We're not just supersaturated; we're shaped by tech more than we shape it. Tech has become essential and inescapable. You can't fully participate in today's world without a smartphone. That phone and its underlying contacts, media, interfaces and databases are the world. Tech has become yet another necessary mainstream commodity, like electricity or plumbing. Nobody gets excited by those anymore, either.

Today, everyone expects to be able to contact you anywhere anytime. That's an mind-blowingly different way to live than before smartphones. (I'm a mid-boomer. The pre-electronic world I was born into is SO long gone.)

Smartphones are by far a bigger change than the other computer-based tech watersheds that came before -- the arrival of PCs (especially since they weren't networked until 1990), or the arrival of online info (web) which was accessible only by PCs, ca 1995. Only 10 years after that, the arrival of smartphones and social networks changed the definition of "tech" to be a state of mind: "being online, connected, and accessible all the time". Now we're used to it, so it's lost its charm. In fact, it's probably true that tech has become more annoying or addictive than fun. Who wants to dance to tunes dominated by trillion dollar mass-manipulative corporations?

That's why tech is no longer cool. Today's New New Thing isn't changing your life anymore. Not in a good way, anyway.