less_retarded_wiki

Modern

"Everything that modern culture hates is good, and everything that modern culture loves is bad." --fschmidt from reactionary software

So called modern software/hardware and other technology might as well be synonymous with shitty abusive technology. In a capitalist age when everything is getting progressively worse in terms of design, quality, ethicality, efficiency, etc., newer means worse, therefore modern (newest) means the worst. In other words modern is a term that stands for "as of yet best optimized for exploiting users". At LRS we see the term modern as negative -- for example whenever someone says "we work with modern technology", he is really saying "we are working with worst technology we know of".

The word modern was similarly addressed e.g. by reactionary software -- it correctly identifies the word as being connected to a programming orthodoxy of current times, the one that's obsessed with creating bad technology and rejecting good technology. { I only found reactionary software after this article has been written. ~drummyfish }

Modern Vs Old Technology

It's sad and dangerous that newer generation won't even remember technology used to be better, people will soon think that the current disgusting state of technology is the best we can do. That is of course wrong, technology used to be relatively good. It is important we leave here a note on at least a few ways in which old was much, much better.

(INB4 "it was faster and longer on battery etc. because it was simpler" -- yes, that is exactly the point.)

• Old technology was simpler and better engineered with minimum bloat. Fewer incompetent people were present in the field and capitalism wasn't yet pushing as hard on extreme development speed and abuse of the user, products still tried to compete by their quality.
• Old computers were faster and astronomically more efficient. Computers with a few MHz single-core CPU and under a megabyte of RAM booted faster to DOS than modern computers boot to Windows 10, despite Moore's law (this shittiness is known as Wirth's law). Old tech also reacted faster to input (had shorter input latency/lag), e.g. thanks to shorter input and output processing pipelines. { I've heard this confirmed from John Carmack himself in a talk on his development of VR. ~drummyfish } Back in the day things had to work smoothly -- if in the 90s you showed people a phone that you wake up and have to wait 20 seconds before it starts to react, they would laugh at it and on one would buy it -- nowadays such technology is the standard.
• Old devices such as cell phones lasted much, much longer on battery. The old phones such as Nokia 3310 would last long over a week on stand-by.
• Old software was shipped finished, complete and with minimum bugs. Nowadays newly released "apps" and games are normally released unfinished, even in pre-alpha states and even "finished" ones have bugs often rendering the software unsuable (see Cyberpunk 2077, GTA: Definiteve Edition etc.), user is supposed to wait years for fixes (without any guarantees), pay for content or even subscriptions. Some software "products" even spend their whole commercial life unfinished. Old software was difficult or even impossible to patch (e.g. Gameboy cartridges) so it had to work.
• Old tech had minimum malicious features. There wasn't spyware in CPUs, DRM was either absent or primitive, there weren't ads in file explorers, there weren't microtransactions in games, there weren't autoupdates, there weren't psychologically abusive social networks, technology was designed to last, with replaceable parts; not to be consoomed, there was much less censorship.
• Old tech was much easier to repair, modify and customize, thanks to not being so overcomplicated and not containing so many anti-repair "features". Old software wasn't in the cloud which makes it impossible to modify.
• Old software was better programmed because it was firstly made by actually the smartest people such as mathematicians and physicist (who were considering the big picture and saw e.g. the necessity for minimalism) and secondly without such a great pressure of the market because software was more a subject of research and experimenting rather than dirty fight for consumers. This can be seen even on commercial software such as games: for example the Doom engine was written very nicely, in an extremely portable way (which actually became legendary), with things such as an elegant deterministic FPS-independent physics (which results in many advantages and is basically THE only correct way of writing an engine) and software rendering that ran smooth even on that time's slow CPUs. Later engines from the same creators -- those of Quake games -- began to suffer from worse design (no deterministic physics, dropping of software rendering etc.). Nowadays software is written by high schoolers, women and incompetent minorities forced into tech just for diversity quotas and generally anyone who can just copy paste snippets of code from the web, extremely tight deadlines in the market race make it impossible to tidy any piece of software -- game engines (like anything else) nowadays are indescribably badly written, non-portable, non-deterministic, bloated, running slow even on computers thousands of times faster than those that ran Doom (even if you lower graphic details of a 2023 game to the looks of a 2000s game, it will likely run under 10 FPS on a 2020 computer).
• Old tech was much more independent and freedom friendly, did not require Internet connectivity, subscription etc. Thanks to its simplicity and better hackability it was possible for people to partly control their devices, even if the devices were proprietary. Nowadays if the manufactures of your phone (or even a car) decides it's time for you to buy a new model, he just remotely kills your device, and you can hardly do anything about it (this is actually happening e.g. with iPhones).
• There was minimum bullshit. True usefulness was more important than killer features and marketing.
• Old tech was simpler and more fun to program, allowing direct access to hardware, not complicating things with OOP and similar shit, and so old programmers were more "productive", less frustrated and stressed.
• Old "look n feel" of software was objectively better. Just compare the graphics of Doom and any shitty soulless "modern" game.

All content available under CC0 1.0 (public domain). Send comments and corrections to drummyfish at disroot dot org.