Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Software is stuff, very much so. Or at least something worth caring about.
The boardgames I used to play as a kid? Replaced by videogames. Mail chess? Chess.com. TV? Streaming. Notebooks for planning, notes, recipes? An app. Physical maps? An app. The Encyclopedia? Replaced by Wikipedia, plus I can for the most part freely access scientific papers as they're published on pubmed, arxiv, etc.
How do I learn things like cooking, sewing, gardening, woodworking, chemistry, or look up information? Used to be a trip to a library, asking around, searching for experts in the phonebook, etc. Now I can google stuff, youtube is full of how tos and instructional videos, and LLMs can spit out semi accurate answers to common problems that are hard to find on google.
People complain how newer appliances are crappier, but the price to income ratio nosedived.
All that said, I agree that we lost things, and that some things got worse. Replacing physical buttons with touch controls in cars springs to mind. Architecture is another common example.
Architecture has certainly got worse in the last 100 years, but in the last 15, I'd say we've probably seen an improvement. New Traditional Architecture is picking up steam as a movement. Governments and developers are realising that building nice-looking buildings isn't an esoteric mystery lost to the sands of time. I predict in another century people will looking back on C20th architecture with embarrassment.
Okay, that first article calls out Beijing’s CCTV building, which is…actually really cool? Or insane, or futurist in a way that makes people think “we can do that?”
Something similar goes for the Guangzhou opera house. It’s not as physically impressive, but it does make me think of Halo: Reach’s vision of the future. Maybe the builders want to send a transhumanist or utopian message. Maybe nice cornices just aren’t the right tool for that.
I’m not offering a blanket defense of modernist slabs. The London National Theatre sucks, and there are plenty more where that came from. And when we consider the mass-produced architecture which trickles down to our houses and shops and parks, I expect the traditionalist language scales much better than exotic futurism. More ways to screw up a design which doesn’t fall back on the familiar. More ways to crawl up one’s own chimney.
I'm less sympathetic to modernism than most, but I can agree that I'd be basically fine with it if it was limited to a handful of high profile buildings in city centres. There's always the small chance that such a building becomes iconic, like the Sydney Opera House or the Eiffel Tower.
But building this when we could just as cheaply and easily build this is an affront to God.
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