Technology

Remember when we could only watch what had recently been on TV and cable companies were trying to lock people in to specific cable boxes that couldn't skip ads and we paid $120 per month for ad supported content and cable companies would attach random fees and everyone had to buy hundreds of channels to only watch 4?

And we'd build movie and music collections of physical media we had to keep in our homes and cars and we'd listen to the same three albums for months and if we were lucky enough to get a TV series box set, it'd set us back many hundreds of dollars and we'd have to remember which disc we were on and navigate arcane and slow menus?

And when we had questions, we had to find the answers ourselves by reading long form content and just be satisfied that there were many questions we couldn't answer at all because the information wasn't available?

Or when we wanted cabs, we'd not know how much a ride would cost until after we got to our destinations and they smelled like rotten farts and were covered in boogers and our only goal was to not touch anything and look out the window because what's a smartphone?

And when we wanted to go somewhere, we had to ask for directions and use atlases to figure out how to get to the general area of the destination, then drive in circles, accidentally drive past a turn 5 times because the street we were supposed to turn onto had two different names and we had been given the wrong one?

I was there and anyone who pines for the old days can just go there. We have cable and encyclopedias and taxis and atlases. Go nuts.