Mac(os)talgia is exploring my 2020 work-from-home routine with an added touch of nostalgia. How would have the same workflow looked like with the tools of today and the limitations of yesterday.
I would take this Mac OS 9 design of Slack, Zoom, and Figma immediately.
How the rise of internet surveillance, algorithmic polarization of social media, predatory app stores, and extractive business models have eroded the freedoms once promised by personal computers.
In the short term, we can do things like support open projects like Linux, support non-predatory and open source software, and run apps and store data locally as much as possible. But some bigger structural changes are necessary if we really want to launch the era of Personal Computer 2.0.
I’m relatively new to the indie blogging, so I’m always on the lookout for new blogs to follow. What works best for me is when I come across a blog that references another one I almost always click through, check out the “About” page, and skim the article archives to see if their content interests me. If it does, I’ll add their blog to my RSS feed.
This is exactly what I do as well. I have never used any directory to find interesting blogs—okay, maybe once—but the point is that linking to other people is a natural way to discover exciting things.
I love it when I have ten tabs open related to a topic and browse the web as we used to.
Using the web for discovery feels like how time was presented at the end of Interstellar. The past, the future, and the now exist all at once, and you can go anywhere on the timeline.
Notes from Avoiding Distractions in Modern Computing:
Most of the upcoming generation will never experience “slow computing”.
Slow computing can be done in a “distraction” heavy environment like email. It all depends on how we set up our tools and what we let our computers do. I can still control a lot of aspects of macOS and iOS and I don’t feel them distractions, but simple tools.
It baffles me that people buy pricey phones and have no idea what these devices are capable of. All they do with them is browse TikTok and Instagram.
It is like a blank canvas with no outputs, just waiting for a command about what I would like to do next. At this point I might navigate to a blog directory and open a document with my text editor of choice: emacs. When done writing this post I will add it to git, my text versioning system. After this I do whatever I please with the text file. I might push it to my central blog repository where a static HTML file generates on a public area or I may pipe it to some other program. This is the Unix philosophy.
The terminal-based environment can feel like an island of peace. Not because apps are distracting but because it is a limited interface that is very easy to control.
Some people, like me, feel at home with a customized Unix prompt.
Look what I’ve got!
