The Downward Spiral of Technology
creativedestruction.club
creativedestruction.club
Decades tend to smear forward a bit, I think. I wonder if people are remembering, like, 200X-201X internet when they think of the 90’s? Google was really good before SEO fully figured it out (or maybe somebody really good at SEO in 200X was actually probably clever enough that you wanted to go to their site anyway).
Those curated lists are looking better and better.
I think it's more complicated that "easier is better" assumption. The 90s internet may have been better precisely because things were hard to find, for instance.
It's kind of like a lot of technology, by solving one "problem" it makes worse ones. People might have complained about needing to walk everywhere before cars were invented, but once they got cars they stopped walking and started getting fat.
There's probably a sweet spot where both "less solution" and "more solution" are in fact worse.
I guess I could also make a 2020s content site, full of ads and signup clickthroughs, but I don't want to.
Movies made this transition around the 1940s. It went from "if you could put on a play, you could rent some cameras and lights and make a popular movie" to "you need a 9-digit production budget and 3 years."
I salute indie video game developers, who continue to resist this trend, making good 6-digit titles that are often more enjoyable than 9-digit titles.
The golden age has wide open frontiers, low barriers to entry, and low hanging fruit.
The silver age is more closed off but also achieves greater sophistication.
If there isn't, maybe you could make some sort of website to explain...
The 90's internet was sort of like pawing through the piles of records at a thrift store. When you found something amazing, it felt really, really good.
I rarely have those moments these days, but the sweet spot definitely felt like 2000-2010. Facebook was a great way to keep up with people and didn't have too many ads. There was enough "old, weird internet" going on.
I think "easier is better" is flawed for a slightly different reason -- the early personal computing era and the early internet had a lot of creativity and a lot of people doing things on their own terms precisely because getting there required a learning curve.
Once you learn how a fundamental technology works, you can adapt it, modify it, put it to your purposes, and truly own it in ways that open a world of possibility to you that go far beyond whatever short-term use cases the original designers had in mind.
There's a reason why so many people doing interesting things with tech today are the ones who learned BASIC on their C64s or wrote HTML by hand to create their first GeoCities websites. People who got into technology when you had to read the manual tend to grok tech in a way that those who started off with overpolished consumer-appliances don't get exposed to without going to great lengths to deliberately seek it out.
I think "peak web" was somewhere around 2010 to 2012 and even as late as 2015. I'm still able to mostly put together a fairly useful and minimally annoying daily experience but it does require increasingly more work to sustain. This includes finding, integrating, and, in some cases, writing userscripts and browser add-ons to variously fix and/or de-crapify the web. uBlock Origin (with lots of my own filter rules to hide various crap elements) is just the beginning. Just checking my Firefox ViolentMonkey and Stylus scripts, there are now four scripts just to fix Google (along with a layered set of my own regex-scripted redirects in the Redirector add-on which manipulate Google Search's URL parameters fix a bunch of things and enforce useful defaults).
* YouTube: The AdashimaaTube Stylus script makes YT usable and useful again (has >700k users)
* Reddit: OldReddit plus the essential Reddit Enhancement Suite along with defaulting the homepage to a carefully curated MultiReddit list of small, special-interest niche subs.
* For the rest of the web I have about 30 add-ons in Firefox (and that's after recently culling my add-on list down to what I consider the bare essentials). About a third of them fix things related to websites, a third address issues with Firefox itself, and a third add features to Firefox or specific sites (Amazon: (item price history, fix default sort), Steam Store: comparative pricing, Twitter: fix Twitter layout & defaults, Netflix: add Metacritic, IMDB and Rotten Tom. review scores, etc).
* Although it remains the 'least-bad' browser for user choice, privacy and personalization, the current product management of Firefox seems intent on destroying even this last refuge. I can't even use FF without the amazing Lepton userchrome that extensively fixes all the insane things FF's run-amuck designers keep doing to fuck up its interface. Essential: https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix. On top of that I have my own extensive fixes, adaptations and personalizations in UserChrome.css and User.JS. Lepton and my own scripts require an emergency intervention to maintain at least once every three months because they keep getting broken by new Firefox versions. Just the maintenance is getting bad enough that I'm about to switch to the latest long-term version of FF. Frankly, the changes, improvements and 'modernizations' FF has been making the last couple years seem about 90/10 irrelevant/useful. The community at FirefoxCSS is a godsend for crowd-sourcing how to keep fixing, patching and maintaining UserChrome (www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/).
