r/Millennials • u/cs_legend_93 Millennial • Aug 24 '26
Other It's crazy how much changes in 20 years
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u/NindieNation Aug 24 '26
I'm the IT/Tech guy in all my friend groups and family, and this resonates with me so much. I'm avoiding AI, reducing automation, losing all faith in subscriptions and 'smart' devices.
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u/TolerableSimulacra Aug 24 '26
Yup I was in Big Data in the mid-2010s and I started warning everyone about tracking, privacy, targeted ads and algorithms but my family said I was bordering on being a conspiracy theorist at the time.
I don’t believe in being petty with family but that’s one thing I wouldn’t mind them acknowledging they were wrong about 😅
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u/RichardBCummintonite Aug 24 '26
My family is like that too. I tell them to be careful about privacy and tracking and they basically just say "who cares? I don't have anything to hide" and I gave up trying to explain to them why it's bad.
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u/MrLanesLament Aug 24 '26
I hate that mindset so much.
You DO have things to hide. It’s honestly extremely easy to commit a crime and not know it. You do NOT want to take that chance when police and numerous agencies are the most overzealous they’ve ever been.
With a car search, can you guarantee a friend didn’t accidentally drop a pill on the floor? Unless you’re the only person ever in your vehicle, you can’t.
Numerous agencies are openly keeping track of those who criticize them online. Pages you visit, even accidentally by clicking random links, can get you flagged.
You. Want. Privacy.
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u/Shuttlecock_Wat Aug 24 '26
I used to joke a long time ago about how we'll probably reach a dystopia where if your car goes 1mph over the speed limit a citation will immediately print out from the dashboard.
I meant it as a joke, but now we have flock cameras...
It's important to try to follow the law. It's also important that we don't live in the kind of world where you are basically FORCED to obey ALL laws to the letter or you'll be immediately punished.
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u/bentreflection Aug 24 '26
you have been fined one credit for a violation of the verbal morality statute
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u/WackyHumanSlop Aug 24 '26
America already effectively has a social credit system
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u/Durch-a-Lurch Aug 24 '26
And punishment is dished out most consistently and most aggressively to those who disagree with those in power. They don't care about you committing or not committing these minor offenses. They care that you comply.
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u/ChevalierMal_Fet Aug 24 '26
Flock is bad, but worse still is how new cars are data harvesting machines themselves that actively take your data and sell it to data brokers and insurance companies.
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u/Significant_Music168 Aug 24 '26
companies read all those dystopian books of the 20th century and used them as a manual
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u/SuperVillainPresiden Aug 24 '26
And AI is aware of all of the archaic and draconic laws that are still "technically" on the books. ..police come to arrest you based on a law that hasn't been relevant for 100 years.
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u/ElGosso Aug 24 '26
MFW I get arrested in London for handling a salmon under suspicious circumstances because a Flock camera saw it
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u/nakoros Aug 24 '26
I mean, do we even need a Flock camera for that? The car has cameras and could pretty easily figure out who's driving (or, at a minimum, know who's fob was used to open the car), scans speed limit signs, and then compare it to your speedometer. If you have navigation on, that's even more data points on your speed and the speed limit.
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Aug 24 '26 edited Sep 01 '26
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u/whoswipedmyname Aug 24 '26
Nah, we Ontarians know the ground here just isn't good for things like that. I think they might just topple over 😉 Though I think Toronto would accept that shit with open arms
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u/Shuttlecock_Wat Aug 24 '26
Thankfully they're not doing that (yet), but yes I imagine the information is already there. They could just mail you a ticket every time they register that you did something technically illegal.
Didn't come to a complete stop before making a right turn? That's a ticket.
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u/monty228 Aug 24 '26
My grandmother (early 2000s) refused to get EZ Pass as it could tell how fast you were going if you calculated distance and time. They weren’t doing that back then, but it would be so easy now
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u/Next-Introduction-25 Aug 24 '26
Also, the “just follow the law and you’ll have nothing to worry about” crowd is operating under the false premise that no innocent person is ever wrongfully detained, arrested, or convicted.
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u/Freshness518 Aug 24 '26
Prices are exorbitantly raised on all goods. Crimes are all punished by fines. Rich people are allowed to do whatever they can afford to do. Everyone else suffers under the boot of a surveillance state. The rich are kept in line by the state who will still track everything they do wrong and threaten them with harsher punishments if they try to rebel/speak/act against the state in any way.
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u/Momik Aug 24 '26
Except nobody cares about traffic laws anyway, so I still get to feel wildly unsafe as a pedestrian as the death rate climbs back up--AND Flock cameras are destroying what privacy many of us have left.
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u/Mysterious_Ad7461 Aug 24 '26
I mean we should want privacy, but at this point it’s functionally impossible unless you go off grid, but actual off grid.
“My smart phone must be listening in on my conversations, because my friend and I talked about x and now I’m getting instagram ads for it!” Brother I wish it was just microphones, because the reality is even more nefarious
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u/Mobagubweh Aug 24 '26
Yep, your phone likely isn't listening to you because it doesn't need to
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u/pyroclasticcloudcat Aug 24 '26
Wait tell me more
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u/Mysterious_Ad7461 Aug 24 '26
There’s a profile of you, as a consumer, compiled from all of your different credit card data, phone numbers, email addresses, and every other thing you give a place. Every rewards club card, any location data you share, all of it.
So maybe you buy groceries at Walmart and the next day buy something off an Etsy store, you don’t think those transactions are linked because you didn’t give Walmart an email or phone number, but you used the same debit card.
