Notes on Retrofuturism
August 30, 2024 5:29 AM Subscribe
"Technostalgia can be described as the fuzzy feeling one gets when seeing a device one used to use, having forgotten all its limitations or why it was upgraded. It is the warm endearment toward home computers of the 1980s that one might have encountered as a child, or else an unexplained fetishism for technology that predates one’s own lifetime but which represents a certain idea of the future — usually the optimistic future that one wishes to inhabit, not the messy, complicated, fraught present."
~looks misty-eyed at his TelePort 56k modem...
posted by Thorzdad at 6:17 AM on August 30 [4 favorites]
posted by Thorzdad at 6:17 AM on August 30 [4 favorites]
Steve Jobs' bit in life was selling the future not the past, but his attitude on tossing history and focusing on current tasks resonated with me.
The long tail of tech is indeed just e-waste now; after the Macintosh II came out in '87, I saved $250/mo (today's dollars) of my arcade game attendant's wages for 2 full years to be able to afford to pay half down on a Mac IIcx in 1989, a beautiful machine that I was somewhat shocked to see was literally curbside sodaigomi not 10 years later.
I went to Dallas to see the eclipse this year, partially because they have the Free Play chain of retro arcades in the area. It was fun touching the games again but I couldn't see myself making a habit of playing all that old stuff.
Web3 is the province of IT technophiles
eh. Scammers looking for cool stuff to literally expropriate with their digital watermarks.
What is it that makes 1970s cultural rebellion and ’80s video game design so irresistible for a generation that never experienced either at first hand?
Being in my late 50s I guess I can't answer that. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, threw it out.
posted by torokunai at 6:23 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
The long tail of tech is indeed just e-waste now; after the Macintosh II came out in '87, I saved $250/mo (today's dollars) of my arcade game attendant's wages for 2 full years to be able to afford to pay half down on a Mac IIcx in 1989, a beautiful machine that I was somewhat shocked to see was literally curbside sodaigomi not 10 years later.
I went to Dallas to see the eclipse this year, partially because they have the Free Play chain of retro arcades in the area. It was fun touching the games again but I couldn't see myself making a habit of playing all that old stuff.
Web3 is the province of IT technophiles
eh. Scammers looking for cool stuff to literally expropriate with their digital watermarks.
What is it that makes 1970s cultural rebellion and ’80s video game design so irresistible for a generation that never experienced either at first hand?
Being in my late 50s I guess I can't answer that. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, threw it out.
posted by torokunai at 6:23 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
What is it that makes 1970s cultural rebellion and ’80s video game design so irresistible for a generation that never experienced either at first hand?
The lack of standardized form factors. During the birth of any new technology there is a period of time where the actual shapes and colors of the devices vary wildly - just look at early computers like the Mac, or Apple, or Atari, or Commodore - they're all totally distinct. It was the same with phones, and MP3 players, and to some extent even televisions and stereo systems. And cars, back in the early automotive days. I think what people long for, beyond just an anesthetized past, is an environment where everything doesn't look the same.
80s arcades were a hotbed of innovation and experimentation. Joysticks! Rollerballs! Rideable motorcycle controllers! Various forms of light guns! Games based on laserdisc technology, vector technology, a constant race to fit more pixels and colors on the screen, well past the point of diminishing return.
The devices we have at our disposal today are, frankly, boring to look at. All phones are just flat rectangles. An iPad or tablet is functionally identical to a phone, just sized up. Laptops are exceedingly powerful and feature-rich but are a visual snoozefest. That's why physical keyboards that look like a C64 exist. (I have one, it is fantastic!)
On the flip side, all of that goddamn beige was really depressing, something used to great effect on Severance. I worked at Sears in the office center in 1993-94 and, man, talk about soul-deadening color schemes.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:54 AM on August 30 [15 favorites]
The lack of standardized form factors. During the birth of any new technology there is a period of time where the actual shapes and colors of the devices vary wildly - just look at early computers like the Mac, or Apple, or Atari, or Commodore - they're all totally distinct. It was the same with phones, and MP3 players, and to some extent even televisions and stereo systems. And cars, back in the early automotive days. I think what people long for, beyond just an anesthetized past, is an environment where everything doesn't look the same.
