Yeah this is an article just about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Connection is great, 24/7 connection and exposure to advertising that is not in my best interests is not! Easy.
Old people are obsessed with nostalgia for their past, for all the cool tech of their day. Okay. What’s new. I guess its that this time the nostalgia is coming from millenials.
Yeah, phone bans bad.
The author relates this to the ancient conservative tradition of pastoralism, which is a romanticized abstraction of the feeling of the way of life of a shepherd. Not the actual life of a shepherd.
I guess the thing this is critiquing is the tendency to skip over the unique and specific ways present tech is problematic and substituting that with an appleal to the tech of the past, which ipso factor couldn’t have the same issues.
Even if we don’t use spotify, we are still living in a world shaped by it. I guess, but that doesn’t mean I have to use it!
We should avoid this nostalgia for nothing else other than this present moment will one day be the past, and we don’t want to be compelled to yearn for it then!
We need a renogiation of our relationship with tech that isn’t avoidant or regressive. Yup.
I avoid all this by simply being too young and also bad at remembering things to experience nostalgia.
The things I want from my computers and technology (agency, ownership, respect of my privacy, repairability, and so on) are all things that are more accessible in older tech than new. Except not entirely; hence why I am happy using a modern laptop running Linux, an OS I can broadly control. And most of my problems are with websites that other people have written contrary to the above values.
I love tech, and its communicative, art making, science doing possibilities. I don’t like the exploitation and alienation it can engender.