday, don't you want to come scroll? It was nicely chronologically ordered, so you could instantly tell if there was anything new to read (vs the random reorder "slot machine" interface that is the modern version), and you had to click to the next page at the bottom of each page, instead of a bottomless bowl of "feed."

And we did it on a fraction the computing power that phones have, but... it worked. We didn't need 8GB of RAM and 500MB of disk to run a single chat client, we ran Pidgin or Adium or something and connected to all the chat services at once, with a far better interface than the current siloed hell that is text communication on the internet (IRC, of course, remains a turtle and is unchanged from the 90s, ignoring the really weird explosion of Freenode and a new domain that everyone uses instead of Freenode now).

Just because stuff is new doesn't mean it's better, and I think more and more people, and even people deep in the modern tech ecosystems, are realizing that something has gone very, very wrong in the past 20 years of internet development.

Yes, unfathomable amounts of money have been made - but at the cost of literally everyone's attention, and with an awful lot of collateral damage to just about every aspect of life. It's increasingly harder to pretend that it's been a significant improvement in quality of life.

And, now, even those devices that promised connectivity are turning against their users. Win10 is a telemetry platform that also runs apps. Win11 is an advertising delivery platform that, based on recent bugs, breaks core fundamental OS functionality like "the start menu" if certain ads are delivered from a remote server. And of course sends God knows what upstream, won't let you have an offline account at all anymore if you buy the "home" version that's fine for most people, etc. Apple has decided that your device should be responsible for scanning for known-bad content (and, yes, they then decided that they'd back off for a while in the face of bad press, but they've yet to say they're not going to do it, just not quite yet. Cynically, one might observe that they're concerned about the holiday sales season coming up that is traditionally their strong quarter).

I've been opting out of a lot of the modern tech stuff in my personal life, and other than remembering just how painful endless group text chains were on flip phones, it's... mostly fine. I've gone back to a flip phone (that lasts most of a week on a charge), I now check email with actual mail clients that I check a few times a day instead of constantly, and my engagement with the internet has dropped massively. It's been really, really nice.