Where would you draw the line

At a café in Dokki, an older man scans the square of black and white code taped to his table, squints at his phone, and announces that eating out has been ruined. He misses the printed card in its plastic sleeve, the waiter who knew what you wanted, the days before all of this.

He is not wrong that something was lost. The code saves the café paper and lets it change prices overnight. It also makes the table a little lonelier, and shuts out anyone without a working phone and good eyesight.

New tools are never neutral. Each one moves something forward and pushes something else aside, and the person complaining is usually reacting to the second half.

But it is worth asking him where the good days actually were.

Before the code, there was the laminated menu that never changed because reprinting cost too much. Before that, the board on the wall. The telephone that let a family order lunch without going out was once new, and so was the motorbike that brought it. The refrigerator meant food could be kept rather than eaten that day. The gas cylinder replaced the fire. Each of these, in its time, was the change somebody blamed for spoiling the old way.

Very few people would give them all up. Most would keep almost every one, and object only to the most recent.

That is the useful part of the exercise. Nostalgia points at a golden age, but when we try to fix it to a year, it slides. Drawing the line forces us to say which specific trade we dislike, rather than mourning change in general.

Sometimes the tool really is the problem. Often it is simply the newest thing we have not yet got used to.