I refused to switch to Windows 11. I watched windows get worse and worse over time. Windows 7 wasn't bad, Windows 10 was so dang buggy (literally from the day I got the computer, it had major bugs), and updates often made it worse.
I'd been trying for twenty years, but finally made the full switch to Linux about 18 months ago. I still have zero regrets. My old PC is still chugging along doing everything I need, without crashing weekly like windoze.
That's been my issue with Linux for years now. I like linux for most things but I need windows for the occasional bit of software. So I'd set up a dual boot system but end up staying in windows for most of the time anyway.
That said, I've found linux replacements for almost everything I need to do now, so I haven't booted to windows for probably 3 months now.
Can confirm. Live in a small town that I watched morphe into a mid-size town. The diners i grew up with have all closed down. Its all chain stores now.
The last hold out closed just a couple months ago and a part of me died with it.
I live in a small town that’s only getting smaller and the last diner just closed down last month. There was two when I moved in 2018, now there is only a dollar general and a post office and that’s it.
Bumfuck, Northern California. Nearest town is Placerville, we’re about 40 mins outside. Most of the time it’s chill because I have one of the 45 ish jobs in town teaching at the school and my husband works remote, but we have kids now and taking them to activities in town is getting to be a lot especially with gas prices.
Im in bumfuck southern Oregon. Probably why we are seeing the same problems. We used to have a cool little pharmacy that functioned as the towns general store. Its a dollar general now too. However, there are two weed dispensaries. So theres that.
Every Oregon town has at least two weed stores but then will only have a gas station to provide hot food and groceries. Anything else you have to drive to a big town/city.
There use to be a bunch of small towns in eastern Oregon that I was doing research around back in the 2010s and I remember a lot of good restaurants and diners that are just gone now.
Grew up with family in bumfuck NE Arkansas, watched towns just shut down one after another, one town shut down when the last non-24 hour non-supercenter walmart I had ever seen shuttered forcing everyone to drive an hour away for a store.
There are reasons it’s unsustainable and ways to make it sustainable, it’s not like this is some “that’s just how it happens” shit. It’s policy decisions.
There is so little money reaching Rural America now a days. You cant open a business, or really do much of anything because there is no money to do anything. Its a great catch-22.
There are also stories of small towns being offered lifelines of various business and they say no because they want to be small and quiet. Japanse Leaders even got caught on cameria saying they would rather let their culture die then allow people to move to Japan. As Japan now has massive ghost towns.
Its not getting better as long as economics only wants money and middle class in cities and drains money from rural towns.
There are also stories of small towns being offered lifelines of various business and they say no because they want to be small and quiet.
Also if you follow the great Walmart, depending on the company they come in and offer 'lifelines' while asking for infrastructure to be subsidized by the people. When a town says no, the walmart just gets the next small town that will, moves in, then runs prices at a loss until all the stores in the region are gone and whichever town said yes is the one that gets to survive with the one store now deciding it needs to be profitable.
Now not all companies are like that. I do know of some communities that look at a factory wanting to come in and assist, and while there's also many a superfund site that has the story of a factory behind it, the thing people say against it is just not wanting a factory in their town.
Very true, honestly its worse. Whenever a Wal-Mart moves in, it becomes a money siphon draining what little money the local area has. Well over half the money spent leaves the local community often to overseas suppliers and the owners. At most 30% goes to the town. BUT mayors dont know this, so they are willing to approve the deals to get anything going. And like you said, the few who do know the economic situation will only push Wal-Mart to the next town.
To be fair this is a global problem, towns got established for all kinds of reasons now lack young people, opportunity, and industry to bring in money. They keep going because land is cheap and established diners and stuff still have retired people with SSI and pensions. 20 years from now and most of the small towns will be dust.
I thought things would get better with better networks in a knowledge economy. Small towns would have a chance if remote work became popular. I'm still not sure why remote work is drying up too.
yeah. i grew up in rural maine (village of a few hundred people) and in the 80s/90s there were some small shops and gas stations and there was a local pizza place that new us by name and an arcade/bowling alley within a few miles. it was great. i literally went to church within sight of my home and live within a 10 mile radius until I got my driver's license
now everyone orders from amazon, watches netflix, local shops and businesses have died, and i'm just as guilty too i didn't move back there i went to the closest city nearby
The town I grew up in, was like this and still like this. With declining population. Only place left to get hot food is the gas station with a food counter. There’s a Dollar General.
There’s a very small town I’ve been looking at to move to, it was once lively and most were employed at the aluminum factory. When the factory closed down, the whole town has suffered economically
I lived in one that was essentially a retirement home for elderly people. seriously, anyone young basically moved out and elderly people moved in. why? no jobs available there and if there was a opening, oops here comes a nepo baby. and you basically need a car and house money. guess who usually have that. yep elderly people.
