* Feels like almost everyone is in it primarily for the money now. Sure, money has always been an incentive, but I feel like before it was more of a side-effect rather than the primary goal. Tech was just cool - whether it was making Flash games, or writing a Play Station emulator, making a video game, or even making some interactive Web 2.0 web page. Stuff that others would put out was cool - messengers/BBS' to talk to people around the world, maps, even GMail and Facebook. Demoscene was a thing.
* Related to the point above, but most tech now feels like it is contributing to a dystopia. Anything 'social' is there with the goal of manipulating you, whether by ads or astroturfing. Any productivity tool is there not to free up your time, but get you to work even harder overall. Entertainment content is overoptimized to keep you hooked and spending your money and attention, but it is empty enough that feels like little of it will be remembered in 50 years time (while there are tons of great movies and music from 50+ years ago, and I envy the people that get to play Monkey Island or Deus Ex for the first time today)
* It all just feels serious now. Can hardly talk to anyone online without them trying to somehow advance their career, 'network', build a following, or fight some political war.
* The complexity has gone way up. It is very difficult to know your system inside out, build something cool by yourself. In many cases you actually have very little control over your own system.
Am I just getting old and people felt this way in the 90s and 2000s too? Or has tech objectively gotten less cool?