https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

This is the perfect example of where this ideology fails. You can _still_ find furniture like those bought in the 1800s that stand the test of time. Cabinetmakers exist and would be happy to build nice furniture that will outlive both the cabinetmaker and yourself. In the age of the Web many of them advertise their services online.

The reason most people don't buy furniture from a cabinetmaker is because their furniture is _expensive_. Make no mistake, furniture in the past was quite expensive as well. Families would save up to buy furniture and preserve it at all cost because of how expensive it was to get nice furniture. Wealthy families would have nice furniture passed down for generations while poorer families made do with their seconds and thirds. Moreover cabinetmakers in the past often relied on cheap stocks of solid wood. In the present, wood has become more scarce due to overforesting and environmental concerns. When you buy furniture made from MDF it uses an order of magnitude less wood than a solid piece of Oak or Poplar made in the 1800s or even plywood from the 1960s. This comes at the cost of worse load-bearing capabilities and brittle joints.

The difference is that consumers now have the option for cheap, environmentally friendly furniture. If a consumer wants long lasting furniture, they could do what most cultures did in the past; save up for furniture over years and commission a cabinetmaker for their services. If you want furniture that lasts made of mostly solid wood and/or plywood, cabinetmakers would be overjoyed to work with you. Most consumers don't care enough about furniture to inflate the cost 10x for long lasting furniture. That's their choice as consumers.

A luthier I met in Berlin had a large stock of wood in their workshop. I asked him what it was for, and he said "oh, that's my supply for the next 10 years, I add to it every year to keep it about the same size".

Granted, luthiers use less wood than a cabinet maker.

You mostly can't. I always wanted quality wood furniture and once I had enough income I went shopping. Nothing. It can't be bought anywhere that I can find. Eventually gave up and bought the nicest office furniture I could find but it is still a very nice veneer over junk plywood. And even that was many thousands of dollars because it is a nice veneer instead of a cheap junk veneer.

> Make no mistake, furniture in the past was quite expensive as well.

Not really. Both my grandparent families were dirt poor small farmers and the furniture they had was orders of magnitude better quality than anything I can find or buy on a 2020s silicon valley tech salary.

In the past, the capability to build cheap furniture just wasn't there so everything you bought was made from solid wood and was hand-joined which is why your grandparents' family's furniture seems so much stronger. The market also had a floor on how cheap it could get before mechanization and the invention of composite materials so it was "easy" to find expensive furniture and "hard" to find cheap furniture. FYI plywood can make furniture that outlasts individuals and has been in use in furniture since the early 1900s. When you're thinking of crappy veneered engineered wood, you're probably thinking of MDF and OSB furniture. Most furniture at retail furniture stores are majority MDF and OSB because of cost and largely weight as both plywood and solid wood tend to be very heavy for their load bearing capabilities.

Silicon Valley area.

At the very top of the market, yes, one can get fully custom furnitue to any spec you like, for a very high price. I know a few people who have done remodels with such custom furniture and the cost has been over 100K on the low end to closer to a million on the high end. Even with a senior silicon valley salary, that's as good as impossible.

That's why I mention that in my grandparents generation, even low-income families could afford solid quality furniture. Today it is a privilege limited to those who hit major IPOs.

Then go to an antique store. They restore old, expensive pieces, the same way people in the past would pass down heirloom furniture and the same way most poorer folks would buy their furniture. You're just not going to be able to get new, solid wooden furniture as cheap as you did even 80 years ago and this has nothing to do with the "good old days before progress for the sake of progress". There's exponentially more people in the world now, correspondingly less wood, and greater awareness about how to sustainably forest. Modern cabinetry is done with PPE to keep the woodworker safe and shops are ventilated and vacuumed to keep the area clean.

None of this has to do with the "good old days before progress for the sake of progress". The ideology itself is tautological; instead of exploring what the problem is, it purports itself to be the solution to all problems. Good cabinetry is still available in the market at expensive prices but there are reasons why solid wooden furniture has become more expensive. These reasons are immaterial in the face of "good old days before progress for the sake of progress", even though PPE and occupational safety has been some of the gains made through this "progress for the sake of progress."

It wasn't for the sake of progress, it was for the sake of profits. Making something almost as good that costs half the price is what the US has been doing for the last 30 years. After 30 years of "almost as good," turned in to absolute shit when compared to the older stuff.

Technology of course isn't bad for the sake of being bad. Electric tools is what allowed the old furniture to be so good at a reasonable price. Wood glue and sawdust being pressed into something that looks like wood but falls apart fairly easily, is an example of when technology makes things much worse and is used strictly for maximizing profit at the expense of quality. There's a lot of that today.