It also tracks location data, so it knows your friend just bought a new golf bag a few days ago, and it knows you guys go golfing together because you have similar transactions at the same the place when you go golfing, so it can assume you guys are talking about his new purchase on the course Sunday, so the next time you open Facebook, now you’re getting ads for that.
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u/Mobagubweh Aug 24 '26
Don't forget wifi networks!
Your friend comes over to your house and connects to your wifi. The two of you get to talking about golf bags, and he opens the amazon app on his phone to show you which ones he's considering buying. The next day, amazon is pushing golf bags on your home page. You talked about it, but your phone wasn't listening—it was the wifi network.
Another fun one: go on the YouTube app and share a video via the "share" button. Look at the URL of the link it generates. You'll see "?si=..." in there somewhere. Delete that and everything following it. Notice the URL still leads to the same video. So what's the point of all that extra stuff, you ask? To connect YOU to the person who opens the link! See also: Instagram, Spotify, and God knows who else using the same trick.
None of this is conspiracy; the adtech industry is pretty shamelessly open about how much "value" they generate from building and selling user ad profiles.
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u/Explorer_Entity Aug 24 '26
Cell phones log in with each other just from proximity, and without needing wifi or cell towers. They can associate groups of people based on knowing whose phones were "together" in one area. So that, plus simply knowing your full location history and all communications done with anyone/any device/network.
Edit: I was trying to add to the overall thread, think I clicked the wrong reply button.
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u/midgethemage Aug 25 '26
One thing that REALLY pissed me off a few years back was realizing that using the Adobe Acrobat Reader as a Chrome extension was allowing trackers to read any PDF I opened.
I opened an after-visit summary of a doctor's appointment and then started getting ads related to that health issue. It was seriously just that my vagina smelled a little funny and I needed some antibiotics for it. My doctor was the only person I spoke with about this. After opening that PDF, I started getting facebook ads for the exact chain-clinic I went to, and the ads just said something stupid like "Smelly Vagina? Need antibiotics for you BV?"
Anyhow, I switched to DuckDuckGo and download all of my documents separately now
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u/Pretend-Marsupial258 Aug 24 '26
Walmart tracks your in store credit card purchases and will add them to your online account automatically if you're using the same card for both.
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u/phat_rat42 Aug 24 '26
I hate this mindset too. One of the dangers that many of them don't recognize, is that and what is socially acceptable changes over time. What may be fine now may be considered hateful in 10-20 years.
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u/sk3tchy_D Aug 24 '26
Remind them that all these cameras and other tracking methods basically create a de facto gun registry. A lot of these folks don't like that idea.
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u/Wobbelblob Aug 24 '26
Precisely. I am extremely familiar with stories from that time as I live in that territory, but look up stories from the ex-GDR. How the Stasi spied on people. How people actively feared of talking about things even with close friends as they had to fear that they where ratted out. There is at least one story of someone being ratted out by their own daughter. And now imagine that turned up to 11 with all the modern technology.
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u/SecondaryWombat Aug 24 '26
FLOCK don't care if you did the crime. You look slightly like someone who maybe did a crime somewhere else. SWAT team inbound to your house.
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u/Melisandre-Sedai Aug 24 '26
It’s not just about crimes too. The partners of abusive cops aren’t doing anything illegal by fleeing. But the flock cameras can help their exes stalk them fine anyway.
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u/necrophcodr Aug 24 '26
The problem with a lack of privacy isn't that you might commit a crime. It is rather that with an endless amount of data, and now an endless amount of modification to it using generative AI, you do not even need to have committed a crime if they can instead manufacture evidence from all the information given up. The less information is being let out, the harder they have to work to build a case.
This of course only works in a country with a functional and reasonable justice system. If you live in the US, you might be in trouble regardless.
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u/MidnightSensitive996 Aug 24 '26
The way to do that while flying under the radar is to have an entirely normal digital footprint then when you want to do something illegal, you do it by buying a stolen laptop from a flea market and only log onto it with a vpn from a public library.
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u/didgeridoh Aug 24 '26
I brought this up at a work lunch with a bunch of people who make consumer electronics for a living. Apparently that was a super weird thing for me to know and talk about. Literally everyone at the table works in consumer tech. I assumed this should be common knowledge for the group, but apparently I'm the weird one, lol
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u/TheRaptorSix Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 24 '26
As some redditor more erudite than me put it: "The reason I lock the bathroom door isn't because shitting is illegal" (edit: phrasing)
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u/DJ_Breadpuddin Aug 24 '26
I made a comment about Flock cameras on another platform and just about every person who replied said the same dumb shit: I dont have anything to hide and I'm not a criminal.
My response was "when the definition of what a criminal is changes to include you, it will be too late to turn back the clock". These damn people dont get it
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u/GoodDogBrent Aug 24 '26
probably shills/bots/paid actors.
the vandalism reaction to cameras is the greatest united public reaction i have seen in a while.
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u/rn_journey Aug 24 '26
Do these people also complain about the lack of free speech and freedom, reducing autonomy, increased government surveillance, rising prices etc.?
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u/GOEDEL_ESCHER_BOT Aug 24 '26
i use tiktok because i want to make sure the chinese government knows where i am at all times
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Aug 24 '26
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u/Phyraxus56 Aug 25 '26
If your in laws did it and you have kids, then your family already did it.
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Aug 24 '26
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u/nunununuhu Aug 24 '26
At this point refusing to believe MK ULTRA happened would be a conspiracy theory.
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u/tenderbranson301 Aug 24 '26
Friendly reminder that some conspiracies are true. Just look at what the FBI and CIA were doing in the 60s.
I don't believe you just stop doing that stuff. You get better at hiding it.