80s arcades were a hotbed of innovation and experimentation. Joysticks! Rollerballs! Rideable motorcycle controllers! Various forms of light guns! Games based on laserdisc technology, vector technology, a constant race to fit more pixels and colors on the screen, well past the point of diminishing return.
The devices we have at our disposal today are, frankly, boring to look at. All phones are just flat rectangles. An iPad or tablet is functionally identical to a phone, just sized up. Laptops are exceedingly powerful and feature-rich but are a visual snoozefest. That's why physical keyboards that look like a C64 exist. (I have one, it is fantastic!)
On the flip side, all of that goddamn beige was really depressing, something used to great effect on Severance. I worked at Sears in the office center in 1993-94 and, man, talk about soul-deadening color schemes.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:54 AM on August 30 [15 favorites]
~looks misty-eyed at his TelePort 56k modem...
posted by Thorzdad
*ponders hammer*
posted by HearHere at 6:56 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
posted by Thorzdad
*ponders hammer*
posted by HearHere at 6:56 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
Of course the Web 3.0 grifters want to invoke retrofuturism. They want you to believe that what they're offering with crypto is a wide-open digital frontier akin to the establishment of the World Wide Web in the 1990s or the personal computer revolution of the 1980s. They want to remind people of the excitement of coding their first HTML page or unboxing that first computer or game console, and they definitely want you to think about how you could have been the one to found Amazon, Microsoft, or Facebook, if only you had gotten into the next big thing sooner.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:56 AM on August 30 [9 favorites]
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:56 AM on August 30 [9 favorites]
What is it that makes 1970s cultural rebellion and ’80s video game design so irresistible for a generation that never experienced either at first hand?
The lack of standardized form factors. During the birth of any new technology there is a period of time where the actual shapes and colors of the devices vary wildly - just look at early computers like the Mac, or Apple, or Atari, or Commodore - they're all totally distinct.
Steve Jobs understood this deeply, which is why he took some technically unremarkable hardware and stuffed it inside a no-sharp-edges wedge that was partly colored to match the bright blue-green waters of a well-known Australian beach. The marketing of this even included a lot of disparagement of beige boxes. The eventual irony was that Apple's success with design eventually inspired a lot of cloning itself.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:17 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
The lack of standardized form factors. During the birth of any new technology there is a period of time where the actual shapes and colors of the devices vary wildly - just look at early computers like the Mac, or Apple, or Atari, or Commodore - they're all totally distinct.
Steve Jobs understood this deeply, which is why he took some technically unremarkable hardware and stuffed it inside a no-sharp-edges wedge that was partly colored to match the bright blue-green waters of a well-known Australian beach. The marketing of this even included a lot of disparagement of beige boxes. The eventual irony was that Apple's success with design eventually inspired a lot of cloning itself.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:17 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
It was fun touching the games again but I couldn't see myself making a habit of playing all that old stuff.
I'm with you. Even the supposedly 'good' games on my retro NES and SuperNES, half are barely playable and barely compare to Roadblox in terms of options for gameplay. I don't think I've touched either of those things in a few years. Though most of the games included (IMO) with those were not great to begin with, and are not among my favorites from that period. My kids play for a few minutes and go back to modern games.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:44 AM on August 30
I'm with you. Even the supposedly 'good' games on my retro NES and SuperNES, half are barely playable and barely compare to Roadblox in terms of options for gameplay. I don't think I've touched either of those things in a few years. Though most of the games included (IMO) with those were not great to begin with, and are not among my favorites from that period. My kids play for a few minutes and go back to modern games.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:44 AM on August 30
What's uncanny about this article, written in July of 2023, is the way it still invokes Web3, crypto and NFTs as if those were important, "trailblazing" things, as opposed to the embarrassing ZIRP technobro nightmare we all know them to be just a year later. Schadenostalgia.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 7:52 AM on August 30 [14 favorites]
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 7:52 AM on August 30 [14 favorites]
Protect your NFT collection and discover new artists with ClubNFT
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posted by stevil at 7:55 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]
Get Started
posted by stevil at 7:55 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]
I can think of quite a few apps that did meet my needs quite adequately at one time and which still might, but which are now so bloated that they no longer as useful and I have gone elsewhere. Is that a form of technostalgia too? I can easily believe that there are technologies which did exist which were probably pretty good fits for my current needs without a load of features stuck on to 'enhance my experience' but which are totally irrelevant to me. I would expect them to be less of a fit over time but the peak of usefulness is not always today's kit.
posted by biffa at 8:49 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]
posted by biffa at 8:49 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]
Speaking of technostalgia, I've tried logging on to BBS systems that are now telnet-based, since I was a big BBS nerd back in the day, and wow, what a terrible UI. Like, somebody even brought my long-dead Amiga BBS back to life (in name only), and I don't enjoy visiting it. Me! The OG SysOp.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:34 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:34 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
It was fun touching the games again but I couldn't see myself making a habit of playing all that old stuff.
