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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I think people here are too young to remember the tech industry in 2012. None of the images and ideas conveyed in this book (printing press, cave art, fall of the Berlin wall, Arab Spring, particle accelerators) were outlandish for the time and space it was printed in. Tech was all about optimism and idealism. Everyone in silicon valley knew they were changing the world for the better, and tech was the missing piece all along. Silly people would finally all stop fighting and get along now that they had Facebook and Twitter and iPhones.

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I think this is the reason why I feel so much nostalgia for the sort of 2012-era vectorflourish sort of aesthetic. Look at the first Google image result for "Zune" for an example[1]. Gradient-type stenciling with references to the organic world and a sort of optimism implied overall (the same sort that proponents of Frutiger Aero talk about but this is not quite the same thing, I think it's somewhat flatter but not ultra-flat like everything is now).

This aesthetic represents to me the dead tech-optimist future we were promised but never got. It's a "ghost future." Mark Fisher had a lot of interesting writing about this phenomenon as applied to music, termed hauntology[2]. It's about how some genres/labels of music (like Ghost Box) were characterized as a misremembered past that was perceived as more rosy than in reality.

I suspect but cannot be certain that "vectorflourish" aesthetics like those and/or simple but not condescendingly dumbed-down ones like Bootstrap 1.0 will experience a resurgence in the coming decade, the same as the "Windows XP" aesthetic of ten years prior had a while ago, in the name of reclaiming such a lost future. With today's CSS I imagine it would be much easier to recreate such an aesthetic than in the past when mostly you had to use Photoshop to create all the raster assets.

[1] https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61hOqru2AWS.jpg

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology?wprov=sfla1

This site is from that era, a bunch of posters on this thread are registered from then or before.

There was plenty of cynicism in tech back then too, plenty of posters who always complained about 'micro$oft'. How Oracle had been corrupted, etc.

What seems to be different now is that the optimism hype fades quicker. Back then Google kept it going for years. Recently things like Tesla and OpenAI the optimism gave way to the harsh reality of greed a lot quicker.

There was plenty of cynicism in tech back then too, plenty of posters who always complained about 'micro$oft'.

I think the anti-Microsoft sentiment (outside of some internet forums, and justified IE6 hate) had been dialled back by the early 2010s.

.NET was a thing, they were post-Gates, post-antitrust, making significant efforts at developer outreach. Windows 7 was a hit.

Despite working in the Microsoft ecosystem, I didn't feel trapped, and the walled garden was coming down, with awareness of non-Microsoft technologies being widespread.

There was always a next wave, a new movement to embody ideals. I’m not sure what the fresh utopia is these days.

But except for the Arab Spring of 2011 none of these events had anything whatsoever to do with social media. It is just absurd to see Facebook try to associate themselves with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It reminds me of the 1990s ad campaign Apple used to have about "thinking different" featuring people like Einstein, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi, none of whom obviously used Apple's products.

"But except for the Arab Spring of 2011 none of these events had anything whatsoever to do with social media"

There is an argument I saw made in a documentary that the Arab Spring also had nothing to do with social media.

I watched the arab spring from online, and I am certain that tech companies were actively involved in fomenting the various rebellions. Unfortunately, evidence has been lost to censorship overtime. The internet is much more malleable than people want to believe

Why does it matter to you?

Unless you received assurances otherwise, trying different things every week seems like the default expectation for a big company.

Do not social media cause the Rohingya genocide?

LOL. Bill Burr on Conan discussing Steve Jobs self promoting: "Jesus, Ghandi, me."

You're likely too young to remember anything much before 2012. Honestly, this stuff has been around for 50 years. Go watch a video about Steve Jobs at NeXT from the 1980s.

True, but for me, the techno-optimism started with Google. I was a young kid back then, but the idea to catalog all of the world's information under a search engine (that worked) sounded wild to me at the time.

> True, but for me, the techno-optimism started with Google. I was a young kid back then...

