"Had you told me 10 years ago that I'd be spending $100 a month on television, I'd have thought you were insane."

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So said my mate Nick, who'd recently audited his streaming subscriptions, discovering that was exactly how much he was spending before cutting them right back and saving precious money in the process.

I cast my mind back further, to when I was 20. The mere suggestion I'd pay to watch any TV at all would have been outrageous. But here I am decades later doing exactly that. Not shelling out $100 a month like Nick was but enough to make me question whether it's made life more enjoyable.

What would 20-year-old me make of the other trappings of modern life?

That person thought push-button phones were novel. He would never have imagined that one day the phone would be shrunk to a 12 by 5cm rectangle. That it would go everywhere with almost everyone but rarely be used to make calls. That it would connect and disconnect humanity at the same time. That it would replace the vinyl records I once owned with music I now rent. That people would be glued to it on the train, bus or ferry, never looking up and glancing out the window to see where they were going.

Twenty-year-old me would have scoffed at the suggestion cars could spy on you. In 1979, they were dumb, completely analogue machines. You navigated with a paper map and there was no way of knowing what the traffic would like en route.

Today's vehicles are connected to the internet via a SIM card, sending data back to the manufacturer, tracking your every move, alerting you to delays. All very convenient but not without a sinister side. Government workers are being cautioned against conducting sensitive conversations in what was once one the most private places you could find - the car.

A few years ago Tesla employees were caught sharing videos of customers in intimate moments, the images captured by the cars inbuilt cameras. Now security agencies fear Chinese made cars could double as espionage tools.

In 1979, young me nervously awaited the arrival of 1984, wondering if George Orwell's dystopian vision of the surveillance state would become reality. It didn't back then but it certainly has now. Cameras are everywhere and not just in our new cars. We've grown used to them on our phones, our doorbells, in buses, taxis and just about every public place.

Their ubiquity means there's rarely a crime committed which hasn't been caught on camera. Duly broadcast on the nightly news, it makes us fear for our safety and assume violent crime is getting worse, when it's not. Australia is actually less violent than it was when I was 20. We're more concerned about crime because all these cameras are capturing it.

But it doesn't end there. They've been incorporated into so-called smart glasses, raising all sorts of privacy concerns. Meta, the company which owns Facebook and Instagram and has produced a line of these glasses was revealed to have toyed with a facial recognition feature, which it........

© Canberra Times