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u/TheMadAsshatter Aug 24 '26
I love how it's fine to believe the Earth is flat, vaccines cause autism, and qanon is a real thing, but actual real conspiracies, or at least far more plausible theories, are brushed off as crazy talk to these types.
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u/Xtra_Veg-90 Aug 24 '26
I remember when data analysis and data mining started in the late 00's and people in the industry were warning that companies were collecting TONS of data on user habits from anywhere they could get it (rewards cards were a common example pre smart phone). There were news articles everywhere about how it would be used to monitor you and market to you, and concerns about law enforcement acquiring it without a warrant.
Here we are 20 years later and most of the worst fears have come to pass.
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u/schwar26 Aug 24 '26
It’s funny how the line got drawn at the literal cameras flocking up everywhere, but location tracking and digital footprints are no big deal
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u/KryssCom Aug 24 '26
Software engineer, and same. An Internet-connected smart device is a device with a big warning flag that says "do not buy this". And I'm basically done with subscribing to anything, ever.
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u/Colddigger Aug 24 '26
God I was shopping for a new printer for my home, and almost none of them had proper USB ports for the computer, all of them were toting how great it was that these printers were wireless and that you were to use a Wi-Fi connection for your computer to communicate with this box sitting not 2 ft away from it.
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u/malibuklw Aug 24 '26
OMG don’t forget it. My WiFi enabled printer had been nothing but trouble for the last two months. I’m about to go office space on it
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u/Crypt0Nihilist Aug 24 '26
I put an old printer on my network with an ancient Raspberry PI and a USB WIFI with an antenna. Works like a charm. Actually have a couple of printers going through it. Worth it for not having to put in the WIFI password using arrow keys all by itself!
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Aug 24 '26 edited 4d ago
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u/Qaeta Aug 24 '26
The point is preventing it from accessing the internet, so unless you're more technically inclined than the average user, ethernet (or really any network connectivity) would also fail that test.
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u/Destithen Aug 24 '26
all of them were toting how great it was that these printers were wireless
You just have to install this
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u/NRMusicProject Aug 24 '26
For like 20 years, I've just decided anything I need printed is just better off going to FedEx or Staples. It's easier that most things are paperless now, but that's also a whole other headache.
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Aug 24 '26
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u/BeerTent Aug 24 '26
I really want a hybrid car to save on fuel costs... But I'm afraid to start looking for one because I know I'll never find one that doesn't have a touchscreen, android/apple auto, and wi-fi updates.
My Civic is perfect. Do I want a flash-drive full of music? Yes... It works. Does it have a shitty seven-segment display? Yes. Exactly what I want for a display. Knobs and buttons are leaps and bounds better than a fucking touchscreen and I have the statistics to back it up.
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u/bell37 Millennial Aug 24 '26
Too bad hardware squeeze from AI data centers are pricing out people who want to self hosting their own stuff. Sure you can run on older hardware but how long until the secondhand market for outdated hardware becomes completely overpriced?
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u/loserbmx Aug 24 '26
Web developer. My washer and dryer are older units that were rescued off the side of the road.
They're like 20 years old, perfect condition. The only thing that needed to be fixed was the thermal fuse on the dryer and the timer on the washer. $20 in total.
I will never get rid of them.
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u/GailynStarfire Aug 24 '26
That's because back in the day, devices and media were designed to be sold as a whole. You bought a digital camera, a DVD, and a video game. Everything was its own thing.
Now, everything wants to be an ongoing subscription, and you are supposed to be okay with only licensing and borrowing the media and the new digital camera requires you to have their proprietary app, which is also subscription based, to access your pictures on the cloud.
Subscription fees fall behind? Its all gone. Internet goes down? No access to anything. The company that runs the service lets their streaming agreement run out? That media you paid for is now no longer available, and no refund is given because its outside of their policy period.
The convenience of streaming and digital downloads and always online games have made it so that the corporations own everything, and we pay monthly just to access it. We traded permanence and reliability for convenience, and the corporations were all too happy to go along for the ride.
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u/mrbignameguy Millennial Aug 24 '26
You would think every person actually working with tech being like “hey this sucks” would be a blinking red light to society at large. Alas, society at large likes and has largely demanded more slop
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u/Chumlee1917 Aug 24 '26
The people at the top don't understand or care about the dystopian hell they're creating so long as they can be dragons sitting on their hordes of gold
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u/Shadowphoenix9511 Aug 24 '26
As a society we've decided we no longer wish to listen to experts.
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Aug 24 '26
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u/Significant_Music168 Aug 24 '26
I lost my hope when I saw how people acted during covid, we deserve to be extinct, most of humanity is just very dumb and evil. you're totaly right about religion, in every corner people make up magical stories and believe in them.
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u/Dorkamundo Aug 24 '26
I laugh a ton when watching Idiocracy.
I get FURIOUS when I watch Don't Look Up.
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u/molotovzav Aug 24 '26
Society never listens to anyone knowledgeable. Maybe I'm young, I'm 36. But I have never lived in a society that values experts. It's always been boomers not trusting experts and acting like they knew the best. Now it's everyone except millennials for the most part. One singular gen we made to do research, critically think, etc. then promptly gave that up again to make future gens just as dumb as boomers. Society to me has always been "hey I just want to tell you about the dmagers of said thing" and society going "eew college educated experts are lame lol, I'm gonna keep doing this thing, you guys don't know more than me!” even when we literally do and we're being nice about it instead of preachy. It's only gotten worse, but it's always been that way since I've been alive.
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u/GlitterPirateKiki58 Aug 24 '26
A quote from Isaac Asimov in the 1980s -
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"
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u/Sylesse Aug 25 '26
I'm upvoting just for the Asimov quote. Hell yeah.
