Digital Reality, Digital Shock: Growing Up at the Dawn of Cyberspace
chrbutler.com
chrbutler.com
I distinctly remember watching X-Files in the 90s and thinking this is the first TV show where everyone is assumed to have a cell phone. Moreover, the phone nearly always works! When one of the characters goes wandering into some dark spooky forest in British Columbia, it doesn’t mean they’re going to get their own episode or suffer a mysterious death, they just pop open their phone and call their partner. Suddenly every existing story where phone calls can only be received at fixed locations seems as old as Sherlock Holmes sending a wire by messenger. And nowadays you have to explicitly signal danger by having the character pull out their phone and see NO SIGNAL.
The second season of Severance has a scene where a character leaves his apartment to make a call at a phone booth down the street. In 1980 this would have just signaled that he wanted to make an anonymous call. In 2025 it is alarming. What is this world he’s in where there are still phone booths? Is a shot with the character framed alone, lit by the harsh light of a phone booth at night, a deliberate reference to The Matrix?
What story elements will kids today take for granted? It’s still kind of trendy in stories to show a crowd making videos of something on their phones and causing a ruckus on social media. Maybe ubiquitous video will seem to them like cell phones seemed to us.
Phones go from landlines, to cordless, to flip phones, to smartphones
And at some point they get to stop re-explaining what a computer is/does every time they use one in a case.
It just reminds me once again that high tech has short horizons. If you found a functional example of a 1980s or 90s cell phone, there are no networks for it to use. That nifty, futuristic StarTAC is a guaranteed brick today unless it was a GSM model (and you'd better hope someone still supports 2G on its supported bands, and that you can find a battery for it).
I’m just glad Java applets died.
Phone books would be a definite regression though. I don't want to physically leaf through five pages of AAAlberts and Aarons to find the plumber.
I do still use my local yellow pages every now and then because local tradespeople are terrible about advertising on the internet in general and I don't have many neighbors. But word of mouth is better when you can. The general contractor who will hopefully do a big job for me after a fire is a reference from a local electrician who helped get my power turned back on who was a reference from the deputy fire chief.
That said, while I'm glad to know what pre-internet felt like, no way would I want to go back to that.
Among the things that define my life (partner, travel, education, work, hobbies) almost all have been only been possible because of the Internet.
- Staying up late with a cassette recorder to record Basicode [1] programs broadcast after-hours on BBC radio, to run on my Vic 20. Somewhere out there was where this stuff was coming from.
- Ten minutes on a Prestel [2] terminal at a university science fair in 1984ish. It blew my mind that the thing on the screen wasn't just in the box on the table, and it was coming to me on wires.
- Downloading public domain software onto floppies from the PDSA archive at Lancaster Uni using Kermit on an Apollo DN300 and an X25 PAD to access JANET [3].
- Reading Omni magazine, which sometimes felt like plugging your brain into a consensual hallucination.
- Later on reading imported copies of Wired and Mondo 2000, which was like having a mental VPN into some other place where the tech lived and where it was always California sunshine.
Good times
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE
I went to revisit it a few months later, and found that an OpenOffice/LibreOffice bug had blanked the entire document.
(The essay was inspired by watching an Otaking animation of two anime characters dancing in an arcade to the RoboCop 3 main theme, on repeat. (Said animation has also been erased from existence.) Sent me down an empathetic rabbit hole of trying to understand what it felt like to live during that period.)
I still know the cache sizes, clock speeds, instruction latencies and sometimes even hex opcodes etc for every CPU/GPU along the way, and I don't think we'll see such a wild ride again (hard to go double-exponential). Truly privileged to have been born at that exact time, and in the "West" (well, South Africa... so -5 years compared to the American/European experience).
Pretty sure this is just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts, i.e. being lied to or deceived
The web: the Commercial Commons. True dystopia.
Another example: Apple forgot about selling bicycles for the mind. They sell media kiosks now.
Not trying to pick on them in particular, but that was a vivid realization when I got the Vision Pro. I love it as a Mac upgrade. It should be a total independent Mac replacement. The new work horse high end. It says "Pro"! Give me 2x, 4x, 8x more computing power, no sandbox, and more system level creative/customization power. Raise the price!
I want to see my data. See serious math. Move through my files as a visual navigatable graph. Surround myself with my tools for every project. Then save that context. Contexts saved for dozens of projects, small or large, important or rabbit hole, that I can drop and pick up exactly where I left off. Tomorrow, next year, never, or after I die and the investigators are trying to figure out the secrets I was working on, why I was assassinated. You know - things the hackers would have done in Neuromancer!
Instead, the Apple Store people couldn't stop telling me about a cool app for looking at the stars. Neat! But I don't want lots of "cool" $2.99 throw away apps.
I want VR for the mind.
Instead, it's just a nice enormous Mac screen upgrade, which lets me sit in bed working and Hacker Newsing, ignoring the kiosk that gets Tim Cook up in the morning.
And yet, the author says:
"The timing was uncanny. The Matrix arrived amid a perfect storm of millennial anxiety: Y2K fears about computers failing catastrophically, a disputed presidential election that would be decided by the Supreme Court, and then the shocking events of 9/11. For those of us just entering adulthood in the United States, these concurrent disruptions to technological, political, and social stability congealed into a generational dysphoria"
All those things (except for Y2K anxiety, which again, in the tech world led to a lot of spending on the fix for it), happened 1 to 2 years after The Matrix came out. The timing was uncanny in that the movie picked the late 1990s as "Peak Civilization" and everything did indeed start falling apart afterwards, but that was 1 to 2 years later. Watching The Matrix in 1999 didn't trigger generational dysphoria. It was just an awesome movie, just like other dystopian nightmare movies like Terminator or Aliens. Feels like they're stretching for a narrative that isn't quite there.
I remember a world without it. The developments of the last few decades have been nothing short of science fiction becoming reality.
This resonates with me, as I was just last night telling a friend about the grift that is “the singularity”. Remember that? The tech bros were really concerned about that for a hot moment, then their stock went up… …but nobody seems worried about the singularity anymore.
only a few days ago somebody posted a plot of how much of their code for an AI helper is written by AI and I think it reached 80% or something.
We're not quite at the point where deepseek comes up with the next version of deepseek, but as more intelligence gets distilled into smaller models, we can expect more and more people to start trying to build a better AI and eventually we should expect take off to happen.
To me it was just an interesting bit of speculation popularised by an academic and sci-fi author (Vernor Vinge) - which is the very thing such people should be doing imo.
And the history of it goes back to Ulam and Von Neumann, and maybe Turing. Hardly grifters.
Musk can't have it both ways, "AI is summoning the demon, and also I own a humanoid robot factory, AI for autonomous cars, and am training my own LLM now that a company I part funded then stopped supporting made a famous one before I did".
But there's still a lot of alignment research going on, to make sure we can even tell if the AI we have now has the equivalent of an evil bit (which they definitely observably and reproducible demonstrate having) that is set to "evil".
A lot of us still are. Just because the news cycle moved, doesn't mean Yudkowsky et al isn't still screaming into the void.
Two weeks ago: https://youtu.be/K8p8_VlFHUk?si=RpatWnlb1z8aKzhN