Pre-smart Phone Movies                                        05/29/26
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When I watch movies create and set  in 2008 or earlier, I feel a sense
of loss. I watch the world as it was when I was a young adult, without
smart phones, and I long for it.

Of course,  the world is not  a dystopia. When  I go out in  public, I
don't  see hordes  of people  with their  heads down  and their  faces
glowing  with the  reflection of  a screen.  Mostly people  have their
heads up and in the world. The same at the store, etc. Most people are
present, most of the time.

And yet, it's still not quite the same.

My wife pointed  out that when we  were young and we  had car trouble,
people would stop to help, or you  could walk to a payphone. Now, they
assume  you  have everything  under  control  and they  keep  driving.
Sometimes... my daughter  had a tire blow  out a year or  two ago, and
she called me on her cell. I went  out there to help her, and before I
could even get the car jacked up, someone had stopped to help.

Have things changed all that much? Or do we just fear they have?

The spectre of the smart phone might be nothing more than that, but my
feelings about  it are  real. I  haven't made  any effort  to quantify
those feelings or even explore them, I have just accepted them. I know
a lot of good and utility has  come from smart phones, but I can't say
that they please  me. I honestly can't say that  much of the direction
of modern  technology pleases me.  As the years go  by I get  more and
more  grumpy about  the  Capitalists and  Technocrats,  which feels  a
little odd.

I think I've  read about people's perception  of previous generations,
and how  this sort of  idealism around the  past is quite  common. But
this is a  change in my own  lifetime, where I lived on  both sides of
the change, and don't like the alteration.

As for  the movies, I  suppose I  can simply enjoy  them as a  sort of
fantasy, imagining  as I watch that  the world never moved  forward in
the way that it did.