Re: Happy Days!
I was one of those people who was happy to see the tech advances open my horizons to the wider world, the thought of instant world connectivity made my knees wobble.
Now that reality has set in, I spend my time repelling boarders from all the world who want to do me harm. This is not how it was supposed to be!
Yes, I remember that wide-eyed excitement at what was coming to the world, the ability to connect anywhere and any time, smart devices that could tell you all sorts about their status or the state of the environment around you or the environment somewhere else (eg how warm/cold your house was), being able to see and control things in your home from your office or hotel. The innovation promised from Microsoft and what that would bring (just slightly before Win95), and a various other OS's (don't know I'd heard of Linux back then) and other software out there. And the way even "closed source" was just so open, alterable, and expandable. Never saw a line of the source code for Dos but I could do a hell of a lot with it, limited by my imagination or patience (some things took a while on those older CPUs).
But what let the world in unfortunately let the world in. Only, not the world we dreamed or imagined. The ideas of security that would protect us from nastiness were poorly implemented or never came about, the good things to come along were usurped by greed or governments hell-bent on knowing every silent word imagined by every citizen at every moment, the brave new world if connected openess became a prison of closely monitored solitary confinement (look at how many people post everything they do to hundreds or thousands of "followers" on FB/Twitter, yet have no real human contact).
My phone is basic and dumb, but with excellent battery life (doesn't last a week but then I use my phone as a phone, and talk to real people in real time for a couple of hours a day on average), not rich enough to own a modern car (you could look at finding and removing wireless antennae, or perhaps blocking its MAC off from your router - if it hunts for free WiFi hotspots then maybe you invest in a portable one that (maybe using a Raspberry?) that connects to nothing else, or some sort of WiFi jammer that is fairly localised to the car while the car is running?) and if I do get to buy a new one it'll be customised, even if it means voiding the warranty. My TV was recently given to me and is an LG, but while it can play movies off USB there's no network connectivity to it. I do find several things annoying not least that all it's fancy sound controls can only be used for the super-crap built in speakers, the only usable output is a headphone jack connected to my HT sound, but LG thinks "who the hell would want to alter tone/equaliser controls on a headphone, or have anything to make the sound clearer, and why would any one want to listen to anything BUT our suder-tinny-crapfest-speakers. That said, most stuff I view is not live TV. A computer does all the "smart" I want, and has the benefit of lifetime updates to the OS and software.
I've never minded getting up to change channel or volume, but I know so many people who would spend 10 minutes looking for the remote instead of 10 seconds manually changing the channel!.