> How can we be cool, when everything that's happening is so very far away?
You are conflicted here. On the one hand there's a whole new world available to tinkerers and poor people alike:
low cost SBCs and rich ecosystems of knowledge, peripherals, open source software packages, and maker communities. OTOH consumerism turns once cool and magical things into mundane commodities for the masses.
Being cool is no longer expressed by being able to wield the magic wand of exclusive and arcane insider knowledge or access to hardware.
Being cool means creating your own semi-autonomous robot. It means providing teaching tools to the less fortunate at affordable prices. It can be achieved by realising your creative potential in new and unexpected ways (smart mirrors, automated hydroponic gardens, interactive art, ...).
Many of the things you mentioned regarding applications moving away from us (and into the "cloud") were never even cool to begin with. Streaming is just TV in new clothes. Social media is just the digital equivalent of high school hallway gossip. [edit]I understand you never mentioned these particular applications by name, but it's what most people actually use the cloud and computers for these days[/edit]
The difference between cool and consumerism can be little things: a digital picture frame is boring consumerism. A digital picture frame that has a motion sensor, a camera and facial recognition that only turns on if you move towards it, identifies you, tries to guess your current mood and picks an image accordingly, however, would be something I'd consider to be pretty cool.
The best part about it is that you can probably build something like that for less than $100 and it'll work offline using OSS components only.
So consumerism is both a blessing and a curse - it enables products to be affordable for a general audience; at the same time it takes away the "magic aura" surrounding incredible technology and its applications.
You are conflicted here. On the one hand there's a whole new world available to tinkerers and poor people alike: low cost SBCs and rich ecosystems of knowledge, peripherals, open source software packages, and maker communities. OTOH consumerism turns once cool and magical things into mundane commodities for the masses.
Being cool is no longer expressed by being able to wield the magic wand of exclusive and arcane insider knowledge or access to hardware.
Being cool means creating your own semi-autonomous robot. It means providing teaching tools to the less fortunate at affordable prices. It can be achieved by realising your creative potential in new and unexpected ways (smart mirrors, automated hydroponic gardens, interactive art, ...).
Many of the things you mentioned regarding applications moving away from us (and into the "cloud") were never even cool to begin with. Streaming is just TV in new clothes. Social media is just the digital equivalent of high school hallway gossip. [edit]I understand you never mentioned these particular applications by name, but it's what most people actually use the cloud and computers for these days[/edit]
The difference between cool and consumerism can be little things: a digital picture frame is boring consumerism. A digital picture frame that has a motion sensor, a camera and facial recognition that only turns on if you move towards it, identifies you, tries to guess your current mood and picks an image accordingly, however, would be something I'd consider to be pretty cool.
The best part about it is that you can probably build something like that for less than $100 and it'll work offline using OSS components only.
So consumerism is both a blessing and a curse - it enables products to be affordable for a general audience; at the same time it takes away the "magic aura" surrounding incredible technology and its applications.