You just don't understand the glory that is Strawberry Shortcake Musical Matchups for the Atari 2600.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:49 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
You just don't understand the glory that is Strawberry Shortcake Musical Matchups for the Atari 2600.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:49 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
> ~looks misty-eyed at his TelePort 56k modem...
Not long ago I took my USR Courier V.Everything to the electronics waste recycling center. It was surprisingly hard.
Back Before The Internet, when you wanted to do a coast-to-coast file transfer via modem, you used Couriers on both ends if you valued your sanity.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:10 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
Not long ago I took my USR Courier V.Everything to the electronics waste recycling center. It was surprisingly hard.
Back Before The Internet, when you wanted to do a coast-to-coast file transfer via modem, you used Couriers on both ends if you valued your sanity.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:10 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
My tech nostalgia centers around the notion of comprehensibility. The old stuff seems less like a magic box, and more like something that I could, in theory, understand, and maybe modify to my own needs, even if I rarely did that in practice. Physical buttons and mechanical switches give me the same feeling, and I get the same feeling from things like Arduino and Raspberry Pi, but those last two are modern, so maybe it's not nostalgia as much as it is a dislike of blackbox tech magic fuckery.
Nostalgia for the design language of old tech is probably some combination of fashion (where everything old becomes new again) and an appreciation for the "naive" design sensibilities of programmers and engineers; programmer art is cool because it wasn't done by a professional artist.
posted by surlyben at 11:06 AM on August 30 [6 favorites]
Nostalgia for the design language of old tech is probably some combination of fashion (where everything old becomes new again) and an appreciation for the "naive" design sensibilities of programmers and engineers; programmer art is cool because it wasn't done by a professional artist.
posted by surlyben at 11:06 AM on August 30 [6 favorites]
When I was a kid in the early 1990s, all that fabulous retro tech was in ruins. There was no internet to download disk images from or cottage industry of people making adapters to replace old, worn out 5 1/4" floppy drives with solid state storage. Even if you were lucky enough to find something that still worked, there was usually nothing you could do with it.
I had a TI 99/4a that I used to play Star Trek with. I'd put it on a table while watching TNG and I'd bash the keys pretending I was firing phasers or raising the shields. Sometimes I'd simulate Trek's infamous exploding consoles by popping the keycaps off just enough so that when I hit my knees on the underside of the table they'd all come flying off. I usually didn't even bother to put them back in the right order. Regardless of whether it worked or not, the computer was more useful as a physical prop than it was for running any of the three cartridges we had for it (Munch Man, Music Maker, and TI Invaders).
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:51 AM on August 30 [6 favorites]
I had a TI 99/4a that I used to play Star Trek with. I'd put it on a table while watching TNG and I'd bash the keys pretending I was firing phasers or raising the shields. Sometimes I'd simulate Trek's infamous exploding consoles by popping the keycaps off just enough so that when I hit my knees on the underside of the table they'd all come flying off. I usually didn't even bother to put them back in the right order. Regardless of whether it worked or not, the computer was more useful as a physical prop than it was for running any of the three cartridges we had for it (Munch Man, Music Maker, and TI Invaders).
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:51 AM on August 30 [6 favorites]
> My tech nostalgia centers around the notion of comprehensibility. The old stuff seems less like a magic box, and more like something that I could, in theory, understand, and maybe modify to my own needs, even if I rarely did that in practice.
I can confirm that I felt this way about my first real computing environment, the IBM PC running PC-DOS2.1. My Dad had bought it for his new consulting business, and being the guy he was he got not only the computer and the DOS user manuals, but the DOS Technical Reference and the blue Hardware Reference. The latter included schematic diagrams of the motherboard, and assembly language listings for the BIOS.