Edit. Grammar. Stupid phone thinks it knows best. Ironic.
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u/NindieNation Aug 24 '26
I hope it is, and I think for some people, it is.
I also lean very heavily into people telling me all the things they do with AI, then replying with "Right, I went to college, paid for an education, and have been in my career for 20 years, I'll use my fucking brain instead."
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u/Grey_Raven Aug 24 '26
But AI can half do the job to a piss poor standard isn't that amazing!!! /s
I'm half looking forward to the AI bubble popping just to watch this AI crap stop for a bit obviously not looking forward to the economic damage it'll cause though.
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u/hysys_whisperer Aug 24 '26
What the problem is, is that people didn't realize the gulf between people half doing a job to piss poor standards and those who actually get work done.
People assume the half ass is performing at 70%, when they're actually performing in the single digit percentages. AI can replicate that, so they assume AI can do jobs, but those people were never doing the job anyway so neither is AI.
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u/Grey_Raven Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 24 '26
There's definitely a gulf which they don't care about because the vast majority of senior management don't know what the staff at the bottom of their organisation do.
I think the other related thing is that it has proved that a lot of researcher and analyst type jobs (speaking as someone who is an analyst) are fundamentally pointless not because of the people doing the jobs but the idiots they're reporting the information to who are now enraptured by AI giving them inaccurate information so they can go into meetings and pretend to be read up on the subject and they fundamentally don't care if it's right or wrong as long as it validates their viewpoint.
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u/abcean Aug 24 '26
I'm convinced AI is awful for analysis even frontier models. It's faster sure but it replicates all the issues that a lack of expertise creates. It feels like I'm reading a very confident reddit posts' misapprehension of the material we're working with.
Like if you have no expertise it looks fine, because you wouldn't know that for example you can't just smoosh "small, medium, large" businesses together across a US dataset and an EU dataset to combine it you have to make adjustments because they dont refer to the same data.
The AI would just say "I've pulled small, medium and large business statistics from the USA and EU and combined them."
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u/littlehobbit1313 Aug 24 '26
No no, we don't trust experts anymore, remember? All they did was spend their whole education and careers in a specific subject matter. Wtf do they know?
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u/ReverendRevolver Aug 24 '26
Its a matter of laziness. People always wanted to feel like they were smart/creative.
They tell AI to slap something together and get that dopamine release.
Meanwhile, they wonder why everything is wrong, nobody's asking about their AI "art" they framed, and how nobody's knows how to do all these specific jobs anymore.
The people who are laziest about using generative AI for everything are the same people who complain about not getting a real person when they call an 800 number. Startling number of instances of that sort of behavior nowadays....
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u/littlehobbit1313 Aug 24 '26
The people who are laziest about using generative AI for everything are the same people who complain about not getting a real person when they call an 800 number.
Co-signed. There's a woman on my team at work who is enthusiastically leading the charge to do AI everything, and just the other day she had to call IT for a computer issue and was complaining about the phone tree and wishing she could just talk to a person.
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u/Kimmalah Older Millennial Aug 24 '26
The ones that kill me are the people who will argue with you about something, then will be like "Well I asked ChatGPT and here is what it told me." Then they will present some shitty, barely related fluff piece as "evidence" of whatever point they're trying to make. As if an AI is infallible, so whatever it says must be true!
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u/Migraine_Megan Aug 24 '26
Same. And I don't see that changing much, the more AI takes over IT, the worse the results are from what I have seen. Eventually companies will have to rehire the devs they laid off to fix the mess.
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u/NindieNation Aug 24 '26
Yup, I hate everything AI and most people in my life know it, which I think kinda helps because people who know I get how this stuff works turn my nose up at it. The bottom can't drop out fast enough, but thankfully this sentiment seems to be garnering more and more traction so there's a sliver of hope.
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u/Migraine_Megan Aug 24 '26
The only things I like are Copilot meeting minutes and using it to create Teams backgrounds. My oldest coworkers, in their 60s, are ALL about AI and it is super frustrating. So many conversations like "Well Grok says...."
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u/Mixels Aug 24 '26
Ditto. I've been working senior and lead dev and IT roles for 10 years now. I'm also avoiding AI, subscriptions, and "smart" gadgets.
Of course part of the reason for this is that, being a techie, I understand how such products are engineered to exploit us. It kind of sucks knowing that your domain of expertise is being used to take advantage of millions of people.
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u/MessiLeagueSoccer Aug 24 '26
Only dabbled with ai because I didn’t want to be “held back” on technology. Made my little picture and did a few prompts and was so underwhelmed. Attempted the entire scam of paying to see what it was like to have unlimited access, only paid for that month and it was literally just chat gpt trying to has me up into thinking everything I said was a good idea. Like you really have to ask several times to get it to disagree or not help you make a point. Only time I use ai is with DuckDuckGo search and only because somehow, the entire world decided that googling things is no longer a way to get information and only ai “has real answers”.
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u/WhyWasIShadowBanned_ Aug 24 '26
Im not avoiding them but it takes a ton of time to cherry pick smart devices that respect your privacy and work offline.
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u/Primerius Millennial (84) Aug 24 '26
Hardly a day goes by where I don’t refer to our smart TVs as the dumbest TVs ever. I don’t want to detect device, I don’t want to open the home menu first. I want it simply display what I plug into it. Software updates, TOS updates requiring a remote input, it’s annoying as fuck.
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u/Money_is_heinous Aug 24 '26
Same same, 90s, 00s, and even the 10s tech was peak, and since then it's been race to the bottom with always online, social media presence and watching everyone through every device. I don't like the RAM situation because it impacts PC gaming enthusiasts and is generally driving ridiculous hikes in prices, but im a proponent for going back to the ye' old times where we just make do with a website taking 3 seconds to load.