* Lastly, since we're talking about tech overall, it's the same clusterfuck on Windows 10 and Android. Yes, I know Linux is better in many ways but it's a personal preference thing for me. Unlike the other non-linux option, Mac/iOS, at least Windows can still be variously "fixed" and otherwise made usable with sufficient effort and diligent hackery. Tools like Ditto (a sharable macro + multi-clipboard), 7TT, Start10, Groupy, AutoHideMouseCursor, Textify, AlwaysMouseWheel, ShareX, PowerToys, WinAeroTweaker, WinGetUI, a dozen free utility apps from NirSoft and the absolutely essential "Everything" (an incredible, lightning fast whole-system search). Together, these along with an extensive personal AHK script and a few dozen registry customizations (which I now have scripted for new installs) allow Windows 10 to be pretty okay. (Note: I'm not forgetting all the similar work I've had to do to hack, fix, de-ad-ify and de-crapify my television, Android-ish streaming sticks and nearly everything else marketed with the word "Smart". I'm just too tired to enumerate all of that too.)
Obviously, this amount of literal per-user work being required to actually experience a reasonable form of the "Better Future" we thought we were building is ridiculous. My whole life I've always believed in the ability of technology to broadly improve our lives. While this belief has proven (mostly) true, I never imagined we'd have to endure these kinds of trivial yet maddening functionality and usability regressions in routine daily activities. It's like a malevolent fairy tale genii granted our wishes for useful AI and routine spaceflight yet perversely doomed us to walk around with sandpaper in our underwear! Maybe I'm too idealistic but I just refuse to give-in, give-up and accept that our technological future is destined to be worse than the past - especially in such mundane ways - and for such trivially stupid reasons.
I've largely curated my own UBO rules/handful of TamperMonkey scripts over the years; seems you've gone above and beyond. Sounds like an admirable effort.
LAMP servers were heralded as the best thing since sliced bread because of how it all just "worked."
And then add in maintenance and all the other sucky sucks of having competing binaries screw everything up.
Now, when it worked, it felt more accomplished than spinning up a `docker run...` or `argocd app create...`
However, I enjoy doing the cool shit on top of this stack now rather than waste my life figuring out why my apache process can't properly invoke php code.
I never found myself able to waste time on these sort of projects, because all of the time I spent on them invariably turned out to be a fruitful investment instead.
However, there was definitely a distinct 1990s Internet, and I remember using it in the actual 1990s. A big part of it was just the newness of the whole thing. That was still happening in like 2001 and 2002, but by the middle of the 2000s the Internet was not new anymore and large numbers of people had home broadband.
I opted for my wisdom teeth to be taken out with local and don't regret it. The worst part is the recovery anyway, not the 20 minutes in the chair.
They also used to take impressions at the dentist where they'd fill your mouth with some kind of goop in trays. Now they have cameras they can just move around your mouth and it stitches a model together.
(I am guessing that if you have 10 root canals, you've gotten the short end of the stick genetically or through childhood.)
Cosmetic treatments like Invisalign use (really cool!) 3d mapping techniques to create a treatment plan and track progress.
Fluoride treatments are now more effective (the brush on fluoride vs the tray that you's soak your teeth in for a few minutes).
The most important part is what the handheld ones are used through the procedure so the doc can see and correct their action in the process and you don't even need to get up.
Electronic health records
Cordless instruments save pain for the hygienist / dentist and angst of moving around a cord
Cavitrons reduce hygiene pain and do a better job of removing calculus
Invisiline gives a significant part of the population an option of not having metal mouth
Then there's better techniques, materials and various other things. Dental offices have changed quite a bit in the last 25 years.
All that's changed is that the screen glass has gotten worse.
Also, I checked a few months ago and as far as I can tell it isn't possible any longer to get a Thinkpad T series with a 4K monitor. edit: Though they seem to have fixed that at least.
* If going by the article, price has decreased from €130 to €95, a significant reduction even if not accounting for inflation.
* RAM has doubled from 2GB to 4GB.
* Per-core CPU performance has presumably increased considerably.
- GSM price check is extremely random and can basically be ignored. Afaict, the price is stable with inflation.
- Agree on RAM. Still, a doubling over seven years is not exactly Moore pace anymore.
- Checking on cpubenchmark.com, A53 vs A55 is like a 20% increase. The A75 is admittedly a nice step up.
RAM has been slowing down a lot in the last ~10 years.
