Toss in the X and LSD that was floating around in the '90s. Also the techno.
What if I told you no one’s stopping you from canceling the internet at your house and living like it’s still the 90’s. Go to the library, get your DVD’s, get a TV antenna, use signal instead of social media. RSS is still supreme.
At this point I’m just listing what I’ve been doing, but God it feels nice
DVD’s
VHS you heathen
I’m a laserdisc head myself
That’s just bragging.
Yeah, but I still need my corner Radio Shack…
Basically how most grandparents currently live, minus social media.
Really? Þe grandparents I now are obsessively online and in social media, especially Facebook.
Think more of the greatest generation and elder boomers, the people who unironically thought netscape was the best the internet ever had to offer, and rightfully so.
I don’t know anybody who lives like it’s the '90s. My mother has several streaming subscriptions on her smart TV, and shops on Amazon. My friend, who just turned 80, streams music from Twitch. I told him about GrapheneOS recently, and he’s thinking about trying it on one of his Pixels.
You just can’t live like the '90s anymore, of you want to interact with the world at all. Shopping, event announcements & tickets, entertainment, social connections, bill payment, public meetings, it’s all online.
I guess skipping right over the Silent Generation tracks.
Anecdotes don’t prove anything. The grandparents I know aren’t on social media. Most barely use smartphones.
One was complaining to me about how their bank requires everything to be done through a phone app. They don’t like how they can go into a branch to do anything because the bank teller tells them to do it on the app.
Just because social media addicted a lot of old people doesn’t mean all old people are doom scrolling.
Studies are better, sure. So how about þis:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1319311/us-meta-audience-by-age-and-gender/
My kids are stopping me
Yeah, I dont want my kid to have friends over and be the weird family that only has dvds and no streaming services. That was like being in the 90s and meeting a family that didnt have a tv.
Kids are stupid. I didnt mind places not having a TV at all as a kid…many grandparents didnt have one.
Even now, our living room has no TV. Obviously none in the bedroom either. Now, my basement gaming room is full of CRTs but yeah no streaming brainrot 😁
Except that ostricizes you from your community peers. The point of these “communes” is to be able to live with others who share your lifestyle and be able to talk and share.
Peers? PEERS!!? How DARE you!
I do most of these things and am still connected to my community. My “online social” is here, limited as it may be (on purpose), and my real community is in real life, where the internet is kind of irrelevant (or when it does come up, is mostly meme sharing)
Idk man, “I saw this Thread (or whatever they’re called) earlier that said “blah blah blah” is far too commoningly overheard. I’m not that old myself, mid 30s, but almost all community notices (wife deals with it) is through Facebook, or some other group messaging system. I don’t think that’s the era they are refering to, they want face to face communication. Like gotta go knock on the neighbors door to tell them there’s some deer coming down the hill.
Aol, all you get is a notification on your computer (when you choose to look at it). Nothing urgent is gonna get noticed in time.
It’s hard to get other people off the bad parts of the Internet.
It’s very hard to get businesses to stop exclusively posting stuff on Instagram.
It’s hard to get other people off the bad parts of the Internet.
Why does it have to be a purity test? Don’t force your own values on other people
It’s not a purity test, I just don’t want 500 different accounts on platforms I have no interest in and don’t trust because they’ve demonstrated their adversarialism.
Because I want to interact with them, but don’t want to be on Instagram.
People are brainwashed to use only the 3 corpo sites on the internet now. They’ve completely forgotten how awesome the human internet is.
Oh well. I’ll keep enjoying it while i can and not talking to people who refuse to leave fb and snap.
Yeah I haven’t run into any issues with it. I talk to people on signal, I watch shit on Jellyfin I pirate at work and transfer to my server. I borrow video games and books and DVDs from the library. I come on here on my phone from time to time to jerk off to beans
Same here, and I love it. Its veeeery rare to find someone who isnt brain dead with scrolling the Tok now, all my IRL friends can’t shut the fuck up about llms and will not put their phones away, so I’d rather just be alone. Hanging around them makes me upset at how corpo brainwashed everyone is. Really sucks they’ve let the technoligarch lobotomize them and refuse to listen to anyone else.
Can you drag your friends on a camping trip? Or even just a walk on a local trail? Basically organize a friend activity that’s not really compatible with scrolling on phones so they might get a break from the dopamine drip?
