We aren't going back.

Embrace the future and shape it how you can because the past is gone.

When I was in high school I remember feeling like I was finally becoming old enough to make real sense of the world and have actual adult opinions on things like politics that were not just parroting things I had heard my parents say. Of course what this meant in reality was that I had replaced my parents with Jon Stewart.

At this time the bogeyman du jour was a guy named Bill O’Reilly. He hosted the most popular show on Fox News from 2001 until right after Trump got into office: The O’Reilly Factor. His whole thing was basically a rotation of “things used to be better.” and “we must return to how things were, everything since (insert era) has been a mistake.” His point in time he wanted to return to was the 1950s.

When things were good according to Bill O’Reilly

His argument was that times were simpler back then. People had good traditional values. America was great. And in his opinion, this time could be achieved once again if we just all were a bit (a lot) more conservative.

Young me (clever boy), immediately thought it was obvious why he thought the America of the 1950s was so much better than the one under Obama. In the 1950s Bill O’Reilly was a child. The world of your childhood is always going to seem idyllic. You are sheltered from the economics and trials of the time. Your food arrives on your plate without you knowing what it costs. Your car takes you to your friends house without you being privy to the gas prices. Everyone is friendly… to you… because you’re a kid!

It seemed funny to me that a man in his mid 60s had a whole show moaning and groaning about politics with a central argument that was essentially: I miss my childhood it was so nice.

We became Bill O’Reilly.

As I grew up technology seemed to be a largely positive force. In elementary school it provided me with the Oregon Trail and the ability to massacre large herds of bison while having almost no impact on the American ecosystem at large. In high school it gave me a way to see naked women even though I had braces and wasn’t good at sports. And then as I graduated college it gave me an industry in which to gain employment. One that didn’t care what you majored in and was willing to give you a competitive salary and even some equity as long as you were a fast learner and a good hang.

Born at the right time indeed.

But then all of a sudden technology started to not feel like a bright light shining in the distance. Instead it was a dark presence that was engulfing everything. On the subway, on the street, my friends, my parents, everyone all the time just staring downwards at their phones. While waiting in line at the grocery store or during a commercial break of a show there was that itch to just whip it out. Just for a second.

This felt bad. How had this turned on us. It wasn’t the phones per se, but what was on them. The social media apps. The things designed like slot machines to hook you after they promised to just help you keep in touch with your friends.

I wrote about it more in depth here:

I think we're nearing the end of the scrolling era

The social media apps and their seeming turn on their own users, shifted the perception of technology in my mind (as well in the minds of many others). Now everything that came out became a cynical sleuthing exercise to try and find the catch or where the pivot would happen. How would they exploit us?

The newest one being the frontier AI labs. There is no doubt that these things make my work much less tedious. But where are they going to “get us?” When they need to show shareholders a few more bips of growth?

I am not alone here. Anti-AI sentiment is much larger than anti-social media or anti-smartphone sentiments were when those technologies first came about. I get it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

So the solution? We have to go back, right? Remember when we had flip phones?

We need to go back to those. We were happy when we had flip phones, right?

We need to take photos on film. We need to have an analog life. We need to pretend its 1999 again.

Are we not just getting old enough to become modern day versions of Bill O’Reilly? Was life so much better before social media and smartphones and AI or were we just… younger? Sheltered from the adult struggles of the time?

Some extreme nostalgics even reminisce about early AI image generation.

This is not just about running from technology. Just like Bill O’Reilly wasn’t just talking about politics. Its the aesthetics as well. It’s not enough to simply stop using the social media apps or the AI.

We need the early 00s Tuscan kitchens that were so common in the McMansions of the era.

We need to go back to the lighting techniques of the pre-Netflix era.

Movies, kitchens, and cellphones all need to go back 30ish years. Right?

---

---

We can’t go back. And that’s a good thing.

The ship has sailed. Life is not analog. The kitchens are not Tuscan. The world is different now. You may not like it, and you probably don’t want to hear this but: it is cowardly to retreat from it.

If you were a child in the time when your house had a “family computer”, then you are probably at the age now where you should start shaping the world you want to live in and not hiding from it. The future is coming. That is always true. But we can dictate how that future looks.

To just sit and lament about how it used to be is actually just whining. The kind of whining that they do on Fox News, just in a slightly different key. And you will just cede the construction of our world to the others who are looking forward rather than backwards.

It may seem defeatist and like I am throwing my hands up and saying to go quietly into that goodnight, something my namesake warned us not to do. But I think it’s actually the other way around. Saying everything sucks now and its billionaires and private equity and other powerful profit maximizing institutions that are making it so is defeatist.

Oh wahh wahh, life cant be good because the big evil people want it to be bad. Have a little gumption! Have a little faith in humanity!

It’s optimistic to say we don’t need to go back but rather that we need go through. That we can take all these that have been made and form them into something that better serves us.

It’s cool to be optimistic, to believe things will get better. To believe you and people like you can make things better. Nothing good in the world was made by cynics. So let’s stop thinking about how great our youth was (everyone thinks their own youth was great) and start imagining a way we can make the youth of the next generation even better than ours was. I want my kid to think (like I do) that he was born at the perfect time in history.

Don’t be Bill O’Reilly.