Early 2000s were peak of humanity(lukaszkups.net) |
Early 2000s were peak of humanity(lukaszkups.net) |
The Iron Curtain had fallen; there was hope for Russia to become a democracy, and the weight of living in fear of dying in a nuclear war was lifted. China was becoming, perhaps not democratic, but at least economically liberal.
The economy was doing reasonably well for most people - it wasn't the high inflation of the eighties, and 2008 was not yet on the horizon. It wasn't yet the two-level economy that it became - if you were lower class, there was still a plausible route to the middle class.
AIDS was becoming manageable rather than a death sentence. Climate change wasn't really on people's radar as a real worry yet - there wasn't a sense of doom about it.
There was still hope that technology would free and empower us rather than enslave us.
And no, I wasn't a teenager or in my early twenties. Though I did have a pretty sweet life then...
seems like you are confusing early 00s with early 90s
Almost universally, any time closer to today is better for most people in most ways than a previous time. But there are exceptions -- prehistoric hunter/gatherer lifestyle is superior in several ways to the modern one, but the risk of dying early in a horrible way is high enough that it's not true overall.
Should we live more like cavemen in very constrained specific ways? Probably. Do we want to force 8 billion people to starve to death by returning to that life? Heck no.
Similar, there are likely small parts of the 2000's that are better than today. That doesn't mean the 2000's are the peak of humanity.
Wind that back 20 years. Yeah we got cheaper computing. Luxury items got cheaper, necessities got more expensive. I can make do with a 2010 think pad, but my rent is cooked and I'll never own a house. I'd rather be born in the 70s than the 90s.
From the literal title of the article:
> Early 2000s were peak of humanity
So what if the early 2000s were, in fact, the peak of humanity? It doesn't seem so absurd when teenage people today rediscover 90s/2000s fashion and are nostalgic for an era they have never lived in. When I was a teenager in the 2000s I didn't give a rat's arse about the 80s, they felt old and stale and with terrible hairdos. Yet today young people yearn for the 00s aesthetic [1] than whatever sanitised corporate hell we live in today.
Maybe people aren't nostalgic for their teenage years in particular, but for a world that wasn't ruled by the Internet and computers. When the Internet wasn't an infinite plane of corporate capitalism ruling the world, coercing people to jack in the hamster wheel every minute of their lives through their smartphones.
1: provided you are in the same algorithmic bubble of mine full of late teens/early adult people finding joy in analog experiences away from technology.
There were a lot of things that sucked about tech in that era! It was literally when pets.com ads blanketed the airwaves. (edited to add: And more specifically, I think the exact time the OP is describing was already too far down its current path of ubiquitous social media (remember Friendster, MySpace, LiveJournal, AO3, etc.?) and omnipresent commercial surveillance. The fork point to avoid those fates was probably a decade earlier.)
But I think we can all agree that it is absolutely when music peaked, and pop culture has just gone downhill since then. :)
Most of my friends spent the back half of the 90s railing against corporate culture, bland mass media and bemoaning the shift from early 90s counter-culture to late-90s glossy consumerism. It was a quick skip from Columbine to 9/11 and then into the Iraq war. Absolutely nothing about that time felt like a golden age.
Some romanticise how things were in their childhood, but most would say that the late 90s / early 00s were objective a great time to be alive.
There have been countless stories about people losing access to their favorite movie when streaming service's licensing agreement expires, Amazon removing books from their Kindle library for ... reasons, Sony moving to digital-only PlayStation releases, etc. These examples are annoying and mostly hinder access to content but there's also the legacy element (what do my children inherit? My Steam account? Some sampler app I used to make music instead of analog hardware?), the inability to share books or music with friends and family, the surveillance aspects, etc.
This class of issues has also started to bleed over into The Real World, as companies no longer sell you dumb appliances but a license (which they can terminate) to use, for example, a computer on wheels _in the ways that they see fit_.
If we could go back I think turn by turn navigation would be the hardest thing to give up.
Sometimes I check the route on Google maps first to get an idea, then close it.
I think navigation is like a muscle and you’ve got to train it.
