Not amish.
Moral compass.
The only technology developed after 2021 was LLM’s and Stable Diffusion
This is the understanding of a “tech enthusiast”, not someone who’s actually interested in how computers work.
Thats a bad way of describing enshitification. Yeah people are not interested in buying stuff they already had but for a monthly subscription. That’s literally the only idea anyone in tech has had this decade. Do the same thing for a subscription and slap AI all over it. Get series A funding and sell the company.
In my mind it is not the age of the technology, but its owner or lack thereof.
Tiny minority very vocal on lemmy
I like technology (mostly pre-2010), but I think there’s been a philosophical shift in the things that modern tech companies prioritize. AI is a huge part of the problem obviously, but it’s more of a symptom than a cause.
I want something that I can repair and modify. I want the internals to be easy to access and made out of parts cheap enough for me to replace. I want to be able to play pretend like I’m Terry Davis and not have to deal with UEFI bullshit telling me what I can and can’t run on my computer.
It’s all a move to walled gardens with very limited access to the OS or hardware, where the focus is on touch screens and amplified UIs. I’m the kind of person who customized Xmonad and Vimperator (RIP, I know there are dupes but it’s not the same) to never even bother with a mouse, and so it all feels unnatural. I spend so much time fighting my autocorrect when I’m on windows or Mac products, another one of those “helpful” features that is forced and obnoxious.
It’s a move from computers as toy (LEGO set) to computers as toy (needoh squishy). They’ve become machines designed to deliver content and extract data while you zone out. Some of the most fucking fun I’ve had in my life has been spending 6 hours writing PERL to do something I probably could have done manually in 30 minutes or strange journeys into the windows registry as I try to figure out why all of my / changed into ¥, and that’s just not the vibe of anything in modern technology. Everything is designed to hide as much of itself from you.
Make it 1994 and I’m fine with it. Couldn’t care less. I’d trade it all to be back in 1994.
- Sooooo many great games and movies released then, and the 90s left a great catalog of both.
Pre 9/11, it was all transparent plastics and physical media. Those were the days.
Is “digital amish” meant to be a pejorative of some sort?
They say it like it’s a bad thing?
I guess if you consider the word “Amish” to be negative? I mean I despise Amish because of how they treat their animals, but I don’t consider it negative. I’d assume most people don’t.
Yeah it’s not really a bad thing if you’re about it. Religious aspects aside the (general, it varies) Amish approach to technology is that each thing is looked at very intentionally with community integrity in mind. Instead of everything for everyone, technology is considered a tool.
Most people don’t get cell phones to scroll tik tok slop, but they might let a business owner have one with a limited plan for planning jobs for their business.
Most people don’t get cars because they encourage people to live farther apart and are expensive, but they might allow solar charged e-scooters
Whoever sets up the first anti-AI town is going to do very well for themselves.
there should be theme towns for every decade with era appropriate technology in each one
Hollywood has this essentially but it’s for filming.
Didn’t people do the same thing when cars turned from awesome (60s/70s muscle cars) to shitty 80s cars?
Enshittification isn’t new. It’s just new to us because we weren’t there last time this song played.
Who said it was new?
I think that it’s not that people refuse to use new tech, I think it’s more that most of what is coming out is just worse in terms of usability and functionality in a lot of ways. Not so much a rejection of innovation, but a rejection of the priorities that major industry players have decided on. Like, “improvement” is relative, and what people care about isn’t being improved or actively being regressed.
They’re making bad products, and people don’t want them.
I am so overwhelmed by the visual clutter of Win 11 and the bizarre choices MS made. It’s like every time I want to do something fairly basic I have to relearn everything.
100% confirm.
I’m driving a rented car for work this week. It’s a 2025 Chevy Traverse. Not a single engineer was involved in making this car. It’s one of the worst cars I think I’ve ever driven.
The gear shift is on the steering wheel where the windshield wiper control arm would be normally.
Shifting requires pulling in that bar and then moving it up or down. To put it in Park, you press a button on the tip of it.
The parking break is also a button. But it doesn’t work unless the car engine is on. The car engine turns on by also pushing a button.
Windshield wipers? Button press. Windshield wipers plus cleaning fluid? Same button, but press it harder.
You want to adjust the treble or bass of the music you’re listening to? You can ONLY do that when the Radio is on. Then turn it off. Then switch to Spotify, etc for added Bass.
Near collision detection? It’s got the normal lights that light up. But it ALSO has a rumble pack in the driver’s chair that vibrates the left or right side of your balls if something is near that side of the car. How near? Someone walking by it on the sidewalk triggered it when I was at a stop sign, and literally jostled my nuts for 20 seconds.
This car literally sexually assaults you during near collisions.
Which I guess might be great if you’re suicidal and want to nut while almost dying.
I’m not going digital Amish, but I’m trying my best not to let tech oligarchs hoard wealth that they can use to pursue their take on techno feudalism.
Most things could be nice if they were done environment consciously with something else than profit-oriented data harvesting in mind: social networks, LLMs, even smart glasses.
If the Amish weren’t Christian, I’d be tempted to join them…
Ever heard of Wwoofing? There are tons of not christian international communities with their own vibe around. There’s also many more not listed aka you just kinda need to know people.
A lot of them live in severe poverty.
Even if that’s true on an individual level - they often pool funds as a community to those in need (mutual aid).
The Amish where I live are doing better than most people with their businesses, which are thriving in this economy.
Extreme religious austerity tends in that direction without eider community support.
eider
I’m assuming this was a typo – sea duck community support makes no sense – but I can’t quite figure out what the intended word was. Elder? Other? Something else?
Whoops, meant to write wider community support. Like Catholic nuns and priests have the congregation who tithe and a similar system for Buddhist monks as well as monks off a lot of faiths.
I’m not going totally “Amish”, but I’ve become a cranky bitch about technology nowadays. I was very passionate about tech throughout my teens and early twenties. Since then, I’ve watched every major tech company go to shit. Services I used forever go to shit or die. Companies harvest more and more of our data in creepier and more invasive ways. They went from “don’t be evil” and creating interesting new tech or shaking up an industry (Google fiber, for instance) to doing anything as long as it saves a dollar.
The only thing giving me any hope or interest in this space is FOSS and hosting things myself. It was confusing to me at first and still is in some ways, but not only can I solve my own issues, I can offer a lot of it to my friends and family. Having 10 different streaming services and finding where a show is within them is expensive and annoying, but I’m enjoying managing a library and hosting it on jellyfin. Then I can tell a few people, hey get jellyfin and type in this url, I’ll find whatever you want. I recently setup seerr so now they don’t have to feel like they’re bothering me when they want something, they can just request it (and see what’s new, upcoming, where something already is streaming if they already have that service, ratings, etc). Yeah it doesn’t support the show or movie but it’s a much more enjoyable experience. I stopped paying for Google drive and have all my pictures and videos (which is what used up all that space) syncing right to my PC, which then backs up to jotta cloud (not foss). I got off windows entirely (except at work) and use Linux now. I’m probably going to setup nextcloud and get a few people on there soon, since i have the space and it’ll save them a subscription.
I used to really push FOSS. I’ve run Linux since the late 90s. But I don’t know that I really believe it’s that much better anymore. I guess I kinda feel about the same as I do “organic” farming… It’s just not worth the price, effort, etc
