Yeah, I'll freely admit I'm a curmudgeon with respect to technology "upgrades", but we've really lost a lot of solid reliability in our phone systems (landlines at least)
Now it feels like an afterthought compared to all of the redundancies they had put in place back then.
That bothers me way more than it ought to too. When I hear people saying it IRL I keep thinking that trillion dollar companies are engineering our speech.
Did you post the essay anywhere? I've always had kind of a soft spot for Ted--not his actions, mind, but his manifesto raises some rather prescient ideas. I also think he was..."justified" in a sense; again, not in his actions, but his decision to check out of society, only for society to come back to get him.
I'm happy to be proven wrong about any of that though. It's been quite a few years since I read it.
I completely agree with your "Children of Ted" hypothesis, for that matter. Historically, oppression births revolutionaries, for better or worse.