Right so let's dive into that a bit. Why is this maximizing profit? Because solid wood is expensive. Why is solid wood expensive? Because it's a limited resource. I can guarantee you that if governments took away forestry restrictions that solid wood furniture would start to be built in a matter of months as new wood mills setup churning through previously restricted lands, at least until the Earth is deforested and climate change wreaks even greater havoc than it is already. Then once the forests are gone, the wood industry will collapse and wooden furniture would end until some brave government musters the will to repopulate a few forests.

Profit isn't the scary boogieman that this ideology likes to make it out to be. Profit is the difference between revenue and expense. Reducing expenses is a way to use resources more efficiently. In this case, we stave off deforestation by pressing low-quality wood scraps and sawdust into OSB and MDF boards. Would you rather we deforest the Earth instead? Remember that working with OSB and MDF is tricky because of how brittle they are as materials. It is much easier _and cheaper_ to design processes around solid wood or plywood if possible. Fundamentally wood is a limited resource. Learning how to use wood more efficiently is what allows more humans to have a quality of life where they can afford furniture at all while keeping the Earth forested.

In general though, applying the critique that chasing profits has impacted furniture quality is shortsighted. Margins on furniture are tiny. Consumers only have so much money they are willing to spend on furniture and cabinetmakers and industrialized furniture companies respond in kind. The critique would be more cogent _if_ furniture profit margins were higher but they really aren't. Unfortunately, wood really is just that expensive. Don't believe me just ask some woodworkers. Or go to the lumberyard and just try to do some rough calculation on how much it would take to build a piece out of solid wood.

This all comes back to my main point. The ideology that progress/profits/conspiracy is what's making things worse and the past was a better status quo is tautological; there's no proof or even research necessary to make the statement, only the invocation of conspiracy (c.f. profits.) Markets are complicated because reality is complicated. Some markets are indeed full of morally bankrupt boards charging huge margins on cheap goods. But reality has a surprising amount of detail and using some tautological ideology to advocate for technological regression is short-sighted.

Go talk to a few cabinetmakers and ask them about their feelings (or complaints lol) on Ikea furniture. I can guarantee you that will give you better insight into the world of furniture and wood than making a tautological anti-capitalist statement would with ideological eschatological fervor.

>Why is solid wood expensive? Because it's a limited resource.

Wood is a renewable resource, it gets cut and replanted all_the_time. Pine is a 30 year cycle and our country is full of it. Can you tell me what restrictions you think are in place preventing tree farmers from growing and selling trees?

> ideology

You keep saying ideology. What ideology are you talking about specifically?

>we stave off deforestation by pressing low-quality wood scraps and sawdust into OSB and MDF boards

Trees are a crop just like any crop, they just have a much longer grow cycle.

>In general though, applying the critique that chasing profits has impacted furniture quality is shortsighted.

It's really not. There is a market for higher end furniture made at an industrial scale, but it's just not being met. Chasing profits at the cost of quality is obvious everywhere you look, if you think it's not been happening I don't know what to tell you.

>The ideology that progress/profits/conspiracy is what's making things worse and the past was a better status quo is tautological; there's no proof or even research necessary to make the statement, only the invocation of conspiracy

You contradict yourself. You said if you want quality wood furniture, buy antique.

>Then go to an antique store. They restore old, expensive pieces, the same way people in the past would pass down heirloom furniture and the same way most poorer folks would buy their furniture.

Nothing. But they also aren't growing the kind of wood your grandparents' furniture was made from.

The trees grown today are the fastest growing varieties available, and are correspondingly softer on average. You certainly couldn't dig your thumbnail into a plank of old growth pine like you can into a modern 2x4 (even though pine is technically a softwood).

Young-growth, sustainably farmed pine is a very different product than the thick growth pine that older generations used for their furniture. I'm confident that sustainable pine is being grown anywhere someone thinks they can turn a profit buying the land and then growing pine. After all, MDF and OSB are originally made from the scraps of these young pine anyway. Sustainably grown pine is hard to grow and mostly comes from the Southern US these days. I urge you to try to grow your own sustainable pine farm if you disagree.

> You keep saying ideology. What ideology are you talking about specifically?

The ideology that it's profits/progress/some conspiracy which drives change causes inequitable distribution of resource.

> Trees are a crop just like any crop, they just have a much longer grow cycle.

