The Luddites got a bad rap. They weren’t anti-technology. They just knew that the technology was being used to push their wages down and make their hours longer.
Ned Ludd knew that smashing the machines was sometimes the best option!
Yeah, after I learned about his movement, I stopped using the term as a pejorative. They were’ pretty based.
A lot of the machinery was also dangerous AF.
Not amish.
Moral compass.
The only technology developed after 2021 was LLM’s and Stable Diffusion
This is the understanding of a “tech enthusiast”, not someone who’s actually interested in how computers work.
Someone is pushing a very stupid narrative about those of us who see the situation as anything other than progress.
I like technology (mostly pre-2010), but I think there’s been a philosophical shift in the things that modern tech companies prioritize. AI is a huge part of the problem obviously, but it’s more of a symptom than a cause.
I want something that I can repair and modify. I want the internals to be easy to access and made out of parts cheap enough for me to replace. I want to be able to play pretend like I’m Terry Davis and not have to deal with UEFI bullshit telling me what I can and can’t run on my computer.
It’s all a move to walled gardens with very limited access to the OS or hardware, where the focus is on touch screens and amplified UIs. I’m the kind of person who customized Xmonad and Vimperator (RIP, I know there are dupes but it’s not the same) to never even bother with a mouse, and so it all feels unnatural. I spend so much time fighting my autocorrect when I’m on windows or Mac products, another one of those “helpful” features that is forced and obnoxious.
It’s a move from computers as toy (LEGO set) to computers as toy (needoh squishy). They’ve become machines designed to deliver content and extract data while you zone out. Some of the most fucking fun I’ve had in my life has been spending 6 hours writing PERL to do something I probably could have done manually in 30 minutes or strange journeys into the windows registry as I try to figure out why all of my / changed into ¥, and that’s just not the vibe of anything in modern technology. Everything is designed to hide as much of itself from you.
“Oh no! Something went wrong! Better call support” instead of “Error 332: Look it up and fix it”
And now, even if you do get the error code, Google and DuckDuckGo are so shit that they’ll find only AI generated slop pages instead of the forum posts with the solution.
Thats a bad way of describing enshitification. Yeah people are not interested in buying stuff they already had but for a monthly subscription. That’s literally the only idea anyone in tech has had this decade. Do the same thing for a subscription and slap AI all over it. Get series A funding and sell the company.
I grew up with nearly every stage and major leap of our modern tech. I saw dialup internet and windows 95 and the major shift to XP. I had an original Nintendo and gameboy, and got to witness the evolution to handheld and 3D gaming. I had a flip phone with T9 texting, and saw the first smartphones come about. For me, tech peaked in like 2012, and hasn’t done anything worthwhile or innovative since, with the exception of the steamdeck. The internet has only gotten shittier since, cell phones and PCs have only gotten more expensive and complex, without any major increase in capability. Sure they’re more powerful, but they can’t really do anything new, and all software has only gotten shittier and less efficient. It’s honestly depressing to think about how much hope I had for the tech space in the 2000s and how far we’ve fallen since then.
Everything modern I buy just breaks in a year
Everything modern also says you don’t own it, only lease access that can be revoked at any time, and also serves you tons of ads while listening to and spying on everything you do.
But anytime anyone says anything unkind towards the god of technology, they are amish, luddites, fools, etc.
I’m not going totally “Amish”, but I’ve become a cranky bitch about technology nowadays. I was very passionate about tech throughout my teens and early twenties. Since then, I’ve watched every major tech company go to shit. Services I used forever go to shit or die. Companies harvest more and more of our data in creepier and more invasive ways. They went from “don’t be evil” and creating interesting new tech or shaking up an industry (Google fiber, for instance) to doing anything as long as it saves a dollar.
The only thing giving me any hope or interest in this space is FOSS and hosting things myself. It was confusing to me at first and still is in some ways, but not only can I solve my own issues, I can offer a lot of it to my friends and family. Having 10 different streaming services and finding where a show is within them is expensive and annoying, but I’m enjoying managing a library and hosting it on jellyfin. Then I can tell a few people, hey get jellyfin and type in this url, I’ll find whatever you want. I recently setup seerr so now they don’t have to feel like they’re bothering me when they want something, they can just request it (and see what’s new, upcoming, where something already is streaming if they already have that service, ratings, etc). Yeah it doesn’t support the show or movie but it’s a much more enjoyable experience. I stopped paying for Google drive and have all my pictures and videos (which is what used up all that space) syncing right to my PC, which then backs up to jotta cloud (not foss). I got off windows entirely (except at work) and use Linux now. I’m probably going to setup nextcloud and get a few people on there soon, since i have the space and it’ll save them a subscription.
I used to really push FOSS. I’ve run Linux since the late 90s. But I don’t know that I really believe it’s that much better anymore. I guess I kinda feel about the same as I do “organic” farming… It’s just not worth the price, effort, etc
Tiny minority very vocal on lemmy
Sounds like nice people. Cant fault them for it, tech has gone down the drain over the years and newer stuff isn’t really worth the cost anymore.
Are they recruiting?Though why specifically 2021? What exactly happened at that specific year?
Chat started to pop off
Chat, ? Pop off?
Can you elaborate a little more on that?
“Chat” is ChatGPT and “pop off” is popular or gaining traction.
I promise I’m old, I’m just going back to university and am surrounded by children lol
Doing HW is why my response lagged, my bad.
When young people say “chat,” they’re not talking about ChatGPT. Generally speaking.
Thank you for explaining. Language does seem to evolve faster than i can keep up with it.