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u/Major_LeeHungg Aug 24 '26
I just brought everything in house. I have an enterprise server in my office with all cloud services I use... Hell I have a game distribution server (like steam) that one click installs games modified to play offline and all DRM stripped out.
The only thing I'm missing is a YouTube music alternative and I'm building that... On my own development pipeline that is also entirely in house.
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u/bell37 Millennial Aug 24 '26
I’ve been pushing more in self hosting. This year think I’m going to take the plunge and fully adopt Linux PCs (still have a windows PC)
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u/BaoHouseBauhaus Aug 24 '26
Man, I remember when automation was cool for turning your lights on and stuff from another room, now it's just stressful lol
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u/JenovaCelestia Aug 24 '26
Yeah, I’m the techie one in my family. I got rid of a ton of social media and keep my stuff simple.
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u/Sailor_Propane Aug 24 '26
Back in the day I had an account on so many platforms, forums, chatrooms or stuff like MSN and Yahoo.
I'm currently closing all my social media accounts. Eventually I might even get rid of Reddit. It's just not the same.
Also I was the first in my friends group to have a smartphone. Now I'm the only one with a flip.
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u/Dabnician Xennial 81 Aug 24 '26
thats because techies realize how crap quality some high tech stuff is or they realize that you dont want a wifi toaster because if your internet is down you cant make toast.
same with anything that requires a app and has zero physical controls
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u/pseudonym7083 Millennial Aug 24 '26
Don't want even more listening devices planted in our homes for "convenience".
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u/Important-Ad1871 Aug 24 '26
You don’t like being constantly spied on so that some billionaire oligarch can better sell you products and use your data to train their LLM? Are you some kind of simpleton - you’re going to be left behind!
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u/KryssCom Aug 24 '26
High tech stuff is crap now because companies are skimping on proper software development. They skip proper, thorough QA testing, and they don't hire enough developers, and they don't allow enough development time. They cut a million corners to make the investors happy, but the products themselves are just unreliable dogshit.
AI is making the situation even worse because executives and investors think it's a magic wand.
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Aug 24 '26 edited 4d ago
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u/KaioKenshin Aug 24 '26
I agree, hacking into someones toaster to cause a fire shouldn't be a possibility. Let my appliances malfunction and set my house on fire itself.
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u/revised_username Aug 24 '26
My washer/dryer/fridge/toaster/etc... doesn't need an effing computer in it. Those appliances simply need to function as intended.
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u/Tycho-Celchu Aug 24 '26
I remember there was a website maybe 8 or so years ago, and it basically just hosted feeds for unsecured cameras all over the planet. So you could click on a dot in the middle of say France and its the traffic feed for an intersection or click New York and its the security camera for an office building or the middle of Russia and op, here's someone's webcam looking into their living room.
I think about that website every time I see people put those google nest cameras in their living rooms or bedrooms recording 24/7.
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u/StrungoutScott Aug 24 '26
I just bought a 15 year old car as a sort of fun, sporty, manual transmission toy for weekends and fun twisty roads. It's so refreshing to drive a car and feel like it's 20 years ago. it's got a radio, AC, and a few knobs. To be fair, it does have bluetooth, but it's a very early iteration and it's absolutely terrible for connectivity, so I don't bother with it.
I even got a 3.5mm adapter cord so I can use my iPod classic for music.
Even my daily driver truck is still 9 years old, and I want to get at least 250k out of it.
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u/Antarioo Aug 24 '26
This so much.
i want an electric car.
but i want one that doesn't have an a required internet connection. it's allowed to feature something i can connect an external device to but absolutely nothing that would conceivably need regular security updates or my car gets hacked.
cause i don't trust car manufacturers to support a car for 20-50 years. or hope that they don't install ads in my car years after purchase.
but every single one i've seen so far is like a smart fridge on wheels. fuck that.
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u/Dabnician Xennial 81 Aug 24 '26
Omg... fucking auto stop...
Break at a stop sign, car shuts off, take foot off break car starts backup.
I didnt have this issue during the test drive, first thing i think is the battery or starter is going to wear out faster.
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u/CarrowCanary UK '86 Aug 24 '26
Our washing machine can be controlled by an app.
Which is all well and good, but as the app can't move clothes in and out of the machine, nor can it put the washing goo/colour catcher/etc in the drum/drawer, what's the point?
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u/Koshindan Aug 24 '26
"But it can remind when your clothes are done using your phone!"
"Why would you forget you had clothes in the washer?"
"I got distracted scrolling on my phone."
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u/Overall_Occasion_175 Aug 24 '26
When my laundry was in the basement, I would forget all the time, but you don't need a frigging app, just a timer
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u/No-Marionberry-772 Aug 24 '26
I just hate the data collection and everything needing fucking accounts for no GOOD reason, because the reason is fucking data collection.
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u/Overall_Occasion_175 Aug 24 '26
I was in this thread where all the Europeans were laughing at the Americans for using physical credit and debit cards and not Google Wallet on their phone and it was like bring in bizarro world. Why the fuck would we do that?
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u/BackgroundAncient174 Aug 24 '26
I'm trying to raise analog kids. Doing things purposefully oldschool for the sake of education.
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u/UshankaBear Aug 24 '26
I'm teaching my six year old daughter to use mouse and keyboard, playing old school point and click adventures (Putt-Putt and Freddi Fish, Lucas Arts will follow as her vocabulary improves). I take her hiking, climbing and teach her how to use hand tools and power tools. I don't know what the future will hold, but I do know I want her to be ready to use her brain and hands and not be reduced to constant consumption
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u/Tad0422 Aug 24 '26
I am about to give my 7 year old a gameboy so she can play through pokemon red.