But for me, the world started with my youth. I was a young kid back then...

For me it started with AltaVista.

For me it started with a 1200 baud modem connected to my Apple IIe.

For me it started with signing up for Match.com for free in 1995 because I was one of the first 10,000 users.

Seriously, it was probably Usenet that kept me engaged. The web was exciting to browse but the conversation was on Usenet.

I was early to Match as well. When I first started, there were a total of 8 women in the entire Bay Area. I kept that free account for years and eventually found my (now ex-)wife through the site.

People thought the invention of the telegraph was going to bring about world peace.

The thing we find out is: when we connect people it doesn’t mean they will get along. See Europeans and Native American Indians.

See Catholics and Protestant See Muslim and Jews

No form of communication would have stopped the racism, inabilities to see other cultures and work together

People suck. Connecting them doesn’t result in utopia

There’s a fair case to be made that it delivered on that, the thesis that increasing connectedness diminished violence over time

David F. Noble's "The Religion of Technology" is a quite good read to see how we arrived at this from monastic origins.

There are some points in the book that after reading became extremely obvious, like the belief that technology can (and will) overcome human limitations, restoring us to a perfect/divine state; that technological progress is the path to transcend physical and moral limits (all of which we see in the techno-optimism of the tech industry).

It's been around forever, we are just seeing a new dress up of it with the information age, the way tech "leaders" speak has been mocked to no end in Silicon Valley because of how insufferably close to religion all of this is...

Lucky Strike thought putting a smooth and refined cigarette in everyones hand was going to bring about world peace.

You mean, the marketing was all about that.

Even non-technology companies stole a bunch of marketing buzzwords from this era that are still in use today.

I think the movie The Social Network was responsible for bringing this into the public consciousness, and constructing it to some extent. It kind of framed the discussion about the software industry for at least a decade.

Feels like we watched different movies.

I think that’s maybe reversed. The Social Network was telling a narrative through a contemporary lens, and part of the reason it became a phenomenon was because it hit on something people were already feeling. It may have helped a lot of people better articulate their own unease. I know I had already identified the anxieties in myself, and started discussing the potential negative impacts to social cohesion and political polarization, as these things were already fairly stark to anyone who was interested in exploring them. Although, I am not a CS grad, but rather Media Studies, so I had been primed to look for unrest and fraying of social fabric as a result of the communications revolution of the internet, just generally. So maybe mine isn’t the best benchmark perspective on this after all?

HN before 2012 was way different back then too.

Most of us felt exactly the same way about it then that we do now. The only difference is that fewer people take that cringy utopianism seriously now.

Is that based on any sort of actual data or are you just going off the scientifically supported totally unbiased data collection method known as ~:/vibes/:~ ?

I imagine the future looked pretty bleak during world war I, and then again during II, and maybe something else during the civil rights movement, or there was also the cold war. Cynics and optimists have existed since there was something to have feelings about. what's different about today to say that the cynics outweigh the optimists, in a way they never could in the past before?

Of course it's vibes. How would you even get data on that? But just going through life, most of the people you meet now, or met then, are not silicon-valley idealists. Maybe they were if you lived in Silicon Valley? Living elsewhere, everyone I ever knew rolled their eyes at it, and maybe transparently parroted it for the money if their job required it.

But every once in a while you came across a person who seemed to genuinely believe the corporate kool-aid they were saying, usually working at Facebook or Microsoft. These people are horrifying: completely manipulated, willing to not only say but believe whatever it took to, basically keep earning their money. I have no doubt that if the winds in America turned towards some kind of communisty cult-of-personality thing they would be first in line: a true believer of anything that it's convenient to believe in.

(and I'm thinking of the USSR-type of cult here, the type described in Milan Kundera novels here. Trumpism is rather different.)

I agree if by "cringey utipianism" you mean the carefully formulated messages CEOs pass on to their employees (especially businesses where the user is the product)

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