the older I get, the more the technological changes I’ve lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn’t even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents’ house and our wall-connected landline; my mother’s first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend’s house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend’s massive CRT monitor wouldn’t fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room’s dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist’s in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that’s a decade’s worth of pictures I’d have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can’t ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don’t have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they’re obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there’s a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven’t had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?
I was born around the turn of the century. My grandpa loves to tell me about how the room-sized computer he worked on in the 60s used punchcards for input, but the biggest visible changes in my life were flattening computer screens, the smartphone to the smartwatch, and removing the wires from the earbuds.
And yet. I am a grad student studying computer science now, and even though the way we access our technology has somewhat steadied (desktops still look largely the same as fifteen years ago, smartphones are larger and have better batteries and yet still look similar to the first iPhone) I’ve learned that the pace at which our technology changes is only speeding up. I’m studying technology that did not exist two years ago. One of my professors called a paper from 2020 “outdated” this year, only three years later.
Our technology may still look the same for many years to come, but the architecture it is built on and the software it uses is changing at a dizzying pace. I don’t know where it stops, or if it ever will.
It’s both amazing and worrying to me, and I’ll remain optimistic that we can somehow keep putting appropriate guardrails in place as quickly as the technology progresses. But stay vigilant. Companies will take all they can from you when you’re not paying attention. Technology is a wonderful thing in the right hands.
I was born around the turn of the century.
You have no idea the temporal crisis I just had reading this line. “I was born around the turn of the century.” used to mean almost a hundred years ago when I was growing up.
I work in tech and when people ask me how I chose that career path, I like to joke that I didn’t, that it’s a made-up job - I support technologies that didn’t exist a year or two ago. I have no idea what I’ll be supporting in the next two.
