Enshittification is definitely real, but let's not look at the past with rose-colored glasses. A lot of things you can buy today are vastly superior to things available 50 years ago.
It used to be remarkable to drive a car 100k miles without major repairs. Volvo dealerships in the 80's and 90's would give you a badge at 100k milestones to advertise how reliable their cars were compared to others.
Anything tech related is just light years ahead of what it used to be, and for far cheaper. 65"+ OLED TVs for less than a couple grand are pretty much science fiction come to life. Gaming consoles are super-computers compared to an NES.
For many appliances, if you pay an inflation-adjusted cost for what a 1980's family would pay you can get something that will last forever. Last year I bought a commercial microwave for about $300 that has a single dial, hardly any features, and likely will last longer than the first microwave my family owned and also paid ~$300 for. Adjusting for inflation my new microwave is vastly better and cheaper than my childhood one.
I play guitar - in 1954 a new Stratocaster sold for $249, which is about $3k in today's dollars. And $249 today will get you a guitar that's easily as good as most 1954 Strats. If you spend the inflation-adjusted equivalent you're in ultra-luxury territory.
Want good furniture? That's ALWAYS been expensive, but you'd typically buy a table for the equivalent of $5k in today's dollars and expect it to last a lifetime. You can spend $5k on real wood furniture today, but nobody does.
Housing materials are much better and cheaper with the possible exception of copper pipes and anything made of real wood. Certainly builders of McMansions are cutting corners at every opportunity, but if you do your own building/finishing these days a lot of materials are available that will outlast their 1980's equivalent, and the cheap options are better.
I think a lot of this is a lack of perspective - everyone wants better things but nobody actually wants to pay for it.
> I think a lot of this is a lack of perspective - everyone wants better things but nobody actually wants to pay for it.
I think that's part of it, but I also think it's largely an issue of information asymmetry. Brands used to be a proxy for quality, and price could also be a proxy for quality, but that is no longer the case. That means it takes significantly more effort to research a product category to find a good product and people don't want to expend that effort. I am one of those weird people that enjoys that research, so I'm often the one people in my friend group ask for product recommendations because they are more than happy to spend the money, just not the time.
It's a discovery problem at the end of the day. When all the existing indicators become unreliable and advertising is inundated with scams and frauds, there's no way for good products to connect to good customers, so /everyone/ suffers.
Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
---
I love this scene because it so perfectly captures what it's like to be young and given advice, however well-meaning, by an older generation living in a world that no longer exists for the young. And it's ambiguous and trite enough to be essentially useless even if the underlying idea isn't terrible.
I did some amount of research into the feasibility of PHE and FHE about 20 years ago, and my conclusion at the time was that the space overhead of the encrypted output was a massive bottleneck, which meant that while it was potentially useful in a small number of niche cases it wasn't ever going to be practical for general-purpose computations without a major breakthrough.
The gist was I could do an encrypted (int)x + (int)y = (int)z computation, I could encrypt the inputs and then get a result back that was correct, secure, and decryptable, but was like 1MB in size.
So, for someone whose knowledge is 20 years outdated and is about Pallier crypto, has that major breakthrough happened?
I often imagine WWIII, as I witness the bombs coming down to destroy everything we've built, wondering, "what conveniences would I give up for this not to be happening?"
And I also realize that this is more than a thought experiment for many people living right now.
In the 80's, many, many people looked down on electronic and synthesized music because it wasn't real music played with real instruments.
And now it's just another instrument and has whole genres of music dedicated to it. C64 SID chips are sought after for 8-bit music creation because it has a unique aesthetic. Same with TR-808 drum machines.
The AI complaints feel a lot like that.
I'm betting in about 15-20 years there's going to be a revival of terrible AI images and videos because people are nostalgic for 2024 when AI images were obvious and sit firmly in an uncanny valley.
And I think AI will inspire a massive artistic revolution, both because it becomes just another tool in the toolbox that makes creation easier like drum machines and synths, AND it takes over the pop-music space previously occupied by boy bands and pop queens - generic rehashes of inoffensive crap that so saturates the market entire counter-cultures develop. But someone will use it to make something uniquely creative and new. Rap and hip-hop wouldn't exist without cheap drum machines.
In other words, you're old enough to start disliking new stuff, but not old enough to have seen this happen multiple times and realize that this is just another generational cycle. The younger generations will absorb AI tools and continue to do what humans have always done, which is be creative with the tools at their disposal.
Satire pokes fun at what is happening right now; it's not predicting anything. Just like 1984 warned of the dangers of totalitarianism that was already happening, Idiocracy was about current U.S. culture at the time. It wouldn't have been funny if our culture weren't already like that 20 years ago.
