I would legitimately love this.
Hear me out… what if we do democracy 2.0 and we actually remove capitalism/religion from the picture entirely? Who’s with me?
AIM is social media.
See, what’s going on here is that “social media” is a word from normie culture. And if people only use the word in the context of normie culture, then it’s only used for normie websites. So people don’t see it used for geek media.
But if geek social media can exist, then AIM is social media. And geek social media can exist.
Discord, email, youtube, and piefed are social media too!
It’s called “The Matrix”. Based on the 1990’s peak of human civilization “to accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of ‘our’ nature.”
Can we get 90s cars there too? I can’t stand super high vehicles and dangerously bright headlights.
We can has buttons on our phones again, removable battery, and 7 day battery life?
Lan parties with Red alert?
Kirov reporting
The menenites I know use email and phones but keep it pretty work focused/practical.
I think the “beachy” Amish do the same too now days.
So you might just wana be Amish without the god part.
So you might just wana be Amish without the god part.
Also hopefully without the child abuse part.
You know what let’s just make a new thing.
I hate this idea that im old now and im supposed to hate modernity. Get bent. Go start your own cult and stay out politics please.
I’m not going to volunteer myself, but I like the idea of periodic checkpoints in case we hit a dead end of some kind.
Going back to the 90s not eating animal products would be rough.
Yeah but you’re going to be real tight with that one Indian or vegetarian buddhist restaurant in the county.
Tangential to this, some cities are starting to have Luddie clubs. NYC, LA, probably SF too. Look into it and start your local. “Summer of Ludd” is a good search term to learn more.
You guys joke but I would do this in a heart beat
I’ve never made a joke in my life
I think a commune based on a less jokey version of this where instead of rejecting all post 90s tech you reject like very specific things, or specific use cases of tech, would be pretty awesome. Like you could have electronics but no internet. Just your own intranet with self maintained message boards, and a library of PDFs/MP3s/Movies and TV. Stuff like that.
I want internet, but only at home on a desktop pc. Get this pocket internet out of here
I agree. I think a pocket device that only has GPS Navigation, MP3 player capabilities, and calling/texting would be perfect. Maybe some basic stuff like a notes, app, alarms, etc too. Stuff that’s actually useful.
Edit: This is actually basically exactly what my own phone is. It’s graphene OS with no google services and that’s what I use it for.
The notes, alarms etc part sounds like PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) to me. My dad used them extensively in the 90s and I would argue that they are the true predecessor to the modern smartphone.
I also remember my dad having a GPS device without a map. You could input waypoints and record a route and that’s it. I searches a bit and it looks like it was Garmin GPS 45 XL (but I might need to confirm that with him - I’m sure he has it somewhere)
There were also early examples of portable mp3 players in the late 90s. I think they were mostly held back by the storage density - the best option was the ultra small HDD (like the first iPod had in 2001). I think a portable CD player was the default back then.
So all the ingredients were there in the late 90s, just not in one device.
The most fun bit of tech history I found on the internet is this mp3 car stereo from 1999, which was running Linux. It had max capacity of 28GB for the music (2 HDDs). I don’t see myself needing much more than that even now. It was quite expensive, so it didn’t sell very well.
I’ve also read that people would drive with a PC in their trunk with some head unit, so they could listen to mp3s it in the car. It would totally be me if I were the same age as now 30 years ago.
yeah i was around back then myself. I remember using a walkman. That’s what portable cd players were called. The issue was that portable power was nowhere near what it is now. Battery tech has truly been revolutionizing and the efficiency gains we’ve made too. If you made a smart phone that was JUST those functions and used modern tech to do it while stripping out all the bloat its battery would last a whole week.
Yes.
I want a Commodore Callback (for the reasons you pointed out.)
But my GrapheneOS phone without Google is most of the way there.
Remember when you could have internet, but only if you let your computer scream at you for a little bit?
Amish 2 with a focus on 90s early internet culture?
AIMish
Spat my beer out. Thank you.
Alcohol abuse!
