this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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My phone can literally be used as VR goggles and stream HD video pretty much anywhere in the country. But smart phones existed in 07 and PDAs existed in the 90s. Yeah, no difference between these things. lol.
I feel like y'all are just being contrarian doomers. Listen, I get it. The ruling class of billionaires use technology for nefarious purposes to control us and extract every penny of money they possibly can by selling our attention spans in ever increasing ways. I'm not saying they don't. I'm not saying we live in a utopia. I'm just saying that there have absolutely been a lot of technological improvements in the past 20 years.
Folks saying "actually PDAs had internet access in the '90s" are, fuck, not even missing the forest for the trees, they're just covering their eyes and refusing to acknowledge that they're surrounded by trees.
We've got driverless cars. Yes, they're far from perfect, and I wouldn't really say they're adequate, but we do have honest to god driverless cars. Electric ones too! And they aren't just a gimmick, they really do give gas cars a run for their money. 3d printers are a home commodity now much like traditional printers have been in the past. CRISPR lets us modify genes. The idea of watching a 4k video on the Internet in 2006 would've been crazy. AI has improved a lot, and I don't even mean the modern generative AI like LLMs or Stable Diffusion, even prior to that machine learning was a huge thing.
Relevant XKCD.
That was released in 2014. You know what I can do now with my phone? I can take a picture of a bird and search to see what kind of bird it is. Reverse image search has been around for a while, but it used to just find things that were mostly pixel for pixel matches. Now it's much more capable.