I really felt I could wrap my head around that machine and understand what it was doing at a very granular level of detail. Later, with AT-class machines (working with Dad at that point, and no longer using IBM brand) we did a project to make an intelligent 6-channel serial comms board for the AT bus. I was all the way down into the weeds on that project, and it was not too much for one person to hold in their head.
That comprehensibility increasingly went out the window with 80386 and later PC machines. There was the start, with cache memory messing up the predictability of instruction execution times, and worse yet with multiple asynchronous clocks for different things. The 486 was the last chip that I got the books for. The Pentium brought NDA-before-reading requirements for the documentation, and anyway it had been a long time since I cared too much about that level of detail. Not to mention that understanding how PCI works is apparently an engineering specialty all by itself.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 12:55 PM on August 30 [5 favorites]
I can confirm that I felt this way about my first real computing environment, the IBM PC running PC-DOS2.1. My Dad had bought it for his new consulting business, and being the guy he was he got not only the computer and the DOS user manuals, but the DOS Technical Reference and the blue Hardware Reference. The latter included schematic diagrams of the motherboard, and assembly language listings for the BIOS.
I really felt I could wrap my head around that machine and understand what it was doing at a very granular level of detail. Later, with AT-class machines (working with Dad at that point, and no longer using IBM brand) we did a project to make an intelligent 6-channel serial comms board for the AT bus. I was all the way down into the weeds on that project, and it was not too much for one person to hold in their head.
That comprehensibility increasingly went out the window with 80386 and later PC machines. There was the start, with cache memory messing up the predictability of instruction execution times, and worse yet with multiple asynchronous clocks for different things. The 486 was the last chip that I got the books for. The Pentium brought NDA-before-reading requirements for the documentation, and anyway it had been a long time since I cared too much about that level of detail. Not to mention that understanding how PCI works is apparently an engineering specialty all by itself.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 12:55 PM on August 30 [5 favorites]
I'm kind of fascinated by the link between nostalgia and NFTs/Web 3, because I just don't get it at all. It's not just this piece—Cory Arcangel, the digital artist maybe best known for his clouds-only version of Super Mario Bros, said in an interview published just last month "I'm sure that if I was 24 today, I'd be in some NFT collective." And I can think of several other figures from that general scene who've migrated into crypto.
But while the old tech and digital art scenes seemed to be about creativity and technical prowess and focused on the artist or creative hacker, NFT art feels derivative—often like juvenilia made by adults—and the scene seems to be about the collectors rather than the creators. When Moxie Marlinspike made an NFT with a classic hacker-style prank a couple of years ago, OpenSea shut it down. What am I missing?
posted by smelendez at 1:30 PM on August 30 [4 favorites]
But while the old tech and digital art scenes seemed to be about creativity and technical prowess and focused on the artist or creative hacker, NFT art feels derivative—often like juvenilia made by adults—and the scene seems to be about the collectors rather than the creators. When Moxie Marlinspike made an NFT with a classic hacker-style prank a couple of years ago, OpenSea shut it down. What am I missing?
posted by smelendez at 1:30 PM on August 30 [4 favorites]
The old stuff seems less like a magic box, and more like something that I could, in theory, understand
I've heard this same thing about steam engines vs. internal combustion.
posted by Rash at 5:20 PM on August 30
I've heard this same thing about steam engines vs. internal combustion.
posted by Rash at 5:20 PM on August 30
What am I missing?
Greed, or, if you prefer, a certain amount of aggrievedness by people who missed out on an earlier gold rush, or at least didn't make out nearly as well as the people who sold the shovels.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:04 PM on August 30
Greed, or, if you prefer, a certain amount of aggrievedness by people who missed out on an earlier gold rush, or at least didn't make out nearly as well as the people who sold the shovels.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:04 PM on August 30
grumpybear69: While it's true that Severance captured the sea-of-beige office design, the actual technology under the characters' fingertips tended to evoke the rich blues of Data General "Dasher" terminals more than anything else.
