Nobody Wants to Admit the Best Boomer Opinions Were Right, So I’ll Take the Hit

The physical controls argument is the one that converted me completely. There’s a post about cars needing buttons you can operate by feel, while wearing gloves, without looking away from the road, and that’s not nostalgia, that’s a safety requirement that the entire automotive industry quietly abandoned in favor of a glass rectangle that requires visual attention at highway speed. There’s the defense of a real metal ignition key, which never leaves you standing in a parking lot uncertain whether the vehicle actually locked. Touch is information. Removing it from the interface didn’t make anything better, it just made the photos look cleaner.

Then the app and subscription exhaustion, where the frustration is universal and nobody’s defending the other side. There’s the QR code menu complaint, the objection to troubleshooting cellular reception at a dinner table before being allowed to see appetizer options. There’s the requirement to download an application and create a password with a special character purely to check taco prices, which is genuinely hostile design. And there’s the subscription creep, the reality that ordinary household objects now come with monthly billing and user profiles, and that we collectively own less and pay more every year without ever having agreed to it. Nobody voted for the lamp to have a login.

And the analog-learning material, which is the section where I think the argument is strongest. There’s a former teacher making the case for paper and pencils over tablets, and the specific point about scratch work is hard to dismiss, because erasing a hole through a page while working out a problem is a physical process that appears to do something for retention that tapping a screen doesn’t replicate. There’s the defense of printed manuals sitting in a glovebox, which never require a working connection during the exact emergency where you need them. And the case for physical media, discs and cartridges, which cannot be removed from your shelf when a licensing agreement expires somewhere you’ve never heard of.

Here’s what I think we all got wrong, myself very much included: we assumed that resistance to new technology was about age, when most of it was about ownership and control. The complaint was never “this is unfamiliar.” It was “this used to be mine and now it’s rented, and it used to work without permission and now it needs an account.” That’s not a generational reflex. That’s an accurate observation somebody made early, and got mocked for, and turned out to be right about.

And the genuinely funny part is watching everyone arrive at the same conclusion on a delay. The people who laughed at the paper manual are now the people complaining about the touchscreen. The cycle isn’t that we become our parents. It’s that we eventually accumulate enough experience to notice what they noticed, and by then there’s a new group laughing at us for noticing it. Go press a physical button today. It’s genuinely satisfying. That’s the whole argument.

The button was better. The key was better. I said what I said.