I really don't think that specific emotion is isolated to gen z.

I remember all the promise and excitement that tech had back in the late 00's and early 10's. Things were unique and fun. That's just not true anymore. Every new software update adds shit that you didn't ask for and don't want (AI, ads, removal of user freedom). New hardware releases are either an underwhelming iteration of specs from the previous version, or an unimaginative device that has the same basic look and feel as every other device it's competing with.

Tech used to be fun and exploratory, now it's just companies pushing to see how much they can be allowed to exploit you for the least cost.

Tech in the 1980's - 2010's was hopeful, beneficial, and fairly consumer oriented. Tech today is mostly some sort of scheme for recurring billing while openly assisting the modern surveillance state. It's no wonder modern tech feels icky.

Tech used to promise a better life. Now it requires a subscription and wants your biometrics just to lie about pizza toppings to you. Sounds like gen z is on the right path.

Is it "discomfort", or a full rejection of the values represented by the enshittified tech companies and their LLM-cronies?

I'm tired of tech being everywhere from cars to toasters I still prefer analog things that do the job and only that job.

I don't need my internet connected fridg to tell me what groceries to buy while selling my data to insurance companies

There's nothing wrong with the technology, it's who is running it all that needs to be fixed, with the general f*ckery that is through everything now I miss my 2400 baud modem that was bigger than my computer and dialing in to a BBS.

Modern technology is great. It's massively cheaper and more performant for orders of magnitude less money.

Consumer technology on the other hand, is cursed.

The problem is that nobody needs to know how to use technology anymore. Every piece of consumer hardware and software is designed so that the company does all of the work for you and then rents you the fruits of the technology. Now you're eternally dependent on someone else to operate your technology for you because you're constantly paying the people that are ensuring your technological ignorance.

Don't worry about learning how to store mp3s or manage your music Library! Just pay Spotify, YouTube Premium, or Apple Music $10/mo!

Don't worry about needing to learn how to backup your data or to store you photos, just give Apple $29.99/mo! Shopping for hardware is hard, learning the difference between a Megapixel and a Megabyte is for nerds! Just buy the iPad, iLaptop, iCamera, iEarbuds, it only costs 50% more than it should!

Dealing with .mp4 and .mkv files, too complicated! Don't worry about needing to learn anything about movies, Netflix/Hulu/Disney/Paramount/Amazon/AppleTV/etc will gladly take your $20/mo and do everything for you!

Don't like your computer's OS being filled with advertising, spyware and AI? Too bad! Your only options are 1. Live in Apple's Walled Garden, 2. Put your entire life's worth of private data on the auction block for the lowest bidding advertiser for the benefit of Microsoft's shareholders or 3. Give your cellphone provider and Google root access to your entire life!

Yes, this is a 'Just use Linux' comment.

It's not really discomfort. It's the fact that any benefit technology would give us is being monetized and abused to the point where it's not enjoyable. I have this phone because employers expect to be able to contact me 24/7, and because governments want to spy on me, and companies want to harvest my data so they can profit from me. In return im given just enough to make it to the next day, and a screen to distract me from how fucking pointless our society is.

A skilled/educated American worker should be able to retire comfortably at 50 without having to worry about how they'll afford healthcare.

Companies make millions off you, then you give a few thousand because they know if they ever paid you a fair share, we'd all realize how much they've been robbing us this whole time.

If I was gen z I would purely hate how I grew up. They got the worst if it. Well, them and alpha.

No wonder so many want to go back, I do as well! Give me all of our civil rights of today (minus US idiocy, I mean actual first world countries ) and take me to 1995-05 somewhere.

"to live in the past" is so fucking dumb, it shows that the person who wrote that title and the publisher who approved it thinks depending in AI, not caring about the data collected from you, jumping into whatever new popular thing and never having any critical thoughts about where this is all going is a good thing and the future.
They're actually living in the now and making choices from that and for the future, they understand the objectively bad practices and shitty behaviour of the late stage capitalism we're living in.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that the problem is not the technology, but who controls it.

If we actually taught digital literacy in schools, and democratized access to technology, people could be making their own software made for solving problems instead of capturing attention!

The sad thing is they aren't really equipped to live in any world but the one being created for them. All the education indicators are trending down. They can't do much without an internet connection and apps

Bullshit. This sounds like a dumbshit conservative article written in hopes to belittle gen z into boomer thinking.

It was that good in the 90s, enshittification is only more visible now as you have gotten older and better at identifying it.

I had an idea for a sci-fi setting where criminals are held in stasis like Demolition Man or Minority Report except the point isn’t to keep them away from society or rehabilitate them. It’s to rob them of their time in the present assuming that things are only going to bet worse.

Xennial here. I got rid of most social media years ago (FB, twitter, etc.) and never signed up for a lot of others. I'm replacing my google pixel watch with a pebble. I'm open to ditching my android google phone as well once something works properly with all the Japanese government and banking services. Thinking about how to degoogle.

It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows back in the '80s and '90s, but I definitely feel like we should take back some of our balance, security, and comfort (though streaming and recording video can stay).

The worst damage to computers was done by U.S. Congress in 1972 when they fired ARPA IPTO that invented the Internet and the foundations of everything we now have in enshittified form. The direction was fantastic until then.

The sick sad history of computer-aided collaboration
https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
(long story)