The thing that sucks today is phones work everywhere. Theres almost nowhere without service now. Unless we hang out in a concrete bunker
Fascist wishcasting
So somewhat like the the techno amish from freefall? source: http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff3200/fc03150.htm
Ive wanted this for a long time. Hard to implement though.
We can has buttons on our phones again, removable battery, and 7 day battery life?
That example still comes with built-in Google surveillance software.
You can scrape off the goo with ADB easily enough though
Even if you replace Google Play with a suitable replacement many banking apps don’t work anymore.
Best to have a totally different ecosystem not controlled by a massive American company which specializes in making money from people’s private data.
Regulate the fuck out of of social medias. Turn them back to what it was in 2009, a way for you to connect with friends and family.
It will make our life much better
Hear me out… what if we do democracy 2.0 and we actually remove capitalism/religion from the picture entirely? Who’s with me?
I would do this. Or like first Gen smart phone era, internet was still wild, cell phones were useful and not just sadness machines.
Going back to the 90s not eating animal products would be rough.
Yeah but you’re going to be real tight with that one Indian or vegetarian buddhist restaurant in the county.
can we use bitchat instead of AOL
Tangential to this, some cities are starting to have Luddie clubs. NYC, LA, probably SF too. Look into it and start your local. “Summer of Ludd” is a good search term to learn more.
It’s called “The Matrix”. Based on the 1990’s peak of human civilization “to accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of ‘our’ nature.”
And anything better we rejected according to the machines (well guess they don’t say they tried incremental improvements in the matrix)…looks at the world huh seems accurate, I so thought we were on turning things for better back then, having more inclusive shows (though they were stereotyped it felt more inclusive).
Also yes I know other issues but things were mostly progressing in a positive manner for acceptance. Used to party with such cool people of all types and it was awesome we had fun, people of all types enjoying their time. Maybe the drugs helped but regardless it was Fun!
In the end the aggro of the white wing (sorry right wing) of politics is polluting any acceptance for creating division. Mean they were starting back then but not as much traction it feels like. I just hope we as humans can figure out we’re all humans and more similar than different to get along before we nuke our civilization.
You guys joke but I would do this in a heart beat
I think a commune based on a less jokey version of this where instead of rejecting all post 90s tech you reject like very specific things, or specific use cases of tech, would be pretty awesome. Like you could have electronics but no internet. Just your own intranet with self maintained message boards, and a library of PDFs/MP3s/Movies and TV. Stuff like that.
I want internet, but only at home on a desktop pc. Get this pocket internet out of here
I agree. I think a pocket device that only has GPS Navigation, MP3 player capabilities, and calling/texting would be perfect. Maybe some basic stuff like a notes, app, alarms, etc too. Stuff that’s actually useful.
Edit: This is actually basically exactly what my own phone is. It’s graphene OS with no google services and that’s what I use it for.
Yes.
I want a Commodore Callback (for the reasons you pointed out.)
But my GrapheneOS phone without Google is most of the way there.
The notes, alarms etc part sounds like PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) to me. My dad used them extensively in the 90s and I would argue that they are the true predecessor to the modern smartphone.
I also remember my dad having a GPS device without a map. You could input waypoints and record a route and that’s it. I searches a bit and it looks like it was Garmin GPS 45 XL (but I might need to confirm that with him - I’m sure he has it somewhere)
There were also early examples of portable mp3 players in the late 90s. I think they were mostly held back by the storage density - the best option was the ultra small HDD (like the first iPod had in 2001). I think a portable CD player was the default back then.
So all the ingredients were there in the late 90s, just not in one device.
The most fun bit of tech history I found on the internet is this mp3 car stereo from 1999, which was running Linux. It had max capacity of 28GB for the music (2 HDDs). I don’t see myself needing much more than that even now. It was quite expensive, so it didn’t sell very well.
I’ve also read that people would drive with a PC in their trunk with some head unit, so they could listen to mp3s it in the car. It would totally be me if I were the same age as now 30 years ago.
yeah i was around back then myself. I remember using a walkman. That’s what portable cd players were called. The issue was that portable power was nowhere near what it is now. Battery tech has truly been revolutionizing and the efficiency gains we’ve made too. If you made a smart phone that was JUST those functions and used modern tech to do it while stripping out all the bloat its battery would last a whole week.
I remember my Sony Ericsson K800i lasting a week or so on a single charge. With modern tech the equivalent would last at least 2 or 3 times that
Yeah we stopped optimizing things. Mostly because now every device uses half its battery power to spy on you.
I’ve never made a joke in my life
Grunge forever!
