Sorry if this is a dumb question, but does anyone else feel like technology - specifically consumer tech - kinda peaked over a decade ago? I’m 37, and I remember being awed between like 2011 and 2014 with phones, voice assistants, smart home devices, and what websites were capable of. Now it seems like much of this stuff either hasn’t improved all that much, or is straight up worse than it used to be. Am I crazy? Have I just been out of the market for this stuff for too long?
Agree. 15+ years ago tech was developed for the tech itself, and it was simply ran as a service, usually for profit.
Now there’s too much corporate pressure on monetizing every single aspect, so the tech ends up being bogged down with privacy violations, cookie banners, AI training, and pretty much anything else that gives the owner one extra anual cent per user.
Aka “enshittification”
Enshittification was always a thing but it has gotten exponentially worse over yhe past decade. Tech used to be run by tech enthusiasts, but now venture capital calls the shot a lot more than they used to.
What’s crazy is that they were already making unbelievable amounts of money, but apparently that wasn’t enough for them. They’d watch the world burn if it meant they could earn a few extra pennies per flame.
You know this happened with cars also, until there is a new disruption by a new player or technology - companies are just coasting on their cash cows. Part of the market cycle I guess.
[off topic?]
Frank Zappa siad something like this; in the 1960’s a bunch of music execs who liked Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong had to deal with the new wave coming in. They decided to throw money at every band they could find and as a result we got music ranging from The Mama’s and The Papas to Iron Butterfly and beyond.
By the 1970s the next wave of record execs had realized that Motown acts all looked and sounded the same, but they made a lot of money. One Motown was fantastic, but dozens of them meant that everything was going to start looking and sounding the same.
Similar thing with the movies. Lots of wild experimental movies like Easy Rider and The Conversation got made in the 1970s, but when Star Wars came in the studios found their goldmine.
But even then, there were several gold mines found in the 1990’s, funded in part due to the dual revenue streams of theater releases and VHS/DVD.
You’ve got studios today like A24 going with the scatter shot way of making movies, but a lot of the larger studios got very risk adverse.
Just saw Matt Damon doing the hot wings challenge. He made a point about DVDs. He’s been producing his own stuff for decades. Back in the 1990s the DVD release meant that you’d get a second payday and the possibility of a movie finding an audience after the theatrical run. Today it’s make-or-break the first weekend at the box office.
Lots of the privacy violations already existed, but then the EU legislated first that they had to have a banner vaguely alluding to the fact that they were doing that kind of thing, and later, with GDPR, that they had to give you the option to easily opt-out.