Considering I haven’t learned or come across anything of value to share to you guys, let’s indulge my imagination for a moment. What would my current life look like in previous generations? Hopefully, doing so puts the sheer exponential speed of technological growth into perspective and makes us grateful for the amenities of today.
2008 - A lot would surprisingly be the same.
- I’d have a thiqq secondhand laptop as my daily driver, and I’d probably still be into free and open source software. Coincidentally, it wasn’t much later that a student teacher would walk in with the most chuunibyou smirk on his face and pull out his laptop boasting, “Guys, it happened! Stand in awe at the power of Ubuntu,” as the rest of the class collectively yawned.
my first laptop - Gateway MT6705 (2007)
- I’d still be able to watch anime on the bus ride to school, although my passive immersion wouldn’t be anywhere near as condensed or automatic. I’d probably be more or less into the same anime, but the educational storytelling aspect wouldn’t be as strong due to less variety than today.
- My cell phone experience would be exactly the same lol - T9 typing on a feature phone.
my first cell phone - Moto EM330 (2008)
- I would have probably hopped off the MySpace wagon a long time ago, and would blindly deride Facebook as I do TikTok today.
- Streaming video would still be the hip new thang. No ASMR, but there would be owned compilations up the wazoo.
- Collaborating with bandmates over the internet would be just a tiny bit more inconvenient. We’d probably have to invest in server space (identical to what this site is hosted on, actually) to share files and music references since YouTube wouldn’t have every single song in existence as it does now. I’d probably have to swallow my pride and use proprietary services for group chatting (MSN, AIM), as well as Skype for video calling and screen sharing.
- I’d definitely still be a Landchad and have a personal website, and just like today, nobody would care.
- The kindle wasn’t out yet, which would make pirating books difficult. The .epub format had barely come out, so the only resource I can think of is hand-scanned, error-filled pdfs hosted on shady Russian servers. I’d probably just suck up the $10 and buy the paperback, hopefully used. Since I primarily want to read classics, so I wouldn’t have to splurge too often. And of course, I’d probably study with friends a lot more just to use their copy of the class textbook.
- Internet porn was as vibrant as ever, and with ubiquitous, high speed access catching on with my friend groups, I would need to make an active decision to not ride with the times and go down the rabbit hole.
- Discovering new music would still be relatively easy, but I’d have to put more elbow grease into finding new genres and artists, and not rely on the almighty algorithm to tell me what I like before I even know myself!
1993 - now we’re talking!
- I definitely couldn’t afford a computer, nor would I really have a need for one given the internet wasn’t widely used. I probably wouldn’t have a typewriter either since I would only use it for term papers; I would probably use a friend’s and save the money.
- Considering I would have recently weened off the media, I probably would have fallen out of date by not reading the tech magazines of the day and would have zero chance of ever encountering the Linux kernel.
- If for some reason I still got the itch to learn Japanese, I would have probably started on the useless, Rosetta Stone path and then immediately given up. Khatzumoto, was some 10 year old kid that hadn’t popularized AJATT yet, but on the off chance I encountered his theories elsewhere, I would have needed to spend a lot of time and money acquiring bootleg tapes of anime. My taste would be completely different, but 1993 was right smack in the middle of Rumiko Takahashi’s creative period that alone would provide me with hundreds of hours of immersion. And needless to say, VCRs needed mains power and couldn’t be run on a bus on my way to school, so I’d have to set aside dedicated time to do so. Additionally, not having a computer meant no SRS/Anki, so I’d probably have a mountain of paper flash cards.
src: Twitter, @telewaifus
- What’s a cell phone? I’d be hogging the party line - well actually, not really; no one calls me. But I would have to be more resourceful about when to place calls and be within earshot when they did happen.
- No social media means I wouldn’t have spent so many of my formative years comparing myself to others. Imagine all the saved time!
- No streaming video. TV was pop culture, and I’d have to tape stuff off local TV if I wanted to relive the moment with friends. My band leader would have tapes and tapes of MTV in the wee hours of the morning when they showed the exotic stuff, or not; I actually have no idea how MTV works.
- Collaboration with bandmates is relegated to whenever we happen to be in the same room. No group chats. No cloud storage. No internet. We would have a lot more sleepovers and lock ourselves in garages or studios to get work done - boot camp style.
- In 2008, there was still enough info and testimony online to sway my life direction towards independence and off grid living, but I can’t say the same in 1993. The odds of me coming to the same conclusions about the trajectory of my life are not zero due to libraries and magazines, but still slim.
- No pirating books. I’d have to suck it up and haunt thrift shops for the based and red pilled content I crave.
- Porn was mainly on physical media (magazines, tapes) and on pay-per-view, and I sure wasn’t going to spend my weekend, part-time $4.25/hr for something I’d mindlessly consume and gain nothing from. That being said, I would have been flying too close to the sun with my bootleg anime hobby, so the time to say “no” and be a good role model would have come soon enough.
- Discovering new artists would probably consist of me annoying my rich friends into letting me dub their albums onto my worn-out cassette tapes, as well as taping public radio in the wee hours of the night.
(not) my first boombox, but found in grandpa’s attic