Recently discovered this movie. I still can't believe it was done in 1970! The visual props of the huge mainframes, tape drives, blinking lights, etc were real-computing gear from Control Data Corporation (CDC). Probably one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time.
That’s a fair point, material abundance and consumer freedom have lifted billions out of hardship. What I found eye-opening in the essay, though, is that abundance can coexist with emptiness: when every decision is individual and transactional, we lose the shared meaning that once came from depending on one another. The argument isn’t against comfort or choice, but against mistaking options for connection.
I interpret it differently - the author is arguing that in becoming increasingly free of the hardship and consequences brought by lack of choice, we became increasingly disconnected from others because we didn't have to rely on them. But that doesn't have anything to do with milk, or mean we're not free. People actively exercise their freedom every time they choose personal convenience and optionality over other people.
It's not the lack of freedom, but an outcome of it that the author finds undesirable - same with their argument that the amount of choice is so overwhelming that it begets freedom. I've been to the grocery store enough to just get what I like and get it out - you either have to willfully participate in it to let something that unimportant overwhelm you, or think your inability to not get overwhelmed is universal or important enough to not realize that some people want those options more than you, or just are unbothered by it.
If you allow yourself to participate in something meaningful then you just won't care about having so many unimportant decision to make, because you'll choose to not think about them, even if it means you have to accept that there might be even worse outcomes than picking the wrong carton of milk. Personally, I believe that it's what might actually help the author get over whatever it is that causes them to point the finger at having too many options - find something where your decisions matter.
I never really connected the modern idea of "freedom of choice" with today’s loneliness epidemic until reading this. The author makes a compelling case that our obsession with individual choice has quietly eroded the social fabric that makes freedom meaningful, turning independence into isolation.
Building a new layer of hyper-personalization over the web.
Instead of generating more content, it helps you reformat and interact with what already exists, turning any page, paper, or YouTube video into a summary, mind-map, podcast, infographic or chat.
The broader idea is to make the web adaptive to how each person thinks and learns.
Microsoft Songsmith is another one that deserved a second life. It let you hum or sing a melody and would auto-generate full backing tracks, guitar, bass, drums, chords, in any style you chose.
It looked a bit goofy in the promo videos, but under the hood it was doing real-time chord detection and accompaniment generation. Basically a prototype of what AI music tools like Suno, Udio, or Mubert are doing today, fifteen years too early.
If Microsoft had kept iterating on it with modern ML models, it could’ve become the "GarageBand for ideas that start as a hum."
I always thought Microsoft Popfly had huge potential and was way ahead of its time. It made building web mashups feel like playing with Lego blocks, drag, drop, connect APIs, and instantly see the result.
If something like that existed today, powered by modern APIs and AI, it could become the ultimate no-code creativity playground.