Though I do like rerouting depending on traffic conditions. I guess in some cities that would basically feel mandatory to use
This is the biggest reason why I'll use navigation even when I know almost a dozen different ways to go somewhere. Using navigation services, its easier to tell if its worth it today to take the toll roads someplace, or if I should really avoid that bridge today, or what not. Choosing the route blindly can sometimes make a difference of a half hour or $10+ of unnecessary tolls depending on the journeys I take.
When people type like this.
New line after every dot.
Even when not necessary.
Ultra short sentences.
I guess it's "cool"?
I latter learnt in school that writing is only deemed correct when it's stylised into elaborate sentences structures that no human would use when thinking in their own heads.
If you're just trying to convey a thought I don't know why people care?
Could you not understand the point OP was making or something? In what way is this a less valid way of writing (aside from the fact it's not what's taught as correct in school?)
(Plenty of things sucked, don’t get me wrong, it’s just that a lot of the fallout from the “war on terror” was still in the upper atmosphere.)
I remember it too. It wasn't that rosy.
What's more, there were already two open standards: SIP/SIMPLE, and newer XMPP.
This is the part of it that bums me out the most. I just wish aesthetics didn't drive so much of the current tech world. Everything has an absolutely beautiful interface now that is slow, buggy, can't be shared, etc. But I guess at least it's pretty and pays the bills.
He made the touch screen interface into a low latency, multi-touch musical instrument. I couldn't seem to find if he had made this program open source or otherwise available, but it looks pretty cool.
I am amazed at the displays, CPUs, memory, networks, storage, and not to mention GPUs of 2026. They are really incredible. Then I derp around on my tablet with these clunky ad-laden websites with extremely poor layout, janky scrolling, barely registering my fat finger flailings, alternating between hitting a one pixel button amongst a sea of mis-aligned text and a grid of six big stupid square things, two of which are ads, and all of which are algorithm-computed content that isn't really what I wanted to see...
>Morpheus: You believe it’s the year 1999 when in fact it’s closer to 2199. I can’t tell you exactly what year it is because we honestly don’t know. There’s nothing I can say that will explain it for you, Neo.
In fact, it was a far more optimistic time than since about 2020, as soaring cost of food and going out means even privileged middle-class people are complaining, and infrastructure improvements have stagnated.
One of the best books I’ve ever read, extremely enlightening.
I've had pretty good time in "Eastern" (Central) Europe, so did my wife in China.
People were still optimistic about EU/euro, that lasted roughly until Lisbon treaty when they forced Ireland to repeat the referendum until they got result they wanted, which later become EU's MO and since then it went all downhill, with another major successes as Wir schaffen das 2015, Green deal 2020 or Totalitarian COVID pass 2021. Hard to understand someone who can still support this failed project. I would just dissolve it and return back to EEA.
Next time maybe ask actually people from those countries instead of parroting some writer.
You could not give me enough money that I would trade down to a 2000-era cell phone from my current phone. "Technology was a tool, not a lifestyle" -- well, guess what! It's still just a tool, not a lifestyle. I'm shitposting here instead of on slashdot, big whoop. My lifestyle is completely unrelated to this.
The "physical world"? What if I want to listen to a song that I heard on the radio the other day, or that I heard playing in a store or something, or that someone told me about? I can't just "pop a CD in the player", there's a whole thing where I have to literally purchase the music from a store that sells music. How is that possibly better than the world where I can just pull up the album and play it? Pop in a DVD? Are you insane?
"There was a very obvious boundary between being online and being offline. Today that boundary basically doesn't exist. You wake up online. You work online. You eat while watching something online. You walk while listening to something online. You go to bed while scrolling online."
So ... maybe the "work online" thing applies. But none of the others do. Maybe the listening while walking too; but I had a crazy thing called a "walkman" (I'm old) and "ipod" (but not that old) back in the day too. I guess circa 2000 I might have had an mp3 player. But the others I opt out of because I don't want to. It's easy ... just don't do that?
"Social media" -- I absolutely hate this term because it combines two unrelated things; friend networks and user-generated content. Most of my friend networks have abandoned online social media almost entirely, and I in turn will almost never use it. User-generated content is fun but I'm a lurker and a consumer, I have no hopes or dreams of becoming an "influencer" or "going viral" or whatever. I understand that for some people that is a dream, like being a rock star or a movie star was when I was younger, but I simply opt out of this and it doesn't affect my life.
