Noah Smith’s rumination on how technology has changed the world since he was young really resonated with me:

When I look back on the world I lived in when I was a kid in 1990, it absolutely stuns me how different things are now. The technological changes I’ve already lived through may not have changed what my kitchen looks like, but they have radically altered both my life and the society around me. Almost all of these changes came from information technology — computers, the internet, social media, and smartphones.

He goes through several examples, and comes to this conclusion:

Sometimes technology grows the economy, but more fundamentally, it always weirds the world. By that I mean that technology changes the nature of what humans do and how we live, so that people living decades ago would think our modern lives bizarre, even if we find them perfectly normal.

Like him, when I think about it all and compare it to life in 1990, “I can’t help but feel a little overwhelmed by how far we’ve come.” And yes, I miss some of the things Noah mentions in his post—I have fond memories of “getting lost” with my wife in European cities. But for the most part I am much more in line with Clive Thompson’s thinking in his book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better:

Today we have something that works in the same way, but for everyday people: the Internet, which encourages public thinking and resolves multiples on a much larger scale and at a pace more dementedly rapid. It’s now the world’s most powerful engine for putting heads together. Failed networks kill ideas, but successful ones trigger them.

His book is a wonderful perspective on all that we’ve been living through.