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MelodicBerries  virtus junxit mors non separabit  1yr ago (freddiedeboer.substack.com)   3364 thread views

It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive

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You used to do things and have places to do them

Psychologically, humans work best by having delineated spaces for mental activity. The internet reduces the uniqueness and salience of these spaces. This is something that needs to understood if we’re talking about which era was best. Music stores, blockbusters, movie theaters, or even hanging out in a parking lot takes on more meaning when there is no competing stimuli input. Smartphones (why do we call them this again?) are a constant competing stimuli, and are manufactured to be addictive. The act of buying a video game or renting a movie is totally different when you don’t even have the possibility of glancing at a social media feed. Hanging out with friends is an insulated and calmer environment when you are not comparing to social media and posting the act on social media.

Albums and CDs can also act as unique objects that enhance the salience and memory of the music we listen to. From a UI perspective, Spotify is horrible for creating unique memory-spaces

Smartphones (why do we call them this again?)

Pedant answer: smartphones are capable of more general-purpose computing, while a "dumb phone" or "feature phone" is more purpose-built and focused down. It's not exactly a clean delineation, as pre-iPhone cellphones had built-in operating systems of their own and could even run some Java-based games. I guess the best distinction is if you can ask "is this basically just a computer that can take a SIM card and make phone calls?" and answer that with "yes."

I don't think smartphones were originally designed for addiction's sake, it's just more that phones combine the already-extant superattraction of desktop computers with the ability to take that computing potential literally anywhere. It's really in the 2010's where smartphones became "good enough" in terms of specs to really displace regular PCs for browsing the internet and other things--plus, having a built-in camera and microphone on top of that makes it very handy for some things. I think that's pretty much why you see the whole "always online" thing nowadays: without smartphones, we'd still have some of the same problems, but laptops and desktops are less, well, mobile (laptops have portability, but may require wi-fi connections only--no cellular internet, no real mobility). You have to get up to do stuff away from the computer at some point. Not so much with phones.

From a UI perspective, Spotify is horrible for creating unique memory-spaces

Oddly enough, I find the music service Bandcamp to be kind of a solution to what you and Freddie criticize Spotify for. You don't need to subscribe (instead, you can just pay for albums a-la-carte like iTunes, except also many artists make their releases pay-what-you-want), and while you can listen to your collection from the desktop website or the mobile app, you can also just download it to your PC and listen on a program like VLC. I find I have no trouble remembering some albums I've bought, whether I've streamed them from Bandcamp's servers or played my local copy.

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