I remember being in a computer store in 1993 and we were lamenting that CD based multimedia was kind of unexciting and burning out as a trend and wondering what would be next. Tech seemed to be getting boring at that point. This was right before Linux and the Internet came in the scene of course. Before that software development sucked. Most algorithm libraries cost money or even had royalties and a lot of devs implemented them from scratch because of that.
Things were awesome in the 90s though. Computers really doubled in speed every two years or so. It was incredible. The internet was new and totally anarchic. Linux kept winning and winning. Little sites could get to the top of search engines. Google and Facebook advertising were super cheap and effective. Things got better every year.
After 2016, probably because Trump won and tech got all the blame, things started to go downhill. Trump winning was like the tech version of 9/11 to the people who like to take the fun out of tech. That's when all the tech censorship and heavy political scrutiny started. Things had already been deteriorating for some time, but all the Stallman hacker ethos free speech energy started quickly draining away and getting replaced with fear of saying the wrong thing. That's when code of conducts started showing up and you had the woke invasion of all the big open source projects. Tech, which had previously been an independent island above politics, now had an influx of gatekeepers and paranoid "ethics" enforcers. People were scared that tech was too powerful and could do too much.
There's still crypto at least. Anything that has a heavy top down control element in crypto just falls flat on its face because the community rejects it. That's where the next Linux and internet will probably emerge from. That's the only thing these days that feels like the early BBS and online days in the early 90s currently. The people making things suck are always watching though. For example, consumer 3D printing is likely about to get killed in its infancy because of ghost guns.
Things were awesome in the 90s though. Computers really doubled in speed every two years or so. It was incredible. The internet was new and totally anarchic. Linux kept winning and winning. Little sites could get to the top of search engines. Google and Facebook advertising were super cheap and effective. Things got better every year.
After 2016, probably because Trump won and tech got all the blame, things started to go downhill. Trump winning was like the tech version of 9/11 to the people who like to take the fun out of tech. That's when all the tech censorship and heavy political scrutiny started. Things had already been deteriorating for some time, but all the Stallman hacker ethos free speech energy started quickly draining away and getting replaced with fear of saying the wrong thing. That's when code of conducts started showing up and you had the woke invasion of all the big open source projects. Tech, which had previously been an independent island above politics, now had an influx of gatekeepers and paranoid "ethics" enforcers. People were scared that tech was too powerful and could do too much.
There's still crypto at least. Anything that has a heavy top down control element in crypto just falls flat on its face because the community rejects it. That's where the next Linux and internet will probably emerge from. That's the only thing these days that feels like the early BBS and online days in the early 90s currently. The people making things suck are always watching though. For example, consumer 3D printing is likely about to get killed in its infancy because of ghost guns.