Crops are complicated. They grow in certain climates, under certain growing conditions, at certain rates, in certain soils. There's physical realities we have to contend with with crops. They aren't an unlimited resource we plant and reap. Get too greedy and you get the Dust Bowl. They're even hard to regulate and subsidize without ill-effects, like America's glut of cheap corn thanks to farm subsidies.

> Chasing profits at the cost of quality is obvious everywhere you look, if you think it's not been happening I don't know what to tell you.

That's what I mean: ideology. It's "obvious everywhere you look". The flat-earthers say the same thing, along with the QAnon folks. "Trust your eyes not what the politicians say." These ideologies are seductively simple answers to complex questions. Whenever you dislike the quality of something, it's "chasing profits at the cost of quality." The explanation does not need to contend with different input goods, resource types, markets, or anything. No observations, other than personal dissatisfaction, are needed to make the conclusion stick.

> You contradict yourself. You said if you want quality wood furniture, buy antique.

In the past many people couldn't afford quality _new_ wooden furniture. They would buy used furniture. You can still do this now at Goodwill or any local thrift store or used furniture store. The difference now is that poorer folk can afford to buy low-quality new furniture instead of used furniture. The middle-class would save a bit and buy what we call "antique" today, restored pieces of old wooden furniture. The wealthier and some of the middle-class would save up to buy a few nice pieces and have a few heirlooms to lean on. I'm confident that if you spend a few years saving up, you can save up for antique furniture. If you're a highly-paid SV tech worker, I expect a few years of savings could let you pay for a cabinetmaker to make you furniture. The wealthiest, then as now, could commission what they want when they want it. If you're annoyed at progress, you can make the _same choices_ people used to make before progress. It's just that people don't make those choices anymore because other choices are available.

For most people Ikea furniture delivers what they need at a price they are comfortable with. It lasts long enough. If you don't move homes and are careful not to bump your furniture too often Ikea furniture can last decades. It took me decades to get rid of my Ikea furniture from college and I just sold it to someone else. But don't blame profits when the reality is differing market conditions resulting in different preferences.

I have land with pine on it, so does a colleague of mine It's a really good long term investment. Plant for $10K, harvest 30 years later for $1M+. I mean do you have land, or are you just hypothesizing? I suspect the latter.

>That's what I mean: ideology. It's "obvious everywhere you look". The flat-earthers say the same thing, along with the QAnon folks. "Trust your eyes not what the politicians say." These ideologies are seductively simple answers to complex questions. Whenever you dislike the quality of something, it's "chasing profits at the cost of quality." The explanation does not need to contend with different input goods, resource types, markets, or anything. No observations, other than personal dissatisfaction, are needed to make the conclusion stick.

If you can't attack the idea, attack the person. It's not my ideology, it's market forces. You haven't show any numbers, just hyperbole. Show me somewhere that the margin on particleboard is less or the same than the margin of hardwood of the same furniture type and it will be more convincing. Companies are motivated by profit, pure and simple. To deny this is to deny understanding of how companies work or their purpose for existence. If they can cut costs, they will. If you think they will never cut costs at the expense of quality, I'm not sure what world you live in. Granted, there are exceptions, but of course they haven't dropped in quality so those aren't the companies I'm talking about.

Show me somewhere that the margin on particleboard is less or the same than the margin of hardwood of the same furniture.

Where does people preferring to purchase cheaper furniture fit into this?

I can afford furniture that lasts 100 years, but I have no desire to. I would rather spend that money in other ways. My IKEA stuff lasts plenty long.

I believe you, which makes me curious when they would have gotten it, and from where. 1940's? 1970's?

EDIT: I was poor in the 70's and the best you were likely to come across (as a poor person) was fingerhut crap so I'm guessing it was earlier than that.

> I believe you, which makes me curious when they would have gotten it, and from where. 1940's? 1970's?

That would've been early 1900s, pre-WW1.

Do you have any proof of those assertions? You're strident in defending your ideology but this claim seems fantastically unsubstantiated. I remember trying to help parents and non technical friends use Web 1.0. they'd get URLs wrong, forget which TLDs a site hung off, clicked on phishing emails, and deal with hundreds of pop-up ads. Web 2.0, as much as this wasn't a buzzword, was a strict increase in usability for every non-technical person I know.

I have no idea precisely what you are calling "Web 2.0" because in my mind, the technology elements of Web 2.0 outlined on the wikipedia page definitely have absolutely nothing to do with "getting URLs wrong", "forgetting TLDs". Changes from the same time period (around 1999) that were not typically considered to be part of "Web 2.0" were also responsible for a dramatic increase in the prevalence of popup ads. I think you're talking about something entirely different.

