alt Hacker NewsDunno man, those things you say were “horrible” before the advent of mobile phones, media players and gps (not even the internet; usable incarnations of those inventions were entirely independent from the internet) - I was also there and it was _fine_.
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Same. I’ll gladly take CDs and DVDs over modern streaming platforms. Before all of this streaming crap music and taste had weight. You find people with the same interests and you share physical medium. No corporation in the world had a power to stop me from giving my copy to another person. Now you either like and pay forever like a good cattle or you hide like a rat from the watchful copyright gods on torrents.
I recall my tapes sounding ever so slightly worse after each playback. I also once left one too close to my CRT monitor, which erased all the high frequencies from the sound.
Also over time friction would build up in the medium, causing the tape to occasionally resist being pulled so strongly that some sections would stretch and introduce a hard to ignore "wah" effect.
Overall not my favourite means of storing information, like you said - it was fine. I've listened to a huge palette of mixes made by friends for friends and the social aspect of this is something I appreciated greatly.
Strong agree. That passage seems to me to be decrying the friction of the real world, whereas it's become increasingly clear to me just how valuable friction is in the world, and how inextricably tied the tech companies war on friction to the bad outcomes technology seems to engender.
Fine... but it's still better now.
I recently went on holiday to deepest darkest Wales where phone signal is intermittent. Trying to locate people and get messages to them was such a bloody pain.
I remember thinking in 2003 "surely we should be able to book GP appointments online now", and a mere 20 years later we can (depending on where you live) finally do it. It's so much better.
I would not go back, and I don't think anyone else would if it really came down to it, despite any virtuous anti-technology mantras they might pretend to believe.
I never had the problems with tapes that the author describes--but I still preferred CDs when they came out, and I greatly prefer having my entire music library on a single USB stick that I can just plug into my car.
I was able to find my way around okay with paper maps--but I still prefer having GPS in my phone.
My issue with those passages is that the author is conflating "digital" or "computers are involved" with "Internet". They're not the same.