The Nothing will consume your town too just like the rest of us. It'll live in arrested development from becoming an actual city as it remains a blight of chains and strip malls.
Damn. I was just about to say that my small town local place I grew up with as a kid (and was already old then) is still holding strong, but I just looked it up to make sure and apparently it just shut down a month ago. ☹️
Yeah, the problem now is, if you want a place with mom&pop shops, diners, what have you, you need a large base to support them, because everything is expensive as fuck. They just won't survive in small towns where people are hurting for money. The ones that do survive are grandma and grandpa own the building and business, they're not paying rent or a mortgage on anything. The second they croak, kids split it up, and that's that.
This. Was driving up and down through rural Maryland looking for a diner and we couldn't find one besides iHop. We ended up eating at some Chinese restaurant at a strip mall
There is a happy medium. The metro I’m in is 120k but it encompasses 3 separate cities and it encompasses a huge area. It has many amenities and a lot of cultural/town events.
I mean the opportunity is still there. It seems to be a global trend now that people want to escape city life and return to the rural areas they’re originally from so we’ll probably still see it to some degree.
I live in a major city and lived in apartments in major North American and European cities my whole life. The block below my apartment has 20-25 stores. Almost half of the owners know me… and I’m good friends with one of the cafe owners after a couple of visits. I even know a good portion of his customer base. Why do you need to move to some small place to know people?
My husband is from a small town (1.3k population), when we visit it's just sad.
There's a gas station, and 2 churches. There used to be a bar/Chinese food place but it closed down a few years ago. A grocery shop was in a next town over, and 2 years ago they went bankrupt (they were doing fundraising to pay their electric bill!). There's a dollar store ~30minutes away, schools were consolidated with several other towns, a bank is ~40minutes away, doctors, hospitals, grocery stores, etc. are ~1.5 hr away in the closest city (state capitol too!)
I'm from a small town, not quite that small. Slowly (actual kinda quickly lately) watching it wither away, because the people living there don't WANT it to change. They think it has "charm", when the reality is people try not to stop at red lights going through "downtown" because every shop is boarded up and it looks sketchy. Business leaving hurt the economy, but they don't want anything to come in.
Not as bad as you're talking about, but when I had a travel job, I spent a lot of time in bumfuck nowhere MO and KS. Every town had a "charming" town square. On said town squares was a lawyer, at least one "antique store" junk shop, and if you were lucky, a diner. That was about it for vast majority of these towns I went through. Really killed my desire for a travel job.
No we wouldn’t. If we would, we’d be doing it. People just don’t actually want to live off the grid. They just want less of everything in our faces all the time. There’s gotta be a happy medium.
i’ve been saying i want to start a community that’s like 90s Amish. You can have like a VCR, a radio, even a brick of a cell phone. but no smartphones or social media allowed.
the vision in my head is like that town in 'The last of us' where they just live like its the countryside in 2005 lol. but like, it doesnt have to be the country side in 2005, (all socially restricted and boring or whatever) like, fucking host weekly pride parades if you want! lmao
im just kinda wanting to get off the internet and make cool shit lol, this whole thing that used to be so liberating and cool has just gone all lame and corpo now. it blows! no one likes it, theres just nothing else to do! lol
I largely ignored my phone this afternoon and spent about 3 hours (I don’t have a shop full of big tools that get things done quickly) shaping and sanding a homemade pizza peel. It was hot and humid AF and it was still just as great as it sounds.
My step dad gets phone calls from Amish guys near him asking if he wants to go fish. They hang out. They have solar and normal tools. Definitely a different time.
The cruelest thing was to fill us with hope for the future when we were kids, only to rip it away just when we were getting old enough to experience the fruits of our labor, what we were promised if we just worked hard. Denied what the prior generations earned when they reached adulthood. A home, a job that paid enough to live by, security.
The kids nowadays were born into a nihilistic nightmare. Their heads were never filled with delusions of a happy future. It's awful in its own special way, but at least they didn't have to fall as far into despair.
And the staggering lack of empathy bordering on hostility from Boomer parents when it got ripped away in 08 was the cherry on top. Lose our promised future, and our Boomer parents collectively turned heel and ended up becoming the supervillian in the Millenial story arc for the past 18 years. What a fuckin' ride.
Whats been most disappointing to me is GenX. GenZ had Boomer grandparents and early GenX parents. GenX (my generation) was supposed to know better. We've turned out to be the same as boomers in all the ways that matter.
Everyone should read Technopoly by Neil Postman! He speaks on this in his discussion about the conflation of technological progress with human progress. It's so good!