I had 16GB ram in my ThinkPad X220 ten years ago and the W520 could already get 32GB ram. Laptops with 128GB ram have been around for at least five years (workstation-class laptop).
Why are computers still being shipped with 8GB ram (or less)?
Why is 32GB a premium and not the bare minimum? A whole class of performance issues could be entirely avoided just by having enough ram.
Yeah, throw more hardware at it!
But some software is largely unfixable (I’m thinking of mainstream software like windows and software commonly used) and more hardware is one of the least executed solutions actually
Honestly, that's actually a bit of an issue somehow. I kind of want to recommend something I've seen and thought was cool, yet the ad spam has gotten so bad lately everywhere, it now reeks of recommend-a-bot's constantly. Which is at least vaguely in theme with the article.
Also, CPU’s are eking out wins by doing more and more complicated things like speculative execution and out-of-order execution, which makes it harder and harder for the programmer at a high level to reason about performance and actually write software that gets the most out of the hardware.
Add in the fact that software is tending to get more and more bloated without equal energy being invested in making it more performant…
My argument is that major performance improvements are only hard-won these days by really dedicated developers because we’re getting diminishing returns from hardware and it’s harder than ever to write performant software.
I have a thing where I wait to upgrade my workstation until performance of newer hardware has 2x'ed on most workloads. I had to wait quite long this time. My trusty 1080 Ti was not 2x'ed until fairly recently, and that came at a hefty price and much increased power draw. It feels like a lot of low hanging fruits have already been picked.
But PC was where the games and frantic hardware progress happened (3D accelerators! Doom! Quake!), even if the 'productivity software' which ran on that hardware mostly sucked (every UI application was siloed away instead of cooperating - which unfortunately hasn't changed much).
All my computers run Linux now, so only the hardware gains are salient. :p
Phone size is another one. I get it, people want their phone to be their only device, and that makes them want a big screen to do more stuff... but for me, a phone should be sized to a human hand. If I can't do everything with one hand, or they need to add software features to compensate for the size of the hardware, it's a failure. I do wonder how much price comes into play. If someone is only going to have one device, because that's all they can afford, it's going to be a phone.
In both of these cases, the technology seems to forget about the humans that need to use these things.
From a repairably point of view, older devices are easier to understand and built to be repairable, where modern devices are cheap and complex (or proprietary), which leads to more waste. This can also be considered worse. That complexity can make for a better product during its serviceable life, but that life may be much shorter. So we have to weigh the improvement of the product against the cost of replacement. Not only the cost in terms of money, but also cost in terms of the environmental impact.
Sometimes it is worth taking a step back to make sure we are taking a thoughtful approach to technology and improvement, to make sure it makes sense and we're not just doing it because we can. I think some people, especially in silicon valley, forget how normal people live and are too wrapped up in technology for technology's sake.
A lot of the things people are making now are being driven by young people. Young people have an ignorance about the past, so miss some of the lessons, but they also lack the cynicism which prevents revisiting things that people have determined "don't work" in the past.
I generally see tech as a large ecosystem which is in fact progressively improving, with minor setbacks that often do echo the same setbacks in the past. The error is to pattern match too strongly on these setback patterns as though they contain some kind of timeless wisdom. If there's any industry where past performance isn't indicative of future results, it's technology. (Which is and of itself, is a process of knowledge discovery at its core.) My general approach to thinking about this is I grow older is to guard against the kind of cynicism I see in so many of my peers. Yes, it means I will be wrong on things where the cynic turns out to be right. But given the pull of cynicism, I suspect more likely I will remain cynical in many places I shouldn't be anyway, so I'd rather focus on being right in the places where the cynic is wrong by forcing myself to remain optimistic and give the young the benefit of the doubt.
This also has the added benefit of making the process of working on things more fun in general - not just because it leads to actually making stuff (cynicism demotivates this) and it also leads to being surrounded by peers who are optimistic and interested in continuing to make stuff (being surrounded by cynics is generally miserable, and breeds cynicism.) A few years ago, I found myself in a broad peer group of technologists who were deep into the abyss of cynicism, and made a conscious decision to just sever myself from these networks because this kind of negativity was becoming my dominant mode of thinking about technology. I've done some of my best work since then and much of it has probably come about due to the fact that I dove into it due to the counterfactual level of optimism I had due to this one decision.
We feel the same today as they felt then. We just have better toys and different problems. Some problems might be more existential (e.g. climate change), but day-to-day is it so different? In material terms yes, in personal terms not so much.
The human condition is far slower to change than the world it inhabits.