The kids today will ask a sort of rhetorical questions out loud and say something like, “chat, should I (under whatever nonsense here)”. In this instance, they’re pretending to be streamers and ask the viewers. But if someone says, “I’ll just ask chat to write my paper (or whathaveyou).” That’s ChatGPT. The difference is contextual.
That’s good to know. Thank you. Yeah context can change a lot, but not even knowing the context can make it rather hard to guess any meaning.
Normally I’d say you can ignore it because it’ll change soon enough, but I think “ask chat” will become synonymous with “ask ai” similar to how “Google it” is now considered personal research/look it up.
Well, ‘chat’ is Internet Chat, as it’s been known for 30 years when it moved from academia to mainstream.
‘Pop off’ is just this year’s slang for “rapidly gain popularity”, and it’ll be replaced by something equally ephemeral (like with ‘fetch’, ‘fleek’, some level of ‘rizz’ or ‘cap’) soon.
Stop trying to make fetch happen. It’s not going to happen.
This comment is streets ahead.
I thought pop-off was like 10 years old
Maybe for certain groups of people. It’s decades old.
All fads circle back
Can confirm. I’m 40 (oldest Millenial) and shit was poppin-off back in 2010.
Thank you, but that still doesn’t really explain why 2021. Chatting services we’re popular way before that. Something must have happened in the year 2021 in relation to technology so that this specific year was chosen as last decent production year for technology.
This might be my “woosh” moment. But I’ll bite.
I think they were referring to ChatGPT being let loose on the general public. That kinda marked the start for the current AI bubble and the enshittification of every new tech product with some sort of LLM bullshit.
Yes this
No, I’m genuinely curious why such an odd number, like 2020 would make more sense as it’s the beginning of a decade.
ChatGPT was released late 2022. So it cant be that one either. Maybe some other AI chat service was released around 2021?
Yeah. Or maybe they just got the number wrong, like I did.
I saw a comment somewhere else on Lemmy saying they heard someone refer to asking chatgpt something as “asking chat.” So I think it was a meta reference to calling AI chat.
And yes, since chatgpt was released in 2022 my cutoff for searches is also 2021, so it makes perfect sense to me.
Yeah that does make sense, thank you.
AI started to become good enough to be marketable.
I think that it’s not that people refuse to use new tech, I think it’s more that most of what is coming out is just worse in terms of usability and functionality in a lot of ways. Not so much a rejection of innovation, but a rejection of the priorities that major industry players have decided on. Like, “improvement” is relative, and what people care about isn’t being improved or actively being regressed.
They’re making bad products, and people don’t want them.
100% confirm.
I’m driving a rented car for work this week. It’s a 2025 Chevy Traverse. Not a single engineer was involved in making this car. It’s one of the worst cars I think I’ve ever driven.
The gear shift is on the steering wheel where the windshield wiper control arm would be normally.
Shifting requires pulling in that bar and then moving it up or down. To put it in Park, you press a button on the tip of it.
The parking break is also a button. But it doesn’t work unless the car engine is on. The car engine turns on by also pushing a button.
Windshield wipers? Button press. Windshield wipers plus cleaning fluid? Same button, but press it harder.
You want to adjust the treble or bass of the music you’re listening to? You can ONLY do that when the Radio is on. Then turn it off. Then switch to Spotify, etc for added Bass.
Near collision detection? It’s got the normal lights that light up. But it ALSO has a rumble pack in the driver’s chair that vibrates the left or right side of your balls if something is near that side of the car. How near? Someone walking by it on the sidewalk triggered it when I was at a stop sign, and literally jostled my nuts for 20 seconds.
This car literally sexually assaults you during near collisions.
Which I guess might be great if you’re suicidal and want to nut while almost dying.
I am so overwhelmed by the visual clutter of Win 11 and the bizarre choices MS made. It’s like every time I want to do something fairly basic I have to relearn everything.
In my mind it is not the age of the technology, but its owner or lack thereof.
Make it 1994 and I’m fine with it. Couldn’t care less. I’d trade it all to be back in 1994.
- Sooooo many great games and movies released then, and the 90s left a great catalog of both.
Pre 9/11, it was all transparent plastics and physical media. Those were the days.
I miss my MiniDisc Walkman.
Yes!! I don’t care how common it was, transparent purple rocked.
{number}{dot} is a Markdown list. Like this:
- one
- two
The original Markdown was poorly documented (including in this regard), but most derivatives specify that the numbers are ignored and it just counts from one. Annoying when you are trying to count from zero.
Ah this explains it. The full sentence was “2001.” I guess next time I need to make an actual sentence. Thanks! TIL
Is “digital amish” meant to be a pejorative of some sort?
They say it like it’s a bad thing?
I guess if you consider the word “Amish” to be negative? I mean I despise Amish because of how they treat their animals, but I don’t consider it negative. I’d assume most people don’t.
Yeah I’ve got beef with their love of domestic violence, not their aversion to technology
Yeah it’s not really a bad thing if you’re about it. Religious aspects aside the (general, it varies) Amish approach to technology is that each thing is looked at very intentionally with community integrity in mind. Instead of everything for everyone, technology is considered a tool.
Most people don’t get cell phones to scroll tik tok slop, but they might let a business owner have one with a limited plan for planning jobs for their business.
Most people don’t get cars because they encourage people to live farther apart and are expensive, but they might allow solar charged e-scooters
I take it as a “fixed” reference. Many people know the Amish community hit a point and chose not to use new technology created after that.
They are not against it, or others using it.
I don’t interpret the phrase as having malace, just a way to show this might be the new line in the sand.
Amish 2.0 ?
