the thing that bums me greatly is that nobody in 2040 is going to collect and show off SD card camcorders, but even moreso, nobody is going to do 2040 youtube videos about the weird products of this era because almost all of them can be explained simply as "this was a scam"

even the products that are genuine examples of businesses trying to push the limits of technology will almost certainly have turned to pumpkins and will be impossible to document. just plastic and inert silicon

scams in the 80s were at least interesting because they weren't that commonplace. you can cover virtually any 2010-? product by just walking on camera, saying "it was a scam for investment money and was not intended to work" and walking off.

the VR headsets will all require patches that were never delivered as standalone files, only streamed from servers. half the hardware too. hell, i can't even get the firmware for my video switcher that fixes the bug where I can't rename the inputs.

i have been thinking for some time that the retrospective analysis of manufactured goods is enabled almost entirely by the uniqueness of the 20th century, where we were hit so hard by new technology that we, as a culture, forgot to keep cheating each other for a bit

and also, the idea of outlandish products might have been a thing that happened in the 20th century and will never happen again.

much of tech youtube - hell, whole swaths of youtube - exist only because the whole 20th century was full of businesses trying to make things they didn't have the technology to make, and didn't have the sense not to try

techmoan's entire ouevre would be nonexistent if solid state media had been developed in the 50s. he basically exists to document the tragedy of manufacturers feverishly trying to create MP3 players and camcorders without the existence of flash memory

solid state memory is here now, and not going anywhere, and that suddenly changed everything, and now there's virtually no reason for new formats. silicon in general virtually eliminated any reason to make weird things. everything is three chips - processor, ram, interface

virtually everything electronic that *existed* from the 70s to the beginning of the 2010s just goes up in a poof of smoke if you add solid state storage, replaced by a black box with a button and a speaker and a screen.

the smartphone is the combination of all technology into one boring device that does everything it does well enough that i just sleep through announcements about new technology

without the infuriating limitations of electromechanical storage (tape, disc, HDD) suddenly the number of problems left to solve shrinks so abruptly that you kind of look at industry and go "god, why do we have all these businesses? surely we don't need nearly this many anymore"

every camcorder made since like 2007 is dead boring. i don't care about any of them. number go up. that's all they have, number go up. there's been 14 years of camcorder reviews on youtube that are basically content-free because they just work.

there's still people making audio players and every one is identical to an archos from 1999. you put files on a card and it plays them. there are no weird limitations. no interesting failure modes. it works until the li-po pack runs out of power, and that takes two weeks.

computer communication used to be interesting, then 10baseT dropped and nothing has changed since then except number go up. same protocol. same hole. same cord. the only interesting stuff is happening at a molecular level. normal people can't see it.

the inexpert public is no longer an active participant in technology. the last 15 years have been nothing but black boxes that we are assured are doing special things inside but cannot audit or marvel at.

short of melting the top off a chip and looking at the traces there's nothing left to analyze. the thing always does whatever it says it'll do, or gives an error message that says "Error"

what will we do when we're out of 90s? out of 2000s? there's nothing coming to replace it. we're gonna have to pivot all our post-AVGN, post-ashens, post-techmoan, post-AvE youtube channels to boat restoration

the technology got so good that we lost interest in making good things, because even the bad things are so good that nobody really cares or notices anymore, and so the market is just gone, and there's no products anymore, just number go up

every week the Next Thing comes out. playstation 8. playstation 12. 16k video. 24k video. nobody knows what else to do because our TVs just look like a window and we don't really want better pictures anymore. we didn't expect to finish technology. the end guy was hard

i miss caring what was new at the electronics store but i also know that was a phenomenon that lasted 40 years and was never guaranteed to continue, and also that it's better this way.