30-40 years ago it was worse given the real possibility of nuclear war.
Old people romanticize the past.
Young people romanticize the future.
Does not seem to be the zeitgeist of online discourse (presumably, in places that a sufficiently representative portion of young people express thoughts).
I have the impression that young people currently are much more pessimistic about the future than the 'old-fart-me' ever was (except for that time in the 80's when an all out nuclear war just seemed right around the corner for a while).
Indeed, much of the progress in technology today is coming from revisiting stuff that didn't work out in the past but has since become viable (much of modern ML, for example).
Conversely, it seems like the actually novel stuff coming out today "doesn't work" out-of-the-box at a much higher rate than when new stuff was introduced in past decades. I'm seeing pervasive problems with new technology for use cases that "just worked" consistently with the incumbent tech right from the outset in the '90s or earlier.
There has been some progress in consumerizing interfaces, but this has been accompanied by drastic regression in functional consistency and long-term reliability under the hood. And while UIs that only expose designers' preconceived use cases might be a bit more straightforward for end-users, accessibility to the underlying functionality of technology as technology has vastly regressed.
It feels like Sturgeon's law has gone from 90% to 99% over the past 10-15 years or so.
The post is chock full of good supporting arguments of the decline — loaded with links to other posts that reinforce the same notion.
I sometimes wonder if I'm just getting old, perhaps becoming a Luddite, and I just am unable to get it. But then a post like this comes along and reaffirms what I already knew.
If it "rings true" for you it's because we're feeling it.
I suppose there's a cynical question to follow up: was tech ever about tech? If so, when/how did that change? If not, how did the public get fooled for so long?
Its not that you're a luddite - its simply that the internet went from an exuberant, wild representation of reality, to a constrained, extractive. corporate 'shop front'. All facilitated by government, which likes the data corporations provide it. And on luddites, apparently they liked tech (as do I) if it were to help them but objected to knowledge extraction and exploitative labour policies that became known the industrial revolution. There are distinct similarities to AI.
I'm sure we'll keep using the internet, but its gone from a place where real value can be found, to some corporate crap. Its equivalent to me, to walking through (pre-Amazon) busy shopping centers as a youth - something you have to do rather than because of the joy you will find there. Its a simulation of the human experience.
And this is fine. IMO the real deal has always been one's own lived experience. This is where the value is. The question has always been how to maximise that, even if we were distracted and entertained for a while.
- the future-that-is, and
- the future-that-could-have-been, or the future they imagined based on their collective experience as a younger person.
Computers completely shifted the potential of the future past the realm of imagination. I was born in the late 80s, and watched the trajectory of technology with anticipation. My father, a programmer, was heavily into technology - and he could not imagine what I imagined. He couldn't imagine basic things in the 90s, like widely available terabyte hard drives in the future, or what they would be used for. I knew they were coming, because quality video files were just too large. When PDAs came out, I patiently waited years for a version with mobile internet (smartphones). These are the things I thought were "obvious" progressions, and they happened.
But I also imagined that technology would work as a system. It doesn't. Everything is fractured and isolated.
In the past there was always a larger, younger generation coming up that would have enough people to make things better even if locally things got worse.
But that's not true anymore. We're already seeing this in places, such as the loss in expertise in certain areas such as nuclear powerplant design, diminished ability to cost-effectively build public works projects, the looming problem of skills shortage for all of these "near-shored" industries, and the inability to keep up with housing demand because there simply aren't enough people in the construction industry.
I didn't agree with some of the examples in the article, but I do think it's true that the declining population that's coming will lead to a lot of orphaned infrastructure and lost know-how.
So if in the past a normal year would have a 20% population increase from births and 15% decline from deaths, totalling a 5% increase, today you'll maybe have a 10% increase from births and 10% decline from deaths, which looks like a standstill, but is actually a -50% decline.
We've invented entire tech-based industries while old ones are fading away. It's not clear that it's actually a decline, especially since the economy has shown steady exponential growth over the past couple of centuries.
I'm curious what the specs of the old and new desktop computer were, and how many years old the old one was.
I upgraded my desktop PC after 5 years, from a decent Core i7 CPU of back then to a Zen 4 based CPU now, and it's 3x faster for single threaded things (if I measure walltime of things like javascript minification), and has 2x more cores/threads on top of that.
Maybe they mean the OS feels slower or something instead? Or made a very uninformed buying decision.
