[eternityforest]

I'd hate to see them regulated, or... how would I ever remember anything? With paper? I'd be hosed if I lost it, and I lose... everything.. including my keys and wallet.... all the time, which I also use my phone to find.

The 1990s solution was just to really amplify the public space. Things like the rainforest cafe were very normal aesthetically. We essentially used clickbait in real life.

Smartphones are one half of it. The other half is we have kind of deprecated public spaces as an idea. We hardly even have them besides restaurants!

Even virtually, we don't have anything like true community forms to the degree we used to. Single player epics are a major game genre. Watching netflix is the new pastime, etc. Most of our big cultural things are fairly private now.

We even talk about privacy probably more than any other technical topic, and that is very new. Nobody but pirates would have known what a VPN was till know, and it was common to not care what the NSA knows about you(Ok, a lot of us like me are still like that).

And at the same time, everything has become about sex more than ever before, and even that seems to be more of a private thing than a public Hollywood drama spectacle.

The concept of a "dream job" is widely mocked. Everything seems to be seen as just some infrastructure to support private life.

What do you... do in public exactly? We are told every day it's just place you go to get ready to be at home.

Banning phones would just lead to everyone staring at a wall instead of a phone, until we actually restablish the public sphere as a real thing.

[brnaftr361]

We've been very unconscious about our acceptance and deployment of technologies, and I don't know that there's really any way around that. It's sort of a Catch-22, technologies empower the individual. Reflecting on it, they tend to create a path of least resistance which is typically isolated (visiting Radio Shack in person as opposed to online). This isolation is inhumane though, we're social animals at heart, but it's way easier to find exactly what you want in the online catalogue of literally everything than it is to move around in the physical world, dealing with x, y, and z. Ultimately, as an arbitrary unit (society?), we've sort of walled ourselves into a really undesirable landscape that I'd argue we're pretty actually fucking averse to.

We hand off these novelties to future generations without any real bearing, all the organizations, traditions, adaptations, and more or less say "You figure it out." And the craziest thing is just the fucking rapidity of it all. Think of life in the 1920's. People have lived that long, 100 years. Imagine the cognitive whiplash watching highways and motor vehicles emerging, radio, television, the nuclear bomb, commercial airliners and transcontinental travel being trivialized, mass warfare, helicopters, wireless communication, calculators, computers, internet and the list goes on - every alteration of the nuanced fiber weave of the social fabric that all those techniques have shorn, altered or displaced.

We have no real reference point in the here and now that can comprehensively assist us in a meaningful convergence, we've sort of been shot into a dark vacuum entirely unconscious of the consequences with the pretense that it's what we desire. But I think we're quickly coming to find, at least those conscious of the implications, is that what we desire isn't necessarily good for us.

But the thing is, I don't think it's probable that we could really retard the unraveling of a technology. If it wasn't Ford it would've been someone else. I don't think it's possible to limit human curiosity, if not culture A, then culture B will ask the questions.

[SyzygistSix]

>it's way easier to find exactly what you want in the online catalogue of literally everything than it is to move around in the physical world

Perhaps if cities and communities were pleasant places to walk and bicycle this could change. In that case, the traveling is a positive addition and makes the trip enjoyable rather than a negative cost.

[SyzygistSix]

>The other half is we have kind of deprecated public spaces as an idea

We used to use the coffee house/bar in my town as the public house, where news was spread and discussions took place. The demise of such places has been very unfortunate and our interaction is now much poorer in both quantity and quality. Facebook/Twitter/Reddit are poor replacements, although I do like my town's subreddit.

I really don't know how we are going to reestablish public places again but I hope it happens. I would love to see something like the cafeterias in Mexico City where people go to have coffee, eat, talk, play games, and catch up with each other.

[mellavora]

> how would I ever remember anything? With paper?

memory is a skill. Paper is useful.

If I want to remember something I write it down, or I train the memory. The phone is so ephemeral, just a vague cloud without landmarks or permanence-- how would I find the information again after I put it in my phone?

Your system (probably) works well for you, and I'm happy you have something which serves your needs.

[eternityforest]

Memory has a limit. I'm about 90% sure I have dyspraxia which is an ADD/Dyslexia/etc type condition, and have essentially never been able to learn.... anything to a 100% reliable level.

At the moment I'm using a custom app called Drayer Journal which is designed to solve the permanence and search issue with P2P sync, Heirachal organization, and exporting subtrees as shareable documents. Unfortunately it's a KivyMD prototype and I'm not sure I want to rewrite it in something less buggy.

It does seem that for whatever reason, most artistic fields were doing better without present day tech though.