alt Hacker NewsThe over arching theme of your article is "tech is fun again because we're escaping the monoculture" but there's a strong unspoken signaling of "look at how cool I am". You're saying "my tech choices signal discernment." You've got this curated counterculture vibe of being off mainstream by being on different mainstream platforms.
The shifts taking place are all reminiscent of the shift from Windows to Apple that started in the late 90s. Back in the early 2000s we had Jony Ive channeling Deiter Rams and telling us how cool Helvetica was. And the "I'm a Mac" commercials beating us over the head with metaphor.
You talk about tech consolidation as something that emerged in the 2000s that killed the fun but consolidation has always been there. Technology is about making your life easier and consolidation is a part of that. When a product can reasonably be consolidated into another product, it often is. Look no further than Swiss Army Knives, the Leatherman, Telephone answering machines, boom boxes, or countless other technology chimera. Even your Meta Ray-Bans are a combination of the Humane AI Pin and sunglasses.
You wax poetically about the need for devices to feel personal, that's always been there. It still is but refinement often is about distilling something down to it's simplest possible form and that's where we're at with Smartphones. So the degree of customization is limited to cases and colors in much the same way as a Swiss Army Knife.
We haven't escaped the monoculture. Bambu Labs is the new 3d printer monoculture. Meta is the AR monoculture. Options like Linux have always been there, they just weren't cool. Gog for example is nearly as old as Steam.
What's changed is that we've slowly moved from running code on our devices to running in the cloud, which has made the choice of device or ecosystem less relevant. Linux is emerging as an option because Apple has grown to be more like Microsoft with age and they're both stuffing tracking and ads into every corner of their platform. They're no longer cool.
To me this article reads as soft elitism with a side of mid-life crisis.
> there's a strong unspoken signaling of "look at how cool I am"
I think tech should feel cool to the person using it, but it won't make a person cool either way. And it's an odd thing to fixate on.
> You're saying "my tech choices signal discernment."
I'm saying I have choices (at least, relative to earlier). I can use a Mac (or not) and that can tell you much less about the type of phone I have than a would have a few years ago.
> Bambu Labs is the new 3d printer monoculture. Meta is the AR monoculture
Then it's not really monoculture? It's narrow rather than cross-all-domains. I'm fine is there's a "toaster brand" everyone buys, or everyone likes Dyson vacuums, as long as it's not Apple producing it.
From what I see there appear to plenty of alternatives to Bambu. Instead of smugly calling people amoral because they bought a popular 3D printer, why not explain what's wrong with Bambu? I still genuinely don't know the criticism. Is it proprietary formats? Banning IP infringing content on their store? DRM? Industry lobbying for something nefarious? Lawfare? What is it that are they doing...?
> To me this article reads as soft elitism
Wouldn't the Apple bro archetype signal this more strongly? I think you may have seen a Leica in the list and way over-indexed on that, while it's actually at quite old D-LUX Typ-109 (not much newer than the Canon it replaces).
And I think the smug condescension throughout the response is closer to a kind of elitism, no?
> side of mid-life crisis
Hopefully I'm not at mid-life quite yet, and definitely not in crisis. That aside, I’m not sure it's useful to frame a critique of an article that way.