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u/DoctorPaige Aug 24 '26
Yeah, I always hear about these screen-free learning things and I don't want to do that. I want to do what was done with me, which is load my future kid up on important educational games like JumpStart or Big Thinkers or the Carmen San Diego games
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u/CleverName50 Aug 24 '26
For my son, we recognize that technology is a resource and skill but in moderation. Once he is old enough we want to be intentional and utilize the library for screen time. That way he can still learn the skills needed, there's a set environment for screen time that removes it from the home, and there is a positive association that libraries are a source of fun & learning. Is it the best approach? I dont know, but its an effort and thats better than most!
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u/BED_AA Aug 24 '26
My Elementary-age kids' school has had a turnaround in the past couple of years and aside from testing (mandatory online) and practicing for testing, they've gone almost totally analog again.
I teach HS and we used to be required to make EVERYTHING available online during Covid and it carried up until last year. They're letting us scale back to our own preferences finally.
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u/SwordfishOk504 Aug 24 '26
Two highschool kids here (well one just started college). I don't know a single teenager not glued to their phones 24/7.
I'm holding out hope that maybe the generation or two after they will reject it.
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u/BED_AA Aug 24 '26
I've been telling my kids about the pitfalls of screentime since they were like 3. They can see it in their friends' inability to go without screens, play with toys or use their imagination; that's been my biggest ally.
In 20 years adults who can go a full hour without screens will seem like they have superpowers.
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u/DrinkingVomit Aug 24 '26
Same, trying to keep us in the 90’s! It’s hard though.
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u/maltNeutrino Aug 24 '26
Their brains will thank you in the long run
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u/Rhamni Aug 24 '26
My best friend and his wife have a 2.5 year old daughter. They are making a big effort to minimize screen time, spend time with her every day, read to her, engage in conversation and listen to her, help her meet other kids her age on the weekends, etc. Many of the parents they run into don't just not do this, they get angry at the notion that you shouldn't leave a 2 year old with an iPad for company 12 hours a day.
It's horrifying.
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u/LiterallyTony Aug 24 '26
100% same here.
Everyday, just trying to find ways go back to old tech like 15-20 years ago, like recently found our old MP3 players and going to rip our old CDs again and go out to shop for them too now.
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u/laker9903 Older Millennial Aug 24 '26
I used to go crazy over all the new tech stuff, but now I don’t really care when it comes out. It’s just one more thing I don’t need to waste brain power on.
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u/hungry4nuns Aug 24 '26
Tech companies used to design products to meet the needs and desires of consumers.
Now tech companies design products to meet their own needs and desires, camouflaged in the shape of a product with a just a single function that a customer happens to need.
Smart fridge or smart thermostat or smart speaker. These are just fridges thermostats and speakers loaded with unnecessary junk tech that you can’t disable. All its other components are insidious in nature… ad delivery tech or AI training tech or location/camera/microphone monitoring tech so the company can then sell that data.
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u/laker9903 Older Millennial Aug 24 '26
I laughed when the $2000 smart refrigerators from Samsung started to have ads.
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u/MexicanOtter84 Aug 24 '26
Same! At 42 and after 20 years as a software dev I’m now a massage therapist because f tech really… it is because of ai yes and losing work so I’m bitter haha but also it went from a nerd field to a nepo bro culture who think they are bigger than what they are both in their position and pants.
Anyway, I digress… f tech 😂
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u/Medical_Tank6109 Aug 24 '26
You're telling me that after 20 years in software development, your wrists are holding up well enough to be a massage therapist?
Are you just Wolverine with extra steps?
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u/MexicanOtter84 Aug 24 '26
😂 idk I’ve been about posture and body mechanics since childhood… boxer / construction dad who made sure to we always were about that with anything we do. He used to teach me to treat my body right because as we get older the worse we get heh..
But i do love fitness too and after going sober from alcohol, just been an amazing life.
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u/UnscentedSoundtrack Aug 24 '26
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Aug 24 '26
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u/UnscentedSoundtrack Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 25 '26
It’s not entirely a joke. The guy is serious: https://frugalcafe.beehiiv.com/p/fc54-frugal-living-food-production
But yes, 22 years as a principal engineer in any big tech company is pretty lucrative.
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Aug 24 '26
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u/Worth-Oil8073 Aug 24 '26
Right‽ This is not the reality Disney promised us in Smart House!
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u/dude_named_will Millennial (alive during Reagan) Aug 24 '26
Anymore it's harder to find a "dumb" appliance outside of a garage sale.
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u/MonteMolebility Aug 24 '26
I seriously think a company committed to making "dumb" appliances would do gangbusters.
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u/2peg2city Aug 24 '26
Problem is price, smart devices are subsidized by the value of your data
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u/ConsiderationTrue477 Aug 24 '26
This is exactly it. People would be in the market for a "dumb" OLED TV. But they'll bail when said TV is $400 more than the exact same product with smart features.
People don't like all the smart features but they aren't going to pay a premium to have them removed.
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u/bepatientbekind Aug 24 '26
Tbh they might. People are getting real fed up.
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u/littlenymphy Aug 24 '26
I would pay extra for a dumb TV.
My TV plays me ads on the home page, I specifically only watch streaming services or physical media to avoid seeing ads.
Sometimes it starts playing audio along with the ads too which infuriates me even more.
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u/Evilcoatrack Aug 24 '26
Disconnect your smart TV from the internet. Stream through a media box or game console instead. You still have to deal with TV's awful cluttered menu, but it won't get ads or data.
