Some days it feels like every company on the planet wants a piece of me. Certainly more than I want to give them, that’s for sure. Makes me miss the good old days.
I miss the good old days when you could buy software outright, and didn’t have to pay a monthly subscription for “features” you don’t want, let alone need. Didn’t have to open accounts to use the functionality you don’t need because of the one thing you do need.
Didn’t have to use the same account across all your devices.
Though I suppose you don’t. If you don’t mind have multiple emails with multiple accounts to go with them.
And the days when you could have just one email, that you didn’t need a second to send all the junk too. And a third for all those subscriptions you don’t want.
When you could send an email to a supplier without having to go through several pages of outdated FAQ before being presented with a form which doesn’t give you enough characters to describe the issue you’re querying about.
Where it was possible to make your own mistakes without some AI asking you whether you meant to type their, or did you perhaps mean there.
Their. There. They’re.
I miss the days where you could bumble around the internet looking for answers without some AI offering you a summary of web posts that it turns out don’t actually answer your question, and in which you know some of the information in the summary is incorrect in your country.
Possibly in every country.
Where ginormous ads and sign ups didn’t open up to the entire screen, forcing you to reduce the size of your display so you can find the teeny tiny x which will, if you’re lucky, close down the pop up rather than opening some other thing in a new tab.
Where you could happily type a blog post without one of your plugins offering you an AI to maximise the impact of your content. Even though you’ve declined a thousand times and disabled that part of the plugin.
Honestly – at this point I’m inclined to pay to not have AI content thrust at me all the time.
The days when searches used Boolean operators instead of making you guess which question is more likely to get you closer to the answer you need.
When you could see your friends posts on social media without having to go looking for them. The days when you could see actual posts, rather than ads.
And more and more ads if one of them catches your interest.
When you could go to the shops to buy something without having the sales assistant offer you a loyalty card, or to sign you up for email updates, or invite you to download the shop app.
It’s no wonder so many people prefer the self-service check outs – it’s the only way you can get a bit of peace and quiet.
Except the sole attendant wants to watch the video playback because they’re sure you haven’t scanned something, or have fed the wrong produce item into the register.
When it was possible to update your software without having to go back and put all your settings back the way you like them, (Bluetooth off, WiFi on, predictive text off, etc).
When your new tech didn’t breakdown the day after your warranty expired.
And you might disagree, but I preferred it when you could rely on there being no mail deliveries on the weekend. When you could close the gate, put your feet up, and not worry about your packages ending up lost in some distribution centre waiting for you to collect them.
Or smashed to pieces on the drive by the delivery guy who doesn’t want to take it back to the delivery centre.
When you could buy a new keyboard without having to figure out how to turn the light displays off.
But.
Nothing stays the same.
The future is coming, and when I get there, I’ll be lamenting the good old days I’m living through now.
And I just hope it doesn’t get worse.
