this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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The tech has evolved a lot. Especially in the FOSS area! And I am thankful for the progress. But along the way, the average culture is what I miss the most. Do I miss the very convoluted, fragile, non-standardized, and hard to configure hardware? Heehee naw.
This image is nostalgic because it recalls when personal computers were conceptually personal, even when they were public. New tech was fun and exciting.
Some of my fondest memories were easy LAN parties and collabing on XP-era machines in my 3D Studio MAX class. Also, computers didn't feel near-useless without an Internet connection.
It's been said before but bears repeating: "The Internet was a place." It didn't follow you everywhere, spy on you, sell you out. You weren't supposed to divulge your whole life to strangers, but somehow you still made new friends.
People logged in to hang out. Heck, know what I miss most? People seemed to have TIME to log in and hang out. Even busy people. These days I feel hurried to smash out a text message while in motion.
People made personal, expressive, whimsical websites for fun, and not just as a hopeful web-dev portfolio. The Internet was only about making money for tie-wearing squares; everyone else just did things for the fun of it.
I think that's what we miss. People were learning and using these miraculous machines that were capable of anything.
Now the machines are consumption-first appliances primarily aimed to drain your wallet and personal information, and the people have gotten so dumb. Computer literacy dropped with all the rest of kinds of literacy, and I long to find a way to push against that tide...