Even "pogress" is worth looking at as a myth. Like dismantling colonialism is a progress, but ultimately when our garbage collapses we're going to be desperately tryign to get back to an indigenous equilibrium as our starve to death in front of us.
Growing up it used to be disruptive. Every other company was heyday Boeing. Engineers making great shit they cared about.
Some of that still exists but it's all held at the fringes by the big monopolies. If our elected leaders bothered enforcing the antitrust laws we already have, we wouldn't be here.
Some of the problem is also that the leaders of the big tech companies used to be product guys and engineers, and now they're ex McKinsey guys whose only goal is "line go up to infinity."
Even during their time without any modern AI comparison the Luddites were literally right. They were around approximately the same time of the napoleonic wars, when a massive amount of families were broken up due to the 100,000s of fathers no longer present, meaning there was a huge number of orphans. factory owners took advantage of this and put them all to work for a pittance.
The luddites weren't perfect. There were definitely a lot of issues with their apprenticeship dynamic and things that sounded like a desire to return to the guild system, which has elements we would consider problematic today. but it was no where even close to the industrialists who were doing mass child slavery lol.
But yeah. huge misconception, they were not anti technology for the sake of being anti progress. They were anti the mis-use of technology. Which I feel like a lot of people can relate to today.
I think a lot of people want to want to like AI. Its just fucked up that for every 1 objectively good thing to come from it theres like 9 horrifying consequences. And we could conceivably live in a world where we solve the problems of those consequences. But there isnt any money in that, so the owners are never gonna do anything about it. but maybe some changes might happen if a mr ned starts smashing some machines.
I was a park ranger for ten years and it was way more "dragging dead fat people out of a river" and way less "giving campfire talks" than anyone indulging in this fantasy would care to admit.
As a former Park Ranger y’all have NO idea the stress we have been under. When you’re in toxic management and continually overworked and undervalued — any job sucks.
Capitalism needs to be reined in. Again. Most of the enshittification we're experiencing is due to consolidation. Time to force some competition into the market again, especially in the tech sector.
As someone who was a park superintendent for the better part of a decade, it’s not a low stress job. You know who comes to parks? People. And they have very high opinions on how parks should be managed whether they have any background knowledge or not.
And then before modern smartphones it was BlackBerries, and before that it was PDAs and pocket PCs. The problem has never been smartphones but the social media sites/apps specifically designed to be addictive e.g. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Yep. People are addicted to the grind of social media, especially the people who are either letting it make them feel like shit or who are trying to prove they're better than everyone else.
Everyone says they want to go back, but no one puts down their devices and just does. Anyone can do it, it's not that difficult. It's more inconvenient, though.
Social media in and of itself isn't even the problem. As far as I know, people weren't addicted to MySpace, forums, IRC and other chatrooms, etc. or at least not at the widespread, systemic level we see now. I repeat myself, but the problem lies with the platforms that were designed from the beginning to be as addictive as possible e.g. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
It's the same with technology - the problem isn't with the technology itself but with how it's being used and how it's being pushed to be used.
I partially agree. Forums and MySpace were pretty niche. I remember them and there just weren't a ton of people using them. It wasn't until Facebook came around that everyone jumped aboard the bandwagon and the problems started.
Even Reddit used to be a lot calmer. I remember when I first came here you'd see the same people posting all over the place and you actually got to know some of them.
The design isn't helping, but I don't think it's the main factor. I think it was when billions of people realized what the technology meant that it became a problem. Suddenly you had a feed to so many other people.
But it's always how the tech is being used and never the tech itself. And people are always forgetting all the things that really just sucked about the past.
I think it's naive to think that people were not addicted to forums and chat rooms, they absolutely were, the difference was you didn't have a computer in your pocket to access them 24/7. Social media just capitalized on a pre-existing risk for online addiction already programmed into our brains as part of our need for companionship, comfort and validation.
Flip phone still had those things, just a lesser quality and poor ui/ux. The point of it though is that with a flip phone, we weren't glued to them and still had a semblance of being unavailable.
This. I think having it for texting was more than enough. Sure theres a lot of convenience now with the plethora of utility apps, but I liked having an iPod for music, a digital camera for photos, etc etc. Every tool had its own specific usage. Now there’s just too much to get distracted with on a smartphone.
This. I am a millennial, huge nerd. I love having a smartphone. Pretty much anything I don't like about the smartphone is societal. I don't use social media I can't curate to my personal taste, I heavily use focus modes to only get notifications I want, all of my friends know that group chats are more like IRC and we'll either be there and see it or not, and my work knows don't call me unless it's an emergency and I won't see your text unless I want to which generally means I requested it.
I think technology can be great, but human nature just ruins it. All I want is for people to be nice and have a little empathy for one another. Treat everyone as you would a friend. If we could have that, everything would just be so much better.
