I mean ... "cool" when I was a kid was having a stereo with two tape decks so you could copy and trade music mixes. Or getting together with 14 year old friends to drink 40s in an abandoned house where someone would bring an air rifle and girls would drink Zima. Doing anything online wasn't "cool" as it was all CLI anyway, but for me trading cracked games and porn gifs on BBSs was cool before we got a dialup internet connection and I discovered IRC. Spending hours browsing in a used record shop or book store was a cool use of a Saturday. Going to a party or the beach was cool. Surfