Seventy-seven percent of middle-age Americans (35-54 years old) say they want to return to a time before society was “plugged in,” meaning a time before there was widespread internet and cell phone usage. As told by a new Harris Poll (via Fast Company), 63% of younger folks (18-34 years old) were also keen on returning to a pre-plugged-in world, despite that being a world they largely never had a chance to occupy.
This is also pretty common. People tend to think like that about everything they had in their formative years.
It’s nostalgia plus a realization of how entrenched tech bureocratic processes have penetrated their lives, oftentimes making them worse, not better (many of the improvements are taken for granted).
But my point is you can take this “old times were better” in most of every case when doing these surveys. About music, TV and everything.
What people really want are the benefits without some of the cons that they’ve very willingly accepted out of laziness and/or ignorance.
They’ve lost a ton of privacy and rights and ability to discourse and act by being so heavily surveilled and “panopticon’d” into superficial uniformity of opinion.
Many of the things they complain about they can still do “non tech/non online” but it requires more effort than pretending that there should be just one way so they don’t have to choose.