It'd require some impressive mental gymnastics to consider hand-washing cheaper than a washing machine. The societal changes (improvements) that washing machines brought are immense, and fairly well documented.
> After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified.
Renting vhs/beta/laserdisc/bluray/hd etc has long been preferable to watching something littered with advertisements every 12-15 minutes - leaving aside the frequent censorship, lower quality audio or video, the inability to pause or rewind at will.
The phrase 'streaming television' just seems wrong.
> To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.
I know plenty of people that don't have a smartphone, but have a 4G / LTE 'feature' phone. There's no stigma there - it's down to a combination of cost, functionality, and signal range.
The suggestion implies there's a clear downside - an evil, perhaps - to using a cellphone or any of Google's services (naturally conflating the two is not useful).