LIVING IN THE PAST

I'm writing one of these posts in the morning for once, so time is 
tight and I'll actualy have to make a genuine effort at being 
concise. The best approach is probably to pick a topic that I can't 
think off all that much to talk about, so here goes.

In many ways I'm living in the past. By reading Gopher you're 
probably with me on this to some degree, but it goes much further 
with me I think. To a significant extent the technology that I use 
as well as a lot of my cultural exposures are stuck around the time 
that I was born, in the mid 90s. This Pentium 1 PC that I'm typing 
with is about the same age as me, my TV is an old CRT one maybe a 
few years younger and frequently used to watch VHS tapes bought 
from garage sales and op-shops (where movies from the 90s are 
disproportionately well represented), my car is some years older, 
my house some decades older and its landline still my main phone 
even as the copper wires slowly corrode line-by-line.

The 21st century only really enters in order to maintain connection 
to the evolving world outside. VHS tapes are accompanied by growing 
numbers of DVDs as the wave of unwanted VHS tapes finally washes by 
only to be replaced by DVDs perhaps replaced by Blue Ray ("BluRay"? 
Who cares?) but more likely by illegal downloads and subscription 
streaming services which I can't imagine ever suiting me. Along 
with the DVD player, the TV has a set-top box to connect it to 
digital TV, and now HD digital TV (for me the most noticable effect 
of moving away from analogue was increased frequency of complete 
signal drop-outs). My internet is via the mobile phone network, so 
the tech to connect to that needs to keep up with the back end of 
that ever-changing technology.

I never have paid any real attention to Facebook or Twitter or any 
of those sites. If that's the modern culture I don't really want to 
know. I want people to buy things off me though, and to buy things 
off them online albeit usually for business purposes. So I've got 
to use PayPal, and Ebay (where I do also enjoy spending lots of 
time "window shopping" for obscure things even though I don't buy 
them (often no-one ever does, with the sort of things I looks at)). 
For that I still use a near 20yo Thinkpad, which isn't nearly as 
impractical as many people running bloated rubbish like Windows 10 
or mainstream Linux distros would claim.

Maybe I can't afford to upgrade in many cases. Genuinely though I 
don't _want_ to upgrade. The concept of upgrading is as 
manufactured as the new goods that we are pursuaded to buy. What I 
have works, it gives me as much pleasure as such technology could, 
and it should be my resposibility to keep it working, not to throw 
it in the tip due to one blown resistor, or a single broken 
bearing, or just not looking the same as the ones they make now.

Plus buying things is a hassle in itself, especially for someone 
who doesn't like dealing with other people, and it demands more 
work in order to get the money that it costs in order to pay for a 
terribly inefficient constant upgrading of one's own technology. 
You could just put that effort into looking after the technology 
that serves you already, and become self-sufficient in keeping your 
own goods.

Nope, I can't keep concise. I just rant because I haven't given 
myself time to plan what I was going to say. Oh well, the Thinkpad 
will probably be replaced soon because it really is getting tricky 
to use the likes of PayPal and a number of newer sites that won't 
work unless I let their countless useless scripts through in 
NoScript. I've had its replacement for over a year, also an old 
Thinkpad but it should be some order of magnitude in speed 
improvement. But it's the outside world forcing me to change, and I 
want to resist that. Maybe I would if I didn't need to make money 
from it. Hell I am anyway, I bought that replacement laptop over a 
year ago after all.

Culturally I'm my own little experiment. I think a lot of older 
people reach a point where they stop adapting to the changes of 
society. "Back in my day" and all that. They do this right after 
reaching the peak of their generation's combined influence, with 
their most successful numbers having risen up through society, then 
they fall out into retirement and the world overtakes them. It's 
possibly happening at its grandest scale right now with the baby 
boomer generation, whose parents probably never learnt how to use 
the internet and didn't/don't know what these young ones were 
"doing on their phones all the time". I'm loosing touch right from 
the start, and I think I'm all the more happy now for doing so, but 
where will I be when the rest of my generation is loosing touch? 
Will I be as out of place as a real 60s hippy is today?

One thing I do know is no more morning phlogs, they definately take 
too long.

- The Free Thinker.