The premise is just a silly one so that there's a plot-based reason to show an exaggerated version of what was already happening culturally. It's not intended to be the point of the movie.
This idea has been around as long as the web, but you can't get momentum behind it.
A much better idea was a .kids domain where the content was vetted, and you could allow-list your child's device to that. Much easier than trying to migrate everyone over to specific TLDs, especially when that ship has sailed already. But that never got traction either.
Edit to add: I used to work on "family safety" software. Blocking bad content doesn't work - it's too difficult of a problem. Walled gardens do work, however. The fact that there's not a push for the equivalent of an Apple App Store for kids is probably evidence of ulterior motives on behalf of regulators.
One of the problems is the binary nature: we lump everyone between 0 and 18 years old into a "kids" bucket, but the content appropriate for a 17 year old is very different from the content appropriate for a 4 year old.
My family has tried the curated "kids" content from the major players: It's junk and not going to be interesting to a teenager. Your 14 year old is not going to be satisfied with a version of Netflix that's all Bluey and Daniel Tiger. And your 5 year old probably shouldn't be watching stuff that's made for teenagers. But our regulatory hammer knows only "kid" or "not-kid". You can't make a single walled garden.
Even within a single age. My 15 year old might not be ready for content that your 15 year old finds to be routine. How is YouTube going to know what is appropriate for any given 15 year old? Walled-off content and numerical age gating is just not a workable solution.
I haven't tried this because I haven't played Magic in over 20 years, but I always thought it would be more fun if you had two draw decks where the second was only allowed to include basic lands.
Then in the draw phase you could choose which deck to draw from, eliminating the mana flood/drought possibility that ruins games.
Maybe some additional rules to limit how many lands you're allowed to draw in the initial draw to one or two, I dunno.
This is similar to how VS system worked, it was a short lived superhero CCG in the mid 2000s, you could play up to one card per turn facedown as a “land”, but you still drew from one deck.
There’s a few modern TCGs who take this approach, like Riftbound (the League of Legends TCG that launched last year) and Sorcery Contested Realm.
Other attempts to fix the mana problem include games like Lorcana and Flesh and Blood, in which cards have dual modes where they can be played or used for resources.
I absolutely adored the psychedelic stylings of the pinball number count as a kid and still do. The kids tv stuff from that era even in conservative Ireland was well weird and funky. Check out the into to this mainstay of children’s tv I grew up with:
I believe this look traces back to the work of Push Pin Studios[1], an influential graphic design studio founded in the mid-sixties. It is hard to underestimate how much this style dominated the time; as a kid in the seventies these psychedelic stylized chrome reflections were everywhere.
I mostly think of it by association with artists who were well-known for it, such as the Pushpin guys, or Peter Max.
Worth looking at: the catalog from this exhibition of some of Push Pin's work. [2]
Maybe. I never got the impression Jim Henson needed psychedelics though. It was certainly in the zeitgeist of the time if you were counter culture which I think sesame street was certainly trying to be at the time.
It used to be remarkable to drive a car 100k miles without major repairs. Volvo dealerships in the 80's and 90's would give you a badge at 100k milestones to advertise how reliable their cars were compared to others.
Anything tech related is just light years ahead of what it used to be, and for far cheaper. 65"+ OLED TVs for less than a couple grand are pretty much science fiction come to life. Gaming consoles are super-computers compared to an NES.
For many appliances, if you pay an inflation-adjusted cost for what a 1980's family would pay you can get something that will last forever. Last year I bought a commercial microwave for about $300 that has a single dial, hardly any features, and likely will last longer than the first microwave my family owned and also paid ~$300 for. Adjusting for inflation my new microwave is vastly better and cheaper than my childhood one.
I play guitar - in 1954 a new Stratocaster sold for $249, which is about $3k in today's dollars. And $249 today will get you a guitar that's easily as good as most 1954 Strats. If you spend the inflation-adjusted equivalent you're in ultra-luxury territory.
Want good furniture? That's ALWAYS been expensive, but you'd typically buy a table for the equivalent of $5k in today's dollars and expect it to last a lifetime. You can spend $5k on real wood furniture today, but nobody does.
Housing materials are much better and cheaper with the possible exception of copper pipes and anything made of real wood. Certainly builders of McMansions are cutting corners at every opportunity, but if you do your own building/finishing these days a lot of materials are available that will outlast their 1980's equivalent, and the cheap options are better.
I think a lot of this is a lack of perspective - everyone wants better things but nobody actually wants to pay for it.
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