Nostalgic Toxicity

While I love being neck deep in the retrocomputing hobby most of the time, there's a small slice of it I don't really talk about, one that wears heavy on many of us, I'm sure. At least those of roughly the same age/generation I am (millennials).

And that's this pain, this longing for a future that we felt like we were promised, but never got, because we somehow ended up on the bad timeline and the thing that we used to love is now being used to, effectively, kill us.

For me, my "era" was the mid-00s. That's when I started getting into computers. I also didn't exactly grow up in the best household either, all of us living on fixed income. So I made do with less, and that meant old Macs and 90s PCs that were outmoded even when they first released. But it was okay, because for the most part the internet hadn't become this heavy behemoth like it is today. AIM still ran perfectly fine on potato hardware, for example.

But PC gaming? Oh man. I had a subscription to Computer Gaming World at the time (before they had rebranded to push Games For Windows) and just seeing all this absolutely cool stuff people were doing with PCs, I wanted this. But sadly, there was no way on this earth I could ever afford any of it. Me and my crappy little Celeron PC could only eke out like 20fps in UT99, if I was lucky. If I wanted decent-performance gaming, I usually turned to consoles.

This is what I love about retrocomputing. I can go back and acquire most of the hardware teenage me would have killed to have, and experience games and software the way I wished I could have back then.

But then there's the flip. In using old OSes like Windows XP, or older OS X on the Mac side, it really feels like we lost something along the way to where we are today: Software back then had a soul. XP with its iconic Bliss wallpaper and blue/green taskbar just invited you to play around with it. OS X with the Aqua UI that Steve Jobs famously said would make you want to lick it.

Even hardware had more of a soul. The G3 iMacs. The old Alienware machines. Hell, even Dell and HP knew how to have some fun (with the XPS 700 and Blackbird 002, respectively).

But more important than all that, at the time it felt like the user experience and technology were both in lockstep with eachother. Tech developments were mostly for the quality of life of all of us, giving us more methods to communicate and talk with eachother over vast distances. It felt like technology was a net good and there were high hopes for it, rather than it being seen as a net negative like it is today.

It was exciting to be a nerd, because we got revolutionary new stuff with each passing year, and it was stuff to legitimately be excited about! SATA meaning we no longer had to deal with cranky drive interfaces. Both Windows and Mac OS moving to next-generation underpinnings that made them suck way less. The advent of multiprocessing for everyone. The launch of devices like the iPod and iPhone. I could go on and on, but the point is things were exciting, and in a good way!

Then the 2010s happened, and the soul just started leaving everything. Hardware slowly began settling into this monoculture where everything started to feel the same. Everything started becoming sterile and safe. Microsoft went above and beyond with Windows 7 (which was just dripping with aesthetic) only to strip all the soul out of it with Windows 8, which I really feel was the true start of The Reckoning.

Apple joined in not long after, with the release of iOS 7 and Mac OS Yosemite adopting the flatter look, stripping out most of the soul of their software (that arguably started with Leopard but it was offset by cool things like Time Machine).

This is also when things previously thought to be either good or okay began to turn on us. Google had a leadership change and this eventually resulted in them pretty much losing everything that made them a Big Good in the 00s. Zuckerberg was always kind of a creep but Facebook was still seen as a more mature alternative to MySpace...until Facebook began turning on us, hardcore.

In addition to the soul being sucked out of everything, this is when disposable hardware really took off: MacBooks went from being relatively serviceable to becoming entirely integrated such that if something like your RAM went bad you were now the owner of a fancy aluminum and glass brick. It wasn't like the old days where you would just repair your hardware and carry on: You suffer a small failure, whole system's a brick because fuck you, pay us.

(It could [and should] be argued this is because of good 'ol capitalism. Because back in the mid 00s there was money to be made and growth to be had just...catering to everyone's needs and making good products and generally Not Being An Asshole to your customers. But as growth slowed and saturation became a problem, these companies were expected to pull profits out of their ass and had to resort to worsening their products or experiences just to make more money. Hence making hardware that was no longer built to last or be repaired.)

I think you get the point. Mid-00s tech painted this rosy picture of a bright future where things didn't suck and everyone would live in happiness forever. The mid-10s arrived and that dream is as dead as the Zune. (And now the AI bubble is just accelerating the enshittification.)

Using this old tech is to let the 13 year old kid in my head get some sustenance and enjoy himself, even for a little bit. But the 30 year old that lives in there too just looks at it and can't help but feel that deep longing, that pain that comes from realizing that there was once a time when you had hope, when the future looked bright, sunny, and was something to look forward to.

But now most everything you used to love has now been turned against you, and only exists to exploit you rather than help you. The interests and hobbies you have are either being burned down by tariffs, or burned down by AI. It's a hard feeling to sit with, and if it's one you don't have when sitting down with old stuff, I definitely envy you. Because while I enjoy messing with this stuff, it's hard to not hear the part of me that feels we were robbed of the future we should have had.