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Comment by luddite99 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah the 80s are definitely outside of my frame of reference, growing up in the 90s alongside the growth of household computers and the internet, living with technology has been the baseline for me. It's interesting to hear the experience of those who grew up on the other side of that divide and have an insight into both of those worlds.

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Maybe I'm an outlier but I'm old enough, and I think the phone/screen thing is a fad. The moment more natural peripherals become usable the screen will go the way of the landline. (I mean things like AR in your contact lenses, input through gesture and dance via "wearable" sensors, holographic sound, and so on.)

I think you're also going to get colonies of non-tech people. (The Amish are among the best farmers in the world and have large families. They are the meek who will inherit the world, eh?) There may arise small towns and enclaves that are retro-tech as a way of life.

I’ve had the same thoughts about societies like that forming. It seems inevitable once brain-machine interfaces become available to the general public.

Even during most of the 90s, you had computers but not always with real connectivity on either laptops or phones. Thus, while I definitely was around and used computers in the 90s, they weren't omnipresent and connectivity was pretty much of the tethered sort.

Thus I did unplug during that period for several month-long trips to Asia but the baseline level of connectivity/online information/ubiquity/social media/etc. was much less than in the 2000s (especially the latter part of the decade).

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