If you’ve got nothing nice to say, go the fuck away. I’m instantly blocking shitheads who want to poke fun at this for their own amusement. You lead sad little lives.
I am probably the last of the group of people that were some of the early adopters of the internet. The internet didn’t fully become public and more accessible until 1994, I didn’t start using the internet until 1996. I am nearing 30 years old on the internet by next year. People from my group, we’ve seen it all by this point.
We’ve seen the internet at it’s infancy, as it developed, the explosion of it’s usage, the dot com bubble burst, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Flash’s death and the ongoing enshittification of the internet today as we know it.
add to this that the internet forced so many of us to become technically & technologically proficient because it was a necessary step to get us online.
that further spurred on knowledge of things that laymen wouldn’t have cared about otherwise like cpu architectures or clock frequencies; operating systems internals with things like linux or bsd; knowledge of basic networking fundamentals; html/css/javascript for geocities & myspace pages; etc.
as the enshitification turns the internet into walled gardens and people continue to use smart phones that “just work”; they are no longer able to repair their own devices like we had to do, which spares them from having to learn the nuts and bolts of the technology that enables our lives.
I can still rattle out the right tones you’d hear if you connected at 56k, that extra pshhhhh hhhshhhhh
When USRobotics first brought the 56k modem to market, they had an online contest to give away 100 of them. I won one. My ISP couldn’t even serve me 56k for about another year.
Also, I miss silly fun winnable online contests and freebies.
i used to have dreams about that handshake. lol
And don’t even get me started on “AI”.
As the family technical person, I can say after years of attempting to teach people to understand and solve their own problems, my support calls are down in the past year! Is it because they got smarter? No! They started using ChatGPT, CoPilot, etc and following it blindly. Do they understand the concepts of what they are changing and doing? No, but as long as the original problem is fixed, who cares if a dozen more are created, as long as they keep quiet.
I am cursed to be in the middle, couldn’t just be given a well paying technical job like my forebears, but nobody thinks they need my technical skills anymore, so I have talents now viewed as outdated and of limited use.
i occupy a different sort of middle ground in that i’m at the right generation to get those well paying technical jobs simply because i had to monkey around with off-the-shelf hardware and linux when they were both new to most people; but i also don’t get as many requests for technical help as i once did from family.
however, in my case, it’s been because the entire younger generations of my family have gone with iphones along with apple’s walled garden so they’ve never had to struggle with something like getting winsock working on windows 3.11 just to get internet porn. lol
somehow, it’s only the other older & leftist in my family that insist on diy implementations with linux and foss hardware, including de-googled androids; while the moderates and conservatives alike just buy iphones and never learn because of it.
like in your case; they see that technical skillset as mildly useful at best even though it underpins their own technology choices. worst of it all to me is that i get to witness them struggling to afford another iphone or its fees simply because they refuse to go with “poor people androids” or they don’t want to deal with the frustration of getting things to work without apple’s walled garden; some prioritize it over food or rent simply due to the exorbitant costs.