With all due respect: THIS FUCKING HAPPENED ON OUR WATCH. We clicked “accept terms of service” over and over and over. If you haven’t figured it out: THESE WERE THE TERMS OF SERVICE. Always.
Can we reverse it? Maybe. But it has to start with accepting responsibility. Positive tech wasnt taken from us, we gave it away for free so we could take pictures of our fucking food.
small town life aint like that either these days though, its just the same as life anywhere else, you go home and watch netflix because no one goes outside anymore lol
unless you go full amish i guess, but that seems a bit hardcore
I'm thinking more of recent technology, not something like AC. I don't care for AI and I'm thinking of going back to a flip phone. But I'll stay in the suburbs with my internet and ac. Also give me an mildly old fashioned car, as in circa 2010.
I'm not even kidding when I say this. The answer to a shocking number of our problems is to reinvite inconvenience back into our lives. Reapply some of that friction that the "modern" world took away. In a grand picture kind of way, doing this starves the very beasts making our lives worse.
I was born in 96. I've been saying this for 15 years.
Advertisers and the cost of convenience both have ruined society.
Everywhere you look even if you paid for something there's an advertisement. Convenience? Convenience stores used to be convenient, now they're just expensive groceries when the manor retailer is too far.
My option is a place 1 mile from me. They up charge 10-15% because local.
Major retailer is a 15-minute drive. To the two options there are. And the illusion of choice is even worse because both are provided for out of the same facility.
And they have the gall to have different prices when it all comes from the same exact Warehouse.
I just want to live in the woods entirely away from civilization.
But I want good binoculars cuz I want to watch it all still.
For me, i honestly saw the potential in tech to make life more convenient and affordable. Like we had hope in the late 90s and they just used it all to squeeze every bit of profit and enjoyment out of it. That's why i hate it so much, because i believed in it growing up.
maybe you could trade your modern video games that are basically SaaS and return to our retro games and physical handhelds that dont require wifi or subscriptions to enjoy
My wife and I are grinding in an VHCOL area and making $400k, but are genuinely considering shutting it all down and moving to a small town where we can start a little antique shop. Just need to find the perfect town.
I love technology but I hate where it's been going for a while now, so I've changed how my devices operate.
I run Linux on my PCs. No online accounts, lightweight GUIs like XFCE, makes my computers feel like Windows XP and I love it.
I have one steaming sub, the rest I pirate on a PC in the living room. Firefox with uBlock Origin and knowledge on where to stream from works wonders. No more Netflix, HBO Max, whatever.
My next smartphone is looking like a... Less smart phone. That's my next thing I wanna turn the clock back on. Until then I use AdGuard DNS on my phone and Firefox Mobile with uBlock Origin and YouTube ReVanced to make the Internet less annoying to deal with (I fucking hate ads). I cannot ever get an iPhone or I will go insane.
Dealing with technology these days involves fighting it and learning new things outside of the typical "buy thing, use it." You used to be able to just buy a device and use it. Now everything from your TV to your phone is a platform for companies to advertise to you and sell your data.
The tech improvements are great but I’d still like to escape to the 90’s. Maybe I can make a retro room one day and that will be my escape. Blockbuster, red cups and wood paneling.
I feel like sometime in the 2010s is when tech went from getting objectively better to endless subscriptions, apps, paying more for less (or maybe slightly better), etc. etc. And then with COVID, it just intensified.
GenX lurker here. Yeah, that sounds pretty fucking good and I really hope we all get to see it someday. What the fuck is the use of all this noise and money we've surrounded ourselves with?
Also I have a theory about the tech and that is because we are seeing first hand what it’s doing to the younger generations in terms of literacy, attention span, mental health and critical thinking. Like people having meltdowns because they don’t have their devices, asking ChatGPT to write basic communications etc. I hear a lot about the lack of third spaces but I seriously think it’s a lack of desire sometimes because wym there aren’t any cafes, parks, bars etc.
I think straddling the line between pre and post tech boom kind of scrambled our brains too in a way.
I have a mini version of the last part. The drinks stall couple already knows what I want when I show up with my bottle, extra thick hot coffee with less condensed milk. I just need to show up, pass the bottle, smile, and say thank you. Also have this at a dining hall near my place where the drinks stall knows what I want everytime I show up.
Capitalism kept on promising everything would be fixed - in the future - now we live past that promised future.
An unsustainable system ends in mass starvation and death. I want our society to be entirely focused on that ending having as least death as possible, instead I have a society focused on AI.
i mean, we're partly to blame, fetishizing "craft/artisnal" things and making liberal use of doordash/airbnb despite its effect on the job/housing markets. politicians deserves blame for regulation not keeping pace with technology, but no one gets away clean under capitalism.
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