this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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It can be confidently argued that the western American empire and it's related industries (software and the Internet included) peaked in the 90s. We had a bit of hang time at the top and now it's been free fall since around 2004.
That's what they said in The Matrix. I guess they called it right.
Honestly it was pretty obvious coming up to y2k that it'd be the last generation of kids that had the same standard of living as their parents..
William Gibson and the entire cyberpunk genre pretty much nailed that stuff from day one. It was supposed to a warning though. Not a playbook.
It's not all bad, though!
I ran Linux in 2004, and it was great, but it was such a "second-class citizen" desktop OS. The fact that Unreal Tournament and sequels actually worked on Linux felt amazing because it was such a break from the norm, whereas now gaming on Linux is actually a viable option.
Maybe you could flash the ROM on your phone in 2004, but afaik nowhere near the vibrant community you have now.
And self hosting then kinda meant, "I have an Apache server and IRC daemon listening" (the irony is that the self hosting community is so good now in part because of enshittification).
Programmable microcontrollers
with freely available, to ust IDE+libraries
are literally the price of a nice cup of coffee (3x ESP32 can be had for $14 on Amazon). How cool is that!?
I think there's a lot of shitty stuff out there, and the shitty stuff probably outnumbers the cool stuff
but there's world full of really, really cool stuff out there.