Recently I saw an Instagram video that romanticised the analogue experience (I love those, and yes, I ignore the irony of watching it on Instagram):
A young guy, somewhere in the middle of the USA, wearing jeans and a plain t-shirt, fuels up his old pickup truck. Next to him is his loyal Labrador. He then climbs into his car, starts the engine, puts a cassette into the tape deck — we hear old country music playing, something about life's simple pleasures, — shifts into gear and unhurriedly drives off somewhere. The music plays, the dog in the front seat squints in the sun — it's pure bliss. The caption reads: 'Call me crazy, but we don't need any more technology.'
But that's not what this is about. One of the comments under the video reads:
'2005 was the cut off. We had cell phones, DSL internet and great consoles with massive libraries of games. That was good enough.'
I would just add to this: We should have stopped.
I realise I risk turning this thought experiment into a nostalgia exercise, but I started remembering my own 2005:
I was sixteen, applying to a university. I was preparing for exams with tutors — you couldn't just Google everything back then, so I relied on human connection and professionalism of the teachers I studied with. Still remember every single of them. My literature tutor, for instance, personally knew Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was still alive at the time — told me quite a lot of anecdotes about him. My mobile phone was always with me, but I only used it a couple of times a day — mainly to call my parents at the end of the day to let them know I was fine, heading home, and to ask if they wanted me to get anything at the grocery store. Or let them know if I passed the entrance exam (I had a lot of them that year).
When commuting I listened to music on an MP3 flash player through wired Sennheiser headphones (I could usually fit about two albums in MP3 format, so the player must have had 256 or 512 megabytes; I’d listen to them for a week, then plug it into my laptop and swap them for other albums — I still remember and love many of them to this day). I didn't play video games much (and when I did, it was stuff that was already considered classic — Fallout 2, StarCraft: Broodwar, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn). Downloading the complete works of Robert E. Howard's Conan from the web, though (I bought the second volume on paper, which contained stories finished by other authors based on his drafts) — that was an absolute must. I remember sitting on a small chair in front of my laptop in the living room, reading it straight out of a Word document on a laptop screen.
There is a lot more I could recall, but honestly, I think I agree:
That was enough. We didn't need any more technology.