2mo ago

Nostalgia is eating us alive. Instead of building a new world, we’re regurgitating a past that never existed

www.theguardian.com

Nostalgia is eating us alive. Instead of building a new world, we’re regurgitating a past that never existed | Martin Ingle

12 comments

Oregon Trail didn’t ask you for your cookie preferences
VisiCalc didn’t require an always on internet connection
WordStar didn’t auto-update and restart in the middle of an essay
Applesoft BASIC didn’t require a fully provisioned S3 instance
Impulse Tracker didn’t try to feed your composition to an LLM
- You can run Oregon trail in the palm of your hand, and many much more sophisticated games offline using emulation. Not just that, there are thousands of people making offline-friendly indie games.
  Visicalc was not cloud-based. You can run LibreOffice Write completely offline now.
  Wordstar didn't have to deal with the threat landscape of the internet as we know it today. If you want you can turn off updates in your office suite of choice and manually update as you need.
  Apple basic can still be run, emulated, on a machine that runs a whole day off a battery. So can Sinclair basic and gw basic and logo. Python and perl run natively on my phone and tablet that work as all day servers that I carry everywhere.
  I use Renoise. It doesn't either. OpenMPT is available if you don't want to pay. There are tons of open source options. Sunvox is available for mobile devices. I make music professionally and neither Cubase nor Reaper force me to use AI. If there are plugins like that they are uninteresting to me and I ignore them. And I started making computer music on screamtracker. I love the tech we have for music now.
I have zero nostalgia. Good memories, yes. But I am hopeful that we could, if enough of us agree, build something better than has ever been before.
I can enjoy generational pandering like Ready Player One and I still want to get a TRS-80 Model III (it outsold the Apple II!) and connect a pi zero to the serial port to connect to a self-hosted LLM trained to respond like MuThUr 6000 from Alien.
But no way in hell do I want to go back to that era.
- Exactly this. Learn from the past, take from the past parts, and improve upon them.
Conservatives have been doing this since at least the 80s.
People tend to look longingly for a gentler, happier time but I hate to break it; it didn't exist. Maybe they weren't exposed to the evils of the world when they were young, and they crave their lost innocence. But in many ways, life and society used to suck even worse than today . Bad as things are now, I wouldn't want to go back.
I guess that's the difference between conservatives and progressives; Conservatives look backward and progressives look forward.
So, we're doing what every generation before us has done, cool. At least we're consistent!
It's saudade but artificial
Fauxdade
Sometimes I wonder if there is a trival general explanation for this. For example, a generation that watched good media grew up and tried to make good media... and it turns out that making it is harder than consuming it, and all the old pioneers of media are long gone, leaving youtubers to recreate the craft from scratch by experimentation.
- No. It’s just capitalism. The incessant need for constant growth causes executives to rely on established franchises bc they have name recognition and built in audiences. So they just keep shooting for low risk/high reward stuff that panders to a general audience.
Watch « Together, » and enjoy your life while trying to not hurt others; eyes forward.
The fact that we're just going in circles if I have no idea is his proof that the old way of life is I'm coming to an end. We're still in the waiting. Between the old world and the new

12 comments