The immature 1980s industry was a lot more fun than any decade since. The problem with the future is that when it arrives it tends to bring amazing things, but they are still executed in a way that is disappointing, annoying and clumsy.

I remember thinking in the early 1980s, when I struggled to get my first dot matrix printer to work with an old instrumentation computer that in the future printers will just work. And then the future came and printers became orders of magnitude more frustrating to use — let alone own.

And I remember the early days of the internet and later the web. How much more fun it was. Now the Internet is this annoying, enshittified sewer that I have to tolerate in my life. If I could I would have preferred for it to not play any part in my life anymore. I can understand that most people who were born later than me can’t imagine life without the Internet. This is people’s lives now. But I can still remember what it was like to be entirely free. To have more real relationships with people you liked.

I used to think people who got rich and left the tech world to pursue more “offline” interests were perhaps a bit nutty. Now I understand where they come from. The ultimate privilege today is to not have to care, to not take part, to just drop off the face of the world/internet.

I need only open my email to be reminded of how little I want to be online.