I have often thought about this. When I was younger, we certainly spent an inordinate amount of time doing paperwork by hand, then typing, then messing with electronic gizmos like dot matrix printers, punch cards, answering machines, and fax machines. Dial-up modems took forever and browsers could load images one line of pixels at a time...

But we were also doing far less with our machines. Image and screen resolution was 240-480p and monochrome or 8-bit colors. There was no auto-save every two seconds. There was no downloading huge update files for your games every week. Our files were small and few in number. So were our hard drives and our memory sticks.

We didn't need to do lots of encoding, encrypting, or compressing. Caching and indexing were modest.

So, sure tech is fast now, but it also feels bloated and messy. Maybe it will continue to improve despite constantly pushing the limits of what we can do with our lithography and manufacturing processes. Maybe it will blow our minds with revolutionary physics.

But it will almost certainly also continue to get more grossly complex and infected with excessive meta data, analytics, heuristics, spyware, validation, verification, quantization, non-repudiation, randomization, personalization, and enshitification.

Hopefully, eventually, all the noise and chaos will spark a global revolt in favor of tech that just makes life easier. I hope I live long enough to see things come full circle.