It made for good contrast: brutalist building above, off-white-on-off-white sea of tiles and cubicles below, and saturated colour for props that demanded your attention.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:25 AM on August 31
It made for good contrast: brutalist building above, off-white-on-off-white sea of tiles and cubicles below, and saturated colour for props that demanded your attention.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:25 AM on August 31
I think we tend to have nostalgia for periods that form a sort of Cambrian explosion in a field. The expressionists were just exploring "what if we painted quickly and didn't focus on fine detail like the Renaissance artists did?" and they found multiple ways to do it. The advances in studio recording equipment in the early 70s led to a bunch of different sounds that we all lump together as "progressive rock" because everyone explored the limits of the system differently. We saw how synthesisers could produce Wendy Carlos, Devo, Gary Numan, Duran Duran, and the Eurythmics.
And yeah, the late 70s showed everyone how easy it was for a hobbyist to design a microcomputer that fit on a desk, plugged into a television, and could do things that even professional computers of a decade earlier would have found difficult. And between a desire to capture a youth education market (handy for selling to educated parents with some spare cash) and a desire to avoid looking downmarket in a monochrome "Brand X" way, they made their materials and on-screen experience vibrant and colourful. Rainbows were on everything, because that demonstrated at the time that you had the budget to print in full colour!
Leonard Richardson once noted to me that the most retrofuturist phrase ever had to be the company name "Spectrum Holobyte". It's the perfect Thunderbirds-esque mix of the past and the future, but with the 80s rather than the 60s as its lens. Colour, holograms, and this fancy new digital term "byte" that we all had to learn!
And so between this optimistic and dandyish aesthetic and the sheer worth-a-try experimentation in the devices' own designs, there's a lot of room for "What if this had inspired the computing platform of the 90s, instead of the IBM 5150?" It allows us to skip over the beige box era and imagine a more recent past that kept the glittering optimism going.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:39 AM on August 31 [2 favorites]
And yeah, the late 70s showed everyone how easy it was for a hobbyist to design a microcomputer that fit on a desk, plugged into a television, and could do things that even professional computers of a decade earlier would have found difficult. And between a desire to capture a youth education market (handy for selling to educated parents with some spare cash) and a desire to avoid looking downmarket in a monochrome "Brand X" way, they made their materials and on-screen experience vibrant and colourful. Rainbows were on everything, because that demonstrated at the time that you had the budget to print in full colour!
Leonard Richardson once noted to me that the most retrofuturist phrase ever had to be the company name "Spectrum Holobyte". It's the perfect Thunderbirds-esque mix of the past and the future, but with the 80s rather than the 60s as its lens. Colour, holograms, and this fancy new digital term "byte" that we all had to learn!
And so between this optimistic and dandyish aesthetic and the sheer worth-a-try experimentation in the devices' own designs, there's a lot of room for "What if this had inspired the computing platform of the 90s, instead of the IBM 5150?" It allows us to skip over the beige box era and imagine a more recent past that kept the glittering optimism going.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:39 AM on August 31 [2 favorites]
This topic is kind of acute for me right now, as I am starting an interdisciplinary masters programme in history next month. I realised that the area of focus where I'd probably have the most energy to devote right now is the Cambrian explosion that...well, actually kicked off in Cambridge with the EDSAC and then again in another Cambridge with the Whirlwind.
EDSAC started a generation of "Can we build Von Neumann architectures with leftover RADAR equipment?", and the Whirlwind was "Wait, what if we actually had RAM?" All sorts of strange and wonderful machines arose, because nobody had yet really seen what Computer Architecture would look like in the future.
By the time you get to Data General and the Nova, it's clear what the industry thinks good design looks like, and what a CPU should work like. But in the 40s and 50s people were still working with spinning drums of metal oxide, tubes of mercury with speakers on one end and mics on the other, and CRT scopes being used for the static charge that lingers on the screen rather than the visible glow they present. It's fun to imagine what later systems might have been like if the LINC had become mass-market instead of the PDP-8, or if the Burroughs approach to stack-based architectures had caught on.
But there's also a certain amount of "cars were always going to lose the cool fins" you have to accept; and as atmospheric as magnetic drum memories might be, they were never going to last.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 7:56 AM on August 31 [1 favorite]
EDSAC started a generation of "Can we build Von Neumann architectures with leftover RADAR equipment?", and the Whirlwind was "Wait, what if we actually had RAM?" All sorts of strange and wonderful machines arose, because nobody had yet really seen what Computer Architecture would look like in the future.