> Web after widespread JavaScript was strictly more usable for non-technical people.

I suppose that's true. The "web" now has more reach, and generally user interfaces have improved, and JavaScript has had many positive effects on that improvement. But none of these things are necessarily causative, and may be more or less coincidences along the timeline.

JavaScript solves some issues to do with presentation, and allowing web browsers to compute things instead of needing a server to. It also allows dangerous security holes, browser malware, spying on the user and a host of "bad things". So whether the overall experience is an "improvement" cannot be easily argued.

There are some "Web Applications" like browser based videoconferencing that would be impossible without JavaScript. Whether these belong "in the browser" is debatable. However the misuse of JavaScript to lazily construct or decorate web content is a growing problem that is denounced by all sorts of people, including web developers and ordinary users who find their pages take ages to load, or function sporadically, or leak information.

Have you used Gemini? Give it a try. Many non-technical people find it very "usable" and it is a technology on-par with Web 1.0 in many ways.

> Generally I see the anti-Web2.0 digital vegan perspectives to be about opposing JavaScript.

:) The DV arguments are much bigger and broader than JavaScript. But to put it in that context for you; most people like myself argue that JavaScript and other "web technologies" have transformed it into something that isn't the web any longer. It doesn't function as an information publishing and distribution system. It's still called "The Web" by dint of evolutionary lineage, but in reality has transformed into something unrecognisable (a surveillance engine and content pushing system). The simple, safe and widely understood function (that some here are calling Web 1.0) is now forced to live alongside something else with no clear boundaries or distinctions between them, and no sense of what parts of that technology are operating when you visit a site. This is very bad for everyone regardless of the usability gains obtained. I hope that makes sense.

Technologically, there isn't much to separate the eras, except perhaps the deprecation of Big Iron approaches to infrastructure in favor of horizontal scaling with commodity hardware, but that's really a spectrum rather than a sharp division.

The Web 2.0 era really hasn't ended, regardless of how the web and it's infrastructure has evolved in the past 20 years. There are various candidates for what will define the next era, but so far none that are indisputably "it".

This doesn't seem right. AJAX was one the main breakpoints.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150910072359/http://adaptivepa...

It's a logical argument with one premise - that fewer people used the internet in the past than today - which I hope you can accept without further proof.

There is a lot of rosy retrospection when it comes to the old web, but really, most blogs were a pretty lonely place back then. It is hard to deny how modern solutions allow even someone with the most limited technical skillset to establish a meaningful online presence. Web 1.0 simply did not provide the same level of accessibility.

True. We cannot take it back in it's entirety, nor would we want to. But for some people that quickly becomes the argument for a kind of technological irreversibility principle, that we cannot take back any mis-step or feature no matter how immediately awful and obvious its effects. Left unchallenged that entitlement becomes an argument for bullheaded intransigence and the labelling of whatever suits us as 'progress'.

In reality many "genies" are strategically limited; poisons, invasive species, bio-agents, nuclear materials, knowledge hazards, weapons, bad poetry...

Sure, I am really glad we won the crypto wars and that "code wants to be free" etcetera, but on the other hand that seems to have set off a kind of megalomania in tech, which legitimises turning the entire digital world into our own personal laboratory for experimenting on everyone, sans ethics oversight committee.

> The general public needs their nuggets of endorfine.

Here we go again "saying what people need" for them. I meet a lot of people desperate to get off the digital morphine drip.

> There is a lot of rosy retrospection when it comes to the old web

It seems like that. I've made a more elaborate argument in other threads. You're right that it's "rosy", like all nostalgia. Of course the past was crap in its own ways. But melancholia is a symptom of crisis, retro is a sign of interregnum and loss of common sense (literally our common sense of things). What does it mean? It means that our "progress" isn't serving us fully, and in some cases causing people to recoil from it. Not acknowledging that would be an error.

> Web 1.0 simply did not provide the same level of accessibility.

Of course not. But there are many qualities/metrics by which we might judge things if we are to avoid what I'd call the "democratic fallacy"; external cost, stability, longevity, coherence, security, safety, interoperability, accuracy and truth content, environmental cost.... Technology is multi-dimensional. Accessibility is all lovely and cool, but it should not be put ahead of more important human concerns. OTC opioids are more accessible than street drugs ever were, that doesn't make it an unqualified "good thing". So we can still enumerate the ways in which Web 2.0 is worse than Web 1.0 without invoking nostalgia for a "smaller cosy digital world".