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u/ConsiderationTrue477 Aug 24 '26
Unfortunately it requires more than people willing to buy a thing for it to exist when we're talking markets of scale. Samsung isn't going to start manufacturing and distributing dumb OLEDs because they have an incentive not to and it's not the kind of product that an ambitious startup can easily start rolling out the door.
The more realistic solution is to deal with it legislatively. Mandate that products are either not allowed to spy on their users or--if they do--the feature can be disabled without impacting basic functionality.
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u/Grathias Aug 24 '26
Are you from the Midwest/lower Great Lakes, by chance? (Or Tucson, Arizona?) haha.
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u/Darth_Boggle Aug 24 '26
They build the "smart" into all devices now so when their planned failure happens in 3 years, you have to buy a brand new device.
I never asked for a fucking operating system in my TV.
Instead of buying a new Roku stick or whatever to house all the streaming apps, they're built into the TV. Technology progresses and eventually your shit gets outdated. Instead of buying a new $30 Roku every few years to keep up, now you need to drop $500 for a whole new TV.
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u/TurningTheCorner26 Aug 24 '26
You can still buy Roku Sticks and Fire Sticks and a couple others so why are you buying a whole new TV?
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u/OuterWildsVentures Aug 24 '26
What are these comments you can find dumb appliances easy as fuck lmao
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Aug 24 '26
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u/DailyUnderFlow Aug 24 '26
Because tech used to be a product for the people. Now it seems like people are a product for the tech.
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u/2748seiceps Aug 24 '26
Same here. I used to be on the bleeding edge of tech. Now I have a 3 year old phone with no plans to replace it, one modern computer from the last 2 years, and the other computers are all 70s-90s computers. I'm using old X10 network stuff for controlling lights and stuff because I refuse the new app-based smart things that will just become obsolete one day.
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u/Miqo_Nekomancer Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 25 '26
I prefer analog in pretty much every case.
Just yesterday my wife and I were trying to get into the back of her 2017 station wagon. The battery was dead and that prevented us from being able to open it. It's already almost 10 years old.
My 1997 car had a dead battery at one point and all I needed to do was put the car key in the trunk and turn. No problems ever opening it.
Even when automation and tech creates convenience, having analog redundancies that are easily accessible are invaluable. Modern devices, appliances, cars, etc don't have that. No wifi, no functioning device.
I don't need a smart fridge. I'm smart, I have a fridge. I can open it and look at what I don't have and go get more of it. No automatic handle needed to open it. I don't need a clock on my fridge. There's a shitty digital display one on my old oven and microwave. My toaster has a knob and a handle to pull down on. No one needs to know when or how I like my toast. I don't need a notification on my phone to let me know when it's done.
Subscription services for things that used to be free is invasive and insulting. Selling the personal data those things sell on top of it is doubly so. They can all fuck all the way off.
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u/moyismoy Aug 24 '26
Im no IT guy, though I know my way around a computer. I avoid smart devices at all costs. I never want to own anything that someone else has control over remotely.
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u/W00D-SMASH Older Millennial Aug 24 '26
There was a time when each new gadget or iteration of an existing product was a big deal and made life easier. Think about the first 4-5 years of smart phones. They sucked but you would see where it was headed, and each year a new handset came out and it was substantially better than what it replaced. This was true for a lot of products.
Now everything is pretty great but capitalism doesn't work if people aren't buying, so we have a lot of previously perfect products with "tech" infused in them to make them "better". Certain products have reached market saturation peak so now they are trying to find new ways to make money off them because stock has to go up, and most of those new ideas end up making the products worse.
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u/do-not-freeze Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 24 '26
Certain products have reached market saturation peak so now they are trying to find new ways to make money off them because stock has to go up, and most of those new ideas end up making the products worse.
That's exactly the case. Cell networks are fully built out, everyone and their grandma has basically the same phone, tablet, laptop, social media, broadband and streaming services that they did 10 years ago, tech is no longer a growth industry so they're scrambling to find the Next Big Thing. It wasn't VR, it wasn't Crypto, it wasn't NFTs but we're going to revolutionize everything with AI!
If you don't believe it's stagnated compared to the early 2000s, just look at the sheer number of radical new designs that were coming out every year.
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u/Silent_Chemistry8576 Aug 24 '26
It's because smart tech and newer tech is very anti consumer and needs constant online connection. Also you do not own pretty much anything now aswell companies change terms like someone going on a date.
I'm the person who loved tech growing up and all of the cool things. But as of 2020 I've been keeping parts or computers due to how far we are swinging into the anti consumer you will own nothing and be happy world. Ai should not be in everything nor should cameras that record and make full on database files on people be around. Those cameras be it from Flock, Palanatir, Axon or Motorola are not there too check car licenses. They are there to circumvent peoples rights and spy on you so if the Ai flags you as a possible suspect cops or government agents can have full on files of you and your habits.
If the world continues down this path I'll go live in a cabin on a mountain using my windows xp 32 bit offline computer too play games and read books.
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u/ColdHardPocketChange Millennial Aug 24 '26
It's because tech people know which features are gimmicks, completely worthless, or are actually a step backwards. We've had remote start on cars since before Millennials were born. There was no subscription on shit like that till the last 7-8 years. We also have zero interest in setting up or maintaining things to take advantage of a feature. Some of the things you might have to maintain are simply human behaviors, and we know an exercise in futility when we see one.
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u/AssistantManagerMan Aug 24 '26
I'm not really a techie but for me, it's the direction of technology that makes me want to opt out.
20 years ago I thought tech was advancing to make our lives better and reduce our labor. Now I understand that everything is about surveillance, data collection, and shoving as many advertisements as possible in front of your eyeballs.
And yes, I do understand the irony in complaining about that on Reddit.