I could go on and on. I simply don't understand how the author finds themselves in this bind where they are "forced" to use technology they don't want to use. Just ... don't use it.
> I genuinely believe that the early 2000s were probably the closest humanity ever got to the perfect balance between technology and actual life.
There was definitely a sense that US hegemony would not be contested by a rival great power, but there was also widespread belief that that hegemony would be undermined and chipped away at by a million insurgent groups and terror cells. IIRC a rivalry with China was speculative and sometimes dismissed as fanciful within the foreseeable future, but we had literal terrorism response drills at my high school. We currently live in the craziest possible international arena, but it's not like the Bush years were some utopia by comparison.
weirdos and nutjobs running their cults. not hyper-rich, deepy engaged technical types.
That said, I was so bad at English as kid that I've had to spend a lot of time learning how to write well. So I can do it if I care enough to invest the effort.
This not to say I see no value in creative writing. You can often summarise the core elements of fictional story in a couple of dozen bullet points, but the story of story isn't why we enjoy to read stories.
In my ideal world, when I'd like to make a point, I would use bullet points. But we don't live in that world so aside from my own personal notes, I rarely ever communicate in bullet points.
You’re saying that the era that sets us down the path of social media is worse than the one today where they rule the world?
Sure, the 2000s weren’t an idyllic time, but the point is that they were much better than today, and likely than earlier due to the technological advances not yet turning out for the worst.
I was in my late teens / early 20s at the time, and not in any of those groups, but I did not find the late 90s/early 2000s to be particularly "amazing" or objectively great. I wanted to make movies, but film was incredibly expensive, and digital video wasn't yet good enough. I wanted to make ambitious software, but absolutely everything was harder and lower-level back then.
It was harder and more expensive to get something delivered, and before you say that was better and we're all spoiled by Amazon, the net result was that you had to drive all over the city to pick stuff up.
We knew high-speed internet would change things, but it wasn't there yet. The internet kind of sucked (sorry). I remember spending hours on Excite and AltaVista searching for obscure information that now wouldn't be considered obscure in the slightest, and when I finally found something, it was rarely helpful. Don't get me wrong, I have nostalgia for the early internet, but at the time, we all knew it would get better. I wanted every video to look as good as Apple's movie trailer site, and it took about 10 years for that to happen.
There were plenty of good things about that time, but this "good ole days" thinking is dangerous. It's the antithesis of gratitude. It gets in the way of having vision and imagining a better future.
I can consistently shave 4-5(!!) minutes by taking a right at a light and coming into a further light from a different direction rather than going straight and sitting in gridlock for 4/5ths of a mile that would've taken ~10min. No illegal turn or difficult left or anything.
Basically if I can see the traffic up ahead I ignore my GPS and take the right, instant ETA drop.
I have other local examples but that's the most egregious.
I'm mostly talking about comparing different routes on like 70+mi highway paths through cities around DFW, where each of these highways would have pretty much identical weights its just a question of which of the potentially hundreds of possible routes to take. There's tons of highways crisscrossing each other, for a lot of paths its not just a "hop on the interstate". Which interstate? What path do I carve to cut over? When do I decide to start going South, on US-75 or I-35E or Dallas North Tollway or President George Bush Turnpike or 820 or I-35W? Which highway do I take to go West, PGBT or I-30 or I-20 or 820 or 121 or 114 or 183? Then factor in some of these are toll roads completely, some have optional tolled express lanes, some have HOV lanes, some are toll roads for some stretches but not others.
Having the navigation systems say "You can go this route, and it'll take an 1:20 but be free, or you can take this route and it'll take you an hour but cost you $5, or you can take this route and it'll take you 55 minutes but cost you $14" is pretty nice. Because sometimes that freeway path can also be 55 minutes, or maybe sometimes that $5 tollway path has an accident and will actually take you 1:30. Or maybe you do want to take that tollway for a bit but be sure to get off at that highway otherwise you'll get stuck in that traffic, or the inverse of that. And when you're talking about an hour long route, the traffic situation may change significantly while in route.