In the filter bubble that I inhabit, articles like this are breaths of fresh air - much needed reminders that everything is not gloom and doom.
Permanently moored as I am in my bubble though I can't help feeling that this type of article more an attempt to balance the narratives that I and my peers are fixated on, rather than paint a complete picture: so what about the trajectories of climate change, wealth inequality, opioid crisis, debt crisis, nuclear warfare threat, pandemic vulnerability, soil depletion etc?
I guess this is the nature of human discourse: we don't typically try to provide complete pictures, we tend to paint alternate pictures (aiming to support different courses of action?) in contrast to other narratives.
In the best of worlds all perspectives are based in reality, painted in earnest, and readily available, enabling a rational discourse. In reality that's obviously not always the case, filter bubbles being a case in point.
I enjoyed the list too and think about a lot of these things when I encounter them in my daily life too. But the major downside I see is that a lot of these improvements are coming via an escalating consumerism. Things like disposable clothes are probably more the product of exploiting labor and externalizing costs like polution than they are the product of technological improvements increasing efficiency. The same thing is happening with larger items like applicamcea which are increasingly being replaced due to part failures rather than repaired.
Counteracting this though is my personal favorite innovation of our times, secondary markets for everything! eBay, Postmark, Amazon, surplus resellers like Marshals and Ross etc have made it so much more possible to connect a good with its buyer rather than hording or junking it.
I agree with almost all of this list, and what I assume are the motivations for creating it, but it definitely leaves out problematic aspects. Not just the ones you list, but things like:
not watching crummy VHS tapes: the decline in ownership and reduction in ability to record / remix media.
playing phone tag: now that normal humans have access to broadcast media, the easy to avoid 'holiday slide show' or gossip sessions have become almost impossible to avoid in whatsapp groups, etc.
USB cables: Physically different connectors for different functions is a good thing. I have usb cables that can carry data (at I think 4 different speeds), usb cables that can only carry power, usb cables that can fast charge, usb cables that can power delivery charge, usb cables that can carry thunderbolt. I have lots of these cables and I have no idea which are which. I do very much like that some of these cables can act as power and screen and input now, but usb is pretty frustrating. It's great that almost everything charges with the same cable these days - for which I credit the EU rules about phones rather than innovation, (but usb-c vs usb-micro, and even a few hold out usb-minis mean it's still not perfect), and the usb micro cable has been much less reliable than things like the old nokia power jacks, with many of my tablets developing problems with charging and connectivity because of the usb port.
search engines: Search engine quality goes in waves. I've definitely had some years where google returned me worse results for my searches than I used to get in the good old days.
batteries: the power tools I have with batteries are less powerful, go wrong more often and have to be charged (and never are, because I don't use them enough).
> not watching crummy VHS tapes: the decline in ownership and reduction in ability to record / remix media.
what do you mean by this exactly? I can agree it's sort of sad that people don't usually own a physical/local copy of whatever movies/music they enjoy, but you can still buy physical copies of most media if you really want. I'm pretty the inflation-adjusted price is lower than it was in the early '00s. you could certainly argue that streaming is so convenient/cheap that it precludes this kind of ownership for most people.
the reduction in ability to record/remix media I completely disagree with. the shittiest smartphone camera records better quality video than a good consumer camcorder from the '90s, and you can edit the footage with free software on any computer.
>speaking of batteries: batteries are built-in—remember how advertisements always had to say “no batteries included”?—so no more mad scrambles at Christmas for AA or AAA batteries to power all the presents
I don't like this trend at all. I've thrown out so many perfectly good products because the bespoke built in battery couldn't keep a charge anymore.
With good ol' rechargable AA/AAA batteries, you typically get a way higher capacity than the cheap built-in batteries in small electronics, and the product lifespan is years longer.
Yeah a lot of this is vastly oversimplified. You didn't have to clean ball mice every week or for most people, ever. VHS being crummy didn't mean we enjoyed it less. Fansub sites today are under constant legal attack by copyright lawyers.
Frankly I miss the days when the online racist death threats were posted by xXBoner420Xx to his Xanga page instead of posted on Facebook by Ted Smith from your company's accounting department.
Oh I forgot to mention screens - until the iPhone, you almost never saw someone trying to use a device with a cracked screen. Now a significant proportion of people use a touch screen device with a cracked screen (or cracked screen protector) every day.
I am perhaps glass half empty sort of person but it’s important for me how far is it to go than how far have we came. The fact is that it’s been literally 50 years since moon landing and Mars landings is still as far as it was in 90s. Cancer survival rates have improved but curing cancer is still as much as pipe dream it was in 90s. Less people are poor but eradicating poverty and providing basic education, food and health for all is still as much away as it was in 90s. I can go on but us Twitter generation take too much pride out of rather silly little things while ignoring the things that matters the most.
Climate change is a serious problem, but until China shut down I was sure we'd crossed a tipping point to solar, which makes the problem solvable, though not easy. Now I think there's some risk that the PV manufacturing won't restart somewhere else.
Wealth inequality is an immensely less serious menace than at any time since at least Columbus. If it doesn't look like it, that's because you aren't looking at China and India 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128 years ago.
The opioid crisis is a big problem. A lot of people who need opioids can't get them because of laws, or they can get them but without reasonable guarantees of quality (again because of laws), and so they die of fentanyl overdoses. Hopefully we can solve that problem, but it's been a century and a half, so it probably won't be soon.
I don't know about the debt crisis. What's the crisis? People (and imaginary people) owe each other money, which is also imaginary. Sometimes they can't pay it and go bankrupt. This is kind of stupid but it's relatively harmless most of the time.
Nuclear warfare continues to be a threat, but it's much less of one than at any time since, say, 1959. There's no Cold War, the massive nuclear arsenals have been mostly scrapped, and really what you need to worry about there are drones.
Pandemic vulnerability is a big deal. Especially in March and April of this year. But the situation will improve rapidly after that.
Soil depletion is potentially a big deal, and it's an incentives problem with a lot of interests vested in the status quo ante. The Netherlands may be showing a solution.
I'm not happy with the way things are going on that front. And things may be considerably worse than they were in the 1990s. They're far better than they were in the 1980s, though.
Permanently moored as I am in my bubble though I can't help feeling that this type of article more an attempt to balance the narratives that I and my peers are fixated on, rather than paint a complete picture: so what about the trajectories of climate change, wealth inequality, opioid crisis, debt crisis, nuclear warfare threat, pandemic vulnerability, soil depletion etc?
I guess this is the nature of human discourse: we don't typically try to provide complete pictures, we tend to paint alternate pictures (aiming to support different courses of action?) in contrast to other narratives.
In the best of worlds all perspectives are based in reality, painted in earnest, and readily available, enabling a rational discourse. In reality that's obviously not always the case, filter bubbles being a case in point.