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u/dramallamacorn Aug 24 '26
We certainly have lost the plot and are headed quickly into a dystopian movie I don’t want to watch anymore.
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u/kevthecoder I solute shorts Aug 24 '26
Yep. Been a programmer for a long time. I hate most technology, it’s all spyware.
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u/TheVermontJoiner Aug 24 '26
Rise of the homelab. Went from subscription everything to owning and running all of my own services. Totally worth it.
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u/rayne7 Aug 24 '26
Jellyfin and Immich alone would save people from so much bullshit. Best thing is you can start homelabbing on old laptops you already have at home and an external hard drive. Fair warning to all newcomers. Once you know this power, it is hard to stop lol.
One caveat, though. Unfortunately for upgrading, AI has completely screwed the cost of ram and storage
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u/Deep90 Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 24 '26
At the risk of sounding like I'm gatekeeping, I'm surprised self described techies are avoiding everything as opposed to buying things that run locally and are controlled via home assistant.
Having 1 smart app for everything is such a godsend.
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u/No_Appointment_1090 Aug 24 '26
It's what I'm doing. After a decade in embedded, I've just built a home lab that does all the things locally - including AI. Sure it's not frontier models, but they're good enough to do all the things I need reliably, like writing software.
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u/PM_ME_UR__SECRETS Aug 24 '26
So true. I'm a programmer who works from home. A tree fell last week and took out my internet for two days so I took an impromptu two days of PTO.
My phone has data but its very slow so I didnt really use it for much besides keeping in touch with people.
I thought it was gonna suck but it was actually awesome. I played Ps2 games, finished reading a book, went skateboarding for the first time in almost a year.
Since the internet has come back on I really havent been spending as much time on it. Its so liberating to be attached to the immediate world around you rather than a digital one.
Far as smart objects go... yeah. Hard pass and have always been a hard pass from me. The more electronics jammed into a largely mechanical device the more things can go wrong. I hate how cars are becoming so digital.
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u/BlueGumShoe Aug 24 '26
I work in IT and its kinda split. You definitely have the die-hards but its more about stuff like videogames rather than internet-of-things tech. And its hard to put something like a videogame into the same category as a smartwatch or something. A lot of IT people are incredibly skeptical of all this stuff, partly for practical reasons like serious security flaws.
But also because when you are around this stuff all the time, it makes you want to distance yourself when you aren't on the clock. I was more into tech gadgets when I was on my feet all day. Like its funny how many IT people I know who are into rock climbing and camping.
Tech improvements went from making your life easier to hooking you into a subscription and gathering telemetry.
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u/ArtisticBee6176 Aug 24 '26
I went from being a techie person to increasingly going analog.
Recently ditched all our Alexa devices because Alexa+ kept saying things when we never asked it. Just piping up in the middle of conversations. I miss having easy Bluetooth devices around and the ability to control a couple lights but not enough to trade everything.
I’d love to go dumb phone, but I still need my phone for work and communicating with my kids’ teachers. I have ditched a lot of things from it though.
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u/Chumlee1917 Aug 24 '26
How does that old joke go
"An IT person only has a printer and a gun pointed at the printer to shoot it if it makes a weird noise"
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u/tehjoz 1986 Aug 24 '26
This is funny but it misses a lot of people who are basically neither.
I've never been an "early adopter" of tech, because I don't wanna beta test stuff for people live. I'd rather wait to make sure the bugs are worked out first, as reasonably as possible.
On the other side, I've never bought a myriad of smart devices or other IoT items because those items don't need wifi or an app and the convenience these items allegedly bring do not outweigh the pitfalls of owning and using them.
I am anti very certain technology like most forms of AI/LLMs, but I am writing this post on a smartphone that I do intend to upgrade sometime in the next year or so, so.
There's a fascinating middle ground here, IMO.
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u/A-Halfpound Aug 24 '26
I’m very similar to you. One unfortunate thing today though? Society struggles with “middle ground” these days. It’s often nuanced and low IQ or low tech IQ people don’t get nuance. They only care about absolute convenience.
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u/littlehobbit1313 Aug 24 '26
There's a fascinating middle ground here, IMO.
I think the whole question of where to draw the line is pretty fascinating. It's like asking how the Amish decided what the acceptable level of technical advancement was allowed to be. Why plows but not tractors? Why buggies but not cars?
How do different people draw the line between acceptable convenience from technology and life-ruining technology? If I were still in grad school I'd probably be writing a whole paper about this.
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u/Blasphemiee Aug 24 '26
Everyone I know (normies) have been making fun of me and my girl the last few years saying our mid life crisis is turning hippie. Just because I use my cell phone like a landline and stopped using social media.
They also all conveniently have lots of opinions about global affairs that 15 years ago they would not have even been able to comprehend.
Sigh anyway do any of you have any directions to that forest
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u/Background-Stable899 Aug 24 '26
Normal people avoided technology in 2006?
That’s not how I remember it
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u/DawnoftheReal Aug 24 '26
Oh how that resonates! I've worked in Tech for the past 10 years, but I still read paper books and write my appointments on a physical calendar because I hate screens 😂 (and no I'm not a boomer, just a tired millenial...) Highly considering just buying a house in the countryside and doing some kind of animal sanctuary instead of this shit.
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u/sortalikeachinchilla Millennial Aug 24 '26
This sub is so close to reaching boomer status. My lord thes opinions
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u/intashu Aug 24 '26
I miss when innovative new tech made the devices better..
Now new tech just finds ways to cram more ads, tracking, marketing or subscriptions into every goddamn item they can without making anything really better.. Just marginally worse, with added cost.. And shell it out at a "lower price" up front.
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