Once the connection was made (networked) all else unfolded because of now (digital space). What replaced much of the 'connected world' before the internet remained - telephones, newspapers, photography, wires, etc. The advantage over all else wasn't just connectivity; it was a reduction in the time allotted in transmitting that information.
From there we realized that we created access to the non-material world whilst remaining firmly planted in reality - transferring much of that material connection into digital connection.
What followed isn't fundamentally abstract at all - 1975-1985, '85-'95, '95-'03, '03-'09, '09-'17 and our current period, are all iterations of the same technology being recreated in faster, larger, more accessible ways.
However, we humans haven't changed. We haven't evolved in the same time line that technology has. Not that we could or should, but rather we're evolving at a much slower rate that we push technology and in my humble opinion exacerbates the rigid dualities of life changing technologies.
We must embrace new ideology in our philosophic approach to technology if we intend to mature new technologies as part of our own evolution.
That is, if we truly care about how technology like the internet can and has changed human life.
It's hard for me to take grumbles like this seriously when I've heard the same thing so many times before. Back in the "good old days", there were plenty of loud people complaining how bad it was compared to times before.
I personally think that although it is a lot more commercialized, the Internet is way better now.
They should talk to more people outside of their bubble, especially in developing countries. Just about everything around tech has improved incomparably over last 15 or so years.
Take health care for example. Cataract surgery is literally a 15 minute out orient procedure thanks to terrific laser surgery. Who would have imagined that something as complex as that could be achieved in our lifetime? I picked just one example, I’m sure there are many many more.
Don't idolize past successful business people... they are the same in every generation.
Don't confuse good communities that you may or may not have been part of in the past with the technologies they used. You can find awesome people in a facebook group or a discord channel today, and you most definitely could have found nice or awful people in a builtin board way back when.
If something is shit don't use it. If apple or google are shit don't use them. Google killed Yahoo because it became shit, the next search engine will kill google because it became shit and so on.
I always saw it manifest as another version of RTFM. Meaning stop being lazy/do your own work.
It's no longer true - we don't have that tool. We have the ghost of that tool overrun by advertisers and other scumbags, which rarely answers the question correctly, and almost never at a depth beyond what can be surmised merely by observing enough to ask the question.
And also offers an interesting parallel to RTFM: when was the last time you got a decent manual with a product?
but when talking about what i consider legit products: 1. The difference may make something improved to one person but worse for someone else - i find most times the older os's faster with windows and android. part of that reason is the include graphical transitions and animations when doing things. turning them off makes them feel fast like the older versions. there are more features, hardware support, ect one person may dislike not need those new features or animations but most do like them 2. Adapting to changing circumstances - When google started out no body knew or maybe even had a strong reason to manipulate google results. Google itself might be significantly better but the internet and people using it has changed its not the Tech that degraded its the people using and manipulating it creating new challenges that were never faced before. 3. In the past it may have worked better for you but now it is more sustainable/better for everyone - in a extreme example during the dot com boom i could make money ($20-$30) just by having a ad bar at the bottom of my screen for a few hours a day(even when i wasnt on it). But the only way it worked was because a bunch of idiot investors were loosing a ton of money. Has advertising got worse? to me sure but in reality they just went to a reasonable business model as much as i would prefer to get paid good money for having ad's on my screen.
All that being said are there companies who make tech worse just for greed and profit absolutely, but its not a black and white situation and there is a lot more factors than people usually realize.
one of my "it got worse" but not really experiences is with phones when phones were analog for my normal use case of making local phone calls when there were just land lines calls, were always clear no latency issues and extremely rarely had issues. now with digital and voip there can be delay's and choppiness and audio cutting in and out and really low quality audio and i sometimes complain about how it used to just work. but really i can now call anywhere in the world for free, have cheap and easy to setup phones with amazing features not depend on one phone company and can easily switch between. so ya in the most common calling situation its worse but overall its so so much better.
What’s on my desk at work? A polycom integrated with zoom. It’s absolutely awful. It lags. The quality is terrible. The interface is bad. Why isn’t there a landline in my desk at work? Well, because the technology improved.
>"It’s been a minute since we’ve seen anything new from tech that has truly improved most people’s existence."
That's not much to do with the tech getting worse and everything to do with how the tech is being applied.
Search sucks! Why? The focus is on profit. Someone connected a thermometer and found that the users are basically stupid, so why bother anything that requires effort.
Amazon bad, bad, bad. But nothing to do with bad tech, it's all in how it's being applied.
Yes, he does make the same point, even to profit being the driver. But the overriding message here is tech is shit, and that's not so. People are.
