I would seriously love to live in one of those Firewatch towers..... but they're mostly getting abandoned nowadays. AI cameras and satellites have mostly replaced the need for people to live out in the towers to report fires.....

2016 mainstream tech was (still) useful.

2026 mainstream tech is either surveillance or surveillance but with ads.

I'll take a CB Radio over a flip phone any day

I am an IT guy, I have worked in the industry for 15 or so years now.

I have thought about plenty other jobs I would find interesting, here are a few:

Street View driver - I love driving and finding odd roads while listening to audio books, podcasts or music.

Orchard manager - this just seem great, you could even include tech into it, by say making a system to monitor the soil and alert you if you need to take action.

Building photographer - being hired to go out to buildings that needs to be documented before major changes and photgraphing them.

It's called "getting old".

some have been converted to bnb's iirc.

Why does every person in IT want to live in the woods? Me included.

I still love tech, I just don't use social media (except Lemmy) or whatsapp and co...easy peasy..

...a park ranger that only needs a flip phone

What, this guy?

To get away from it all completely. I recently adopted this mindset after burning out at work but still having to work.... So yeah, haven't fully recovered from that. I really just want to walk dogs for a living. Part time. Then do art and play bass.

Those sound like some good opportunities.

Let's create a developer sanctuary in the woods and all retreat there. I would like to start pottery, metal- and woodworking.

This sounds lovely. I will bake cookies and befriend all the woodland creatures. We will all thrive in this utopian environment without the daily impending doom of working for a corporation.

this is where millennial optimism comes from. now its just millennial naïveté unfortunately

Orchard Manager sounds fucking awesome. Please let me play with autonomous drones, GIS, and data crunching so that I can be a modern day Lorax. I'll even grow that massive mustache if it helps. I feel like I might get caught between the environment and the corporate interests in the end.

I'll supply the wifi

Wait, fuck. Sorry, force of habit

iirc street view drivers have a somewhat regulated area they need to cover. It's sadly not driving around randomly through the country and finding weird roads to cover

I want this, but unironically...

We know the horrors of how the tech is used.

We have all been there. I have trained hard to make it a reflex to answer "I will not fix your printer" whenever someone asks if I'm in IT.

Yeah, I saw a few episodes of Clarkson's Farm (like him or not, he is a brilliant storyteller) when he tested out some automated farm machines, and the command center he hsd looked quite cool.

Imagine running an orchard you put sensors in the soil by each tree, you get info about rhe moisture, oxygen content, and temp if the soil and can monitor each tree automatically, and make sure they all have what they need. I don't know if you can put a static detector and monitor the live mineral content of the soil, but that would be bloody brilliant.

It’s called a dude ranch and it’s by no means a recent invention.

I don't want to exclude dudettes.

That is a booze tourist

Sadly the building photographer role is just an intern or the planner themselves with a phone these days. Very few jobs hire actual photographers anymore.

Source: I'm a professional photographer that finds whatever work I can.

The closest I've found is a gig work thing that will pay like $20 for you to photograph billboards for an hour. Once or twice they offered like $80 to photograph a warehouse for a prospective client. Tried it a few times around the COVID era. Those years really sucked for me.

Other than that, there's still some real estate work out there, but only for very expensive properties.

I mostly do weddings and events and such.

Hehe, I have seen pictures in digital archives from museums when they documented nuclear powerplants, gasworks and other cool places, I guess I have been romantizising that.. (:

Because we're not allowed to kill the MBAs ruining it.

*yet

We're all coming around to Kaczynski's arguments

Aw, he sounds like a sweet old man. Wait, Ted? Uh oh...

Dude had a sweet shack

But then we wouldn't have this site.

I cried when I watched this scene because it’s everything I ever wanted

I want to raise heirloom pork breeds and mushrooms for fancy restaurants, plus a big garden for me and mine.

I want a job as a park ranger

No you fucking don't.

I've got friends in the park service. The pay is shit. The hours are long. The bureaucracy is mind numbing. The work is dangerous. And living out in the back woods is not nearly so glamorous when your jury rigged AC breaks.

It's a job you take when you grew up poor and every other job is worse. It's not a city slicker dream job, just an escapist fantasy.

Ted was, at best, a patsy, and at worst, a deliberate aren't provocateur to justify federal surveillance and COINTELPRO of environmental organizations.

the surveillance and ad games were well in-motion by 2016.

in the 'before times' we had dial-up bulletin boards and fido-net, which is not that dissimilar in function or architecture: a bbs=instance, echos=communities, netmail=dm's

No good option

I would guess because the woods are more natural and don't require deep examination to find answers to problems.

If you saw a tree fall in the woods you don't have to spend an hour figuring out that the tree fell because it had root decay which led to trunk decay and also had a wood pecker nesting in it but one of their offspring died which attracted bugs adding to the decayed of the tree. Oh and none of this explains why the tree next to it fell over too because that tree has been well taken care of and always looked healthy.

I would love to be a park ranger, but that means you're a cop. And fuck cops.

Because technology went from something you engaged with at your discretion to a form of drug a cartel is threatening you to take else they skin you alive.

Because technology stopped being a fun toy.

Yes, but not by the level we see now. Google was still usable in 2016. Shitty, but usable.

guessing that seeing the quality/experience thereof become increasingly optional for shareholder value

and getting actively, blatantly used as tools to attempt to dismantle any semblance of democracy

does things to you