By the time you get to Data General and the Nova, it's clear what the industry thinks good design looks like, and what a CPU should work like. But in the 40s and 50s people were still working with spinning drums of metal oxide, tubes of mercury with speakers on one end and mics on the other, and CRT scopes being used for the static charge that lingers on the screen rather than the visible glow they present. It's fun to imagine what later systems might have been like if the LINC had become mass-market instead of the PDP-8, or if the Burroughs approach to stack-based architectures had caught on.
But there's also a certain amount of "cars were always going to lose the cool fins" you have to accept; and as atmospheric as magnetic drum memories might be, they were never going to last.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 7:56 AM on August 31 [1 favorite]
(Dangit I flipped expressionists and impressionists)
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:05 AM on September 2
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:05 AM on September 2
I'm with grumpybear near the beginning of the thread. My folks had a handed down Atari 800XL complete with 5.25" floppy drive and drawing program with drawing pad (yes, you read that correct) when I was basically born. The more insane thing is that a Sega Genesis controller could be used with it, which I think had to do with Atari working with Sega on some things back in the day, or something like that.
Aside from that, you had the sea of Tiger Electronics, and various other doo-dads that had you wondering what they did. Would there be adventure? What can you do to brighten my day?
And to see that all in my lifetime all get reduced to light-up, touch-enabled slabs (admittedly reductionist, buttttt...) takes some time to really process and grasp. You've lost capacitor, transformer, circuit board, button and switch fixing economy in exchange for trying to wrap heads around programming nearly universal devices, and of course that favors certain groups of people over others, which aint great for overall diversity.
Of course, these slabs are loaded with features: cameras - you'd be joking to tell me 30 years ago that one day I'd be able to see something I wanted a picture of and be able to pull something out of my pocket to get that picture in better than 35mm resolution (and have the picture to look at *right away*), mics - same deal, accelerometers for step tracking, and potential crash detection (not roller coaster :) ), (flash)lights, GPS, etc. Surface thinking says there's endless possibility there in the programming space, but how limitless is it really?
posted by JoeXIII007 at 7:52 AM on September 2
Aside from that, you had the sea of Tiger Electronics, and various other doo-dads that had you wondering what they did. Would there be adventure? What can you do to brighten my day?
And to see that all in my lifetime all get reduced to light-up, touch-enabled slabs (admittedly reductionist, buttttt...) takes some time to really process and grasp. You've lost capacitor, transformer, circuit board, button and switch fixing economy in exchange for trying to wrap heads around programming nearly universal devices, and of course that favors certain groups of people over others, which aint great for overall diversity.
Of course, these slabs are loaded with features: cameras - you'd be joking to tell me 30 years ago that one day I'd be able to see something I wanted a picture of and be able to pull something out of my pocket to get that picture in better than 35mm resolution (and have the picture to look at *right away*), mics - same deal, accelerometers for step tracking, and potential crash detection (not roller coaster :) ), (flash)lights, GPS, etc. Surface thinking says there's endless possibility there in the programming space, but how limitless is it really?
posted by JoeXIII007 at 7:52 AM on September 2
I don't think this analysis is incorrect, but I do think there is another thread, at least for old people like me, that circles around the way older tech was not constantly trying to spy on you and extract every last cent. Checking my email twice a day and being able to ride the subway without 1000 electronic ads clambering for my attention was nice.
In fact, living in Germany, many expats complain about how stuck in the past it is technologically and to me that is pure feature. I don't care that my doctor has a fax; at least none of my bodegas or drugstores has replaced glass fridge doors with ad screens that sometimes tell you whats inside.
posted by dame at 11:40 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]
In fact, living in Germany, many expats complain about how stuck in the past it is technologically and to me that is pure feature. I don't care that my doctor has a fax; at least none of my bodegas or drugstores has replaced glass fridge doors with ad screens that sometimes tell you whats inside.
posted by dame at 11:40 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]
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You can remove electronics from the equation entirely and find similar levels of enthusiasm for older architectural styles or clothing. Or pre-electirication tech like steampunk enthusiasts enjoy.
The recent love for cyberpunk aesthetics seems to cut against the idea that we are dreaming of a less complex vision of the future. There is a fad for things from the 1980s right now, and Cyberpunk includes a lot of those signifiers in its aesthetics. Neon, analog distortion, rainbow colors and chrome.
posted by pattern juggler at 6:15 AM on August 30 [6 favorites]