Like the idea of 'useful' tools for 'useless' people.
It is little bit more nuanced than just greed is making things crappy.
Edit: Very good article, though. There are some core assumptions that are part of the belief system of many people (especially technology enthusiasts and software engineers) that need a serious rethink, because they're just not true (or more insidiously, just not true anymore).
This is why the free software movement failed and why the fediverse will obviously fail.
- Social networks
- Hardware
- Internet UI portals*
That are cannot be abused by corporations.
* The web is rotten to the core. No amount of regulation or activism can fix it at this point. We need something else.
Almost no one besides a small group of fanatics. Used free software.
Why isn't there a smartphone that Richard Stallman can use?
The reason is because no one built such a phone. People where instead complaining about it.
But no one actually thought of a real solution. Besides the fanatical "throw away your phone" that is very impractical for most people today.
> The reason is because no one built such a phone. People where instead complaining about it.
Librem and PinePhone exist as Linux phones, then there is GrapheneOS if you want to stay with Android. You can install spyware on it yes, but you don't have to. These are not things you just create over a weekend so there are rough edges yes, but they exist.
The problem you're describing is more about demand. Since it is niche corporations are still stuck in the old ways. For example I can't ID myself online without Google Play Services and it disgusts me, government institutions need to get better at supporting a bigger eco-system.
People don't care enough to jump through hoops, but that doesn't mean that the solutions don't exist or aren't being worked on.
These are very lazy solutions to the problems technology has today. We need a complete overhaul. Rewrite Operating Systems that satisfy these agendas.
There are very many people that care. They just don't have good solutions yet.
Elaborate please, you can install any distribution you want on the Linux solutions. Have you used one? What are your gripes exactly? Would Stallman (your example) have the same?
They are completely fine for my use except banking/identifying myself online. I can use web for banks but not for the 2FA solutions banks in my country use. Graphene however can if I turn on a Google profile. It's not perfect but it works.
It's not just the about having Linux.
There are all kinds of problems around. But here are my main concerns.
- The lack of an easy way to know what all programs on your phone are exactly doing;
- Sensible application permissions. (I just want to share 1 photo but somehow the application has access to my entire disk/folder?)
Projects like Grapheme seem to just lock down the software completely and make it unusable for all kinds of use cases
> - The lack of an easy way to know what all programs on your phone are exactly doing;
> - Sensible application permissions. (I just want to share 1 photo but somehow the application has access to my entire disk/folder?)
Yet when Graphene (and Flatpak etc) locks everything down and makes dangerous permissions opt-in it's also a problem:
> Projects like Grapheme seem to just lock down the software completely and make it unusable for all kinds of use cases
If you want per file permissions that can also be implemented with tools that exist today. For the photo example I usually just copy the image rather than uploading from disk, clipboard access however is another security issue.
What would a solution you can accept look like? I agree a fresh OS would be nice but there are solutions to every problem you mention. Even old hardware without binaries are possible for the truly paranoid. It's not perfect but you have to be pragmatic.
I think I've made my point that free software didn't really fail. Is it perfect? Absolutely not, but neither was electricity in the 1800s or even today. Did electricity fail?
Yes it didn't fail completely. (It was exaggerating to some point)
The solutions do exist. But they are scattered & un-integrated into a well oiled out of the box solution that are accessible.
What I am just saying is that we need an intellectual cross breed between Steve Jobs & Stallman.
That will know how to marry the principles of free software with general consumer satisfaction (UX et al).
The free software movement does have some achievements.
I would however call it a success if it it was used by the majority as a default and not just a small group of fanatics.
Don't call us fanatics, we're the early adopters shaping the UX you're too busy complaining about to help improve. :)
As opposed to you, right? :)
The SIM card that requires remote downloadable and executable code to run on the phone is a non-removable surveillance risk of any mobile phone. If you separate the phone part form the tablet part, then the phone will need 2 CPUs with 2 OSs and double the power use, double the battery, almost double the size.
Then, there is automated surveillance from the cell towers and data nodes (MITM, listening, speech recognition, auto-transcription, keyword analysis, etc.).
Not just phones.
It's very doable. It's just that no one is interested.
Did it though? I see people caring more and more about privacy, and eventually it might even be mainstream. Big tech is becoming so awful that even casual users are noticing and asking questions, and we now have laws to give users freedom and protection.
Give it time, electricity was still scarce once. You wouldn't say it failed back then.
Everything I use is free software. It didn't fail, it delivers exactly what was promised.