2026-03-26
Last week, I watched Arco, a beautiful french animated film from last year. The story follows the titular protagonist Arco, a 9 year old boy, living in the distant future. A future where humans have found harmony with nature. Technology does not have the same shape that we perceive it to have today. In this future, the humans seem to have found a way to travel through time. The beginning of the movie shows Arco's family members returning from a expedition from the past, carrying botanical samples of the past age. Full of ambition and ignorance, Arco tries to sneak through time, attempting to travel back to the age of the dinosaurs. But his first ever flight goes awry, and he lands into 2075.
This future is what most of us can relate to. We are shown the pictures of a town where professionals like teachers, firemen, technicians have all been replaced by humanoids. Childrend live in the care of home robots and most parents live far away, in other cities, for work. We see floating cards, hovering bikes, droid phones that make holographic human communication seem very real yet so distant. In this future, humans seem to have gotten comfortable with some rapid technological progress. Agency of tasks have been delegated to appropriate (??) androids. Living in this world is a girl, Iris. Grown up in the care of a robot, we see Iris clearly missing the presence of her parents, who seem to have delegated their parental responsibilities to the robot Mikki. Mikki takes care of both Iris, and her younger infant sibling Peter. It's voice is a mix of both of the parents of Iris, as if to give a sense of closeness. The houses have retractable domes build around them that protect them from environmental calamities (we see the domes protecting the buildings from both a storm and a wildfire).
When Arco gets to know 2075 a little bit better, he is amazed by mundane machines such as the washing machine, the telephone, the car: gifts of technology we have gotten so used to. And from our perspective, it is even more interesting to see a person from even further in future to be fazed by these. To our mind, this technological "regression" seems unnatural.
My elder brother is a fashion designer. During his time in the university, I had some chance to study some theories of fashion designing. That was the first time I learned about Trend Cycles. In fashion, styles, products, and concepts move through a cyclic timeline of "... introduction, rise, peak, decline, and obsolescence." (Wikipedia). A trend cycles lasts for about 20 years. That's why things or ideas fall "out of style", become retro, and then retro becomes cool again, to the point when it is no longer retro but rather the trend again. We have seen that with mechanical watches. Mechanical watches saw a significant usage and was considered an utility until the Japanese quartz movement hit the market, pushed it to near extinction, only to be later come into the trend conversations again (in the form of a luxury item this time). That's why some Y2K clothes that we would've considered "old" and "outdated" 7-8 years ago, are now being considered the latest buzz again.
For the past year, social media (Youtube, Instagram, and Facebook) saw and increasing interest in "analogue" tech. Analogue is a pretty misleading term here. They mostly refer to products that are less distracting than the machines of today, where the screen is there not to suck you in but to simply inform. Steve Jobs pitched the iPhone with the capability of having everything inside your phone. Your books, music, calls, notes, camera, everything in one place. The analogue movement went in the opposite direction. To reduce our obsession with the half a foot digital screen, people moved each utility to a different product. Content creators showed off their setups with a digicam from the Y2K, a nice pen and paper solution for notes and journalling, a physical book, an iPod to have all their music in one place, and a "dumb phone" that can only text and call. This is not an invalid approach by any means. It has been proven and tested that you can definitely control your usage patterns by limiting access to the product. However, a "trend" exposes itself to the risk of what I call "content farming". Soon, the analogue movement was just a way for creators to milk contents. What was supposed to be a movement for taking control of the algorithm and their freedom of choosing where to spend their time without the influence of the pocket time-killer, turned into a catalyst of consumerism among the people who wanted to get in. The advertised sentiment pushed people to buy more and more 'analog' stuff, which is pretty ridiculous in my opinion. If your goal is to live simple, buying more items should definitely be lower on the list. Once again, minimalism had done more for capitalism than it did for the people that adopted it.
I'm afraid the same thing will happen with self-hosting and homelabbing too. I haven't yet figured out how it can be, and although it has outlasted the analogue trend by a long shot, it is showing the signs of the other one. Cloud was the new cool two decades ago, now we have "regressed" back to the age where we self host our applications again, taking back the control that we submitted to the corporations.
Arco has drawn some very relatable parallels between the current landscape of technological advancements (including AI and agents) and its two worlds. The technological progress that we have swooned over and gotten so used to now, for the past half a century or so, can very well go extinct over a period of time, no matter how impossible that sounds. Agentic coding is so cool now, and there will surely come a day when we are back to writing codes by ourselves again.
I am not an AI-skeptic by any means, rather quite the opposite.