Technology as a narrative element has also evolved.
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.
I never really got into that, since by that time I really couldn't get into TV shows anymore - or indeed, for pretty well all of my adult life. And yet, your note reminds me that the landline phone network is pretty well dead as the dodo at this point, and the flip phones that once evoked Star Trek communicators to my generation are now, for the most part, firmly in the past. For me (over 60 now), it's quite a bit of future shock, even as I saw it happen around me. First the pay phones disappeared, then the value proposition of a landline steadily degraded until VoIP (or just porting out to a cell carrier) was a better option.
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).
Detective Conan, a very long-running anime, has been hilarious to watch this evolution in as well.
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.
I had to explain a phone booth to my daughter recently. It was being removed from a corner spot in front of a gas station – maybe the last one in our city!
One of the hilarious things about rewatching old episodes of Seinfeld is his use of a cordless phone that I swear is the size of a toaster!
I was born in the UK in the late sixties. So my formative exposure to cyberspace was
- 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
"a Prestel [2] terminal" amazing reference!
In 2016, I wrote a short essay about my epiphany, as a Millennial, concerning the attitudes towards technology of people living in the 80s - the sense of suspicion and paranoia, living under the glow of green CRTs and the threat of nuclear annihilation - and how it was likely that our relationship to that technology had transitioned to one that was more trusting not because we'd become acclimated to its alien character, but because that tech had morphed to become more (superficially) friendly.
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 was born in 1980 and I find it neat that we grew up without the internet we know now, it was in it's infancy in junior high in high school (93 to 99), and then once we were in the workforce we all got smart phones as we know now. Us Xennials and the millenials that succeeded us (or we're just early millenials) definitely have a unique perspective
Absolute privilege to have lived the time before the internet. In hindsight.. and as say all people as they grow older and look back at the good old days. That too, but time before internet was really something else.
My counterpoint is I first worked for a computer company starting in the mid-80s (I had an earlier professional job but not in tech). If I were to be time travelled back to that role today, I'm sure I would be absolutely frustrated by the utter inability to get timely information about just about anything.
You'd get used to it again, and no one would have expectations that required timely access to information about everything.
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.
Sure. But there would still be a huge amount of frustration if you're used to having the information (and being able to quickly get something delivered) at your fingertips. Of course you'd adapt. But I don't think most people would think it was better in any way, shape, or form.
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.
I also grew up before the internet but would hate to go back. I envy my kids, growing up when they did. What do you think was better?
I'm definitely grateful social media wasn't around in the 90s. It's hard to navigate school as it is.
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.
I am nervously waiting to see what social media is the THING for my daughter's generation (she's 8). One of her friends just got an Apple Watch so it feels like everything is about to change for her and them...
From compuserve through AOL to Starlink today, my have we traveled.
I’m just glad Java applets died.
There was something magical about landing on some random page and being presented with a massive flash loading screen that lasts longer than a minute or a java applet. Find a random link on irc and end up on some black website with an exotic loader was better than Christmas morning for me. The web is so exactly as one would expect now, and it's incredibly boring. Sure, java applets, flash, dhtml, tables and frames were a hodgepodge toolbox, but at least the web was interesting to explore... I feel grateful to have gotten to be a teenager through the 90s actively involved in building web stuff. Not sure if it's just nostalgia and everyone feels this way about their teenage years but the never ending exploration into tech, computers, the web, was enthralling...palm pilots, modems, ram, mp3, irc, wow... even thinking about it today gets me excited for that time.
It’s the closing of the frontier. Pioneers opened up new territory, but now it’s mundane. Bankers, grocers, and town councils have all moved in. Streets have been laid out, fence wire strung, and the railroad has decided how you’ll get from place to place. They’re building a courthouse and a jail downtown. The pioneers’ kids are settled in houses; they don’t know how to dress a deer or pick a spot to sleep rough. The frontier that seemed infinite has come to an end.
I love it when I end up on a website that is clearly 100% bespoke and weird.
I remember having to write a java applet in my senior CS capstone class at DePaul 20+ years ago. I’ve never written one professionally.
Born in 1959, i miss the days without cellphones.
I don't. Phones have a huge amount of downsides, attention spans, doom scrolling, etc. The upsides though, of this magic sci-fi supercomputer in your pocket, good damn.
Some people call them Elder Millennials.
Absolutely!
Beyond the social aspects, it's been such an unbelievable ride surfing that exponential growth in computing power, from maxing out a 100mhz Pentium1 in assembly language, to maxing out my 4090 in PTX.
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).
I think it's crazy how an individual can design a PCB and get it made in a couple weeks. You gotta have the skill but yeah and prototype a product, launching is something else (regulation/scale) but yeah. I'm enjoying being able to just buy parts and make stuff.
i bet cyberpunkers really missed something like drugs...
Hey, thanks for reading this everyone – the author
> where corporations control the digital commons
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.
Gibson described cyberspace as "a consensual hallucination" which is still an incredibly good phrase
I love the implication of how that differs from reality's nonconsensual hallucination.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” - P. K. Dick. That's a better expression of the concept.
Cyberspace doesn't go away when you stop believing in it either.
> nonconsensual hallucination
Pretty sure this is just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts, i.e. being lied to or deceived
I'm confused by this essay. I'm a few years older than the author so I theoretically have a similar lived experience. I need to point out that the movie came out in 1999, near the peak of the dotcom bubble. At the time, "everything is awesome" was the vibe in tech.
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.
Author here: I was putting these events together as a zeitgeist aligning with entering adulthood for people my age. I probably should have added a "then" in between the Y2K and election references. But I wan't trying to draw a sequential connection.
Thanks for the reply. From a zeitgeist point of view, though, the events of 9/11 seemed to wipe the map of everything else, including Matrix like tech fears. By 2002, tech was in a dotcom winter and the zeitgeist was all about the "global war on terror". The general vibe at the software company I worked at from 2000-2007 was basically "we're all just happy we still have a job". But heh, this is just opinion vs opinion, and am happy to agree to disagree.
I hear that. And I don't think it's in opposition to what I'm focusing on in this piece. Ultimately, the point is that The Matrix provided a relatively novel metaphor for the kind of world re-entry a young adult makes when they go off on their own, and that, for me, it was part of a group of events that solidified a certain paranoia and cynicism that I think is somewhat unique to late GenX/early Millenials.
I feel incredibly privileged to have experienced the birth of the Web, at ground zero.
I remember a world without it. The developments of the last few decades have been nothing short of science fiction becoming reality.
This isn't the whole essay right? This is a part of a serial?
> Perhaps this is why our generation often approaches technology with a mix of fluency and skepticism
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.
I'm not sure why you call it "grift". Who profited?
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.
isn't that because a lot of the predictions are now taken for granted and it's no longer interesting?
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.
The idea that anything "digital" is also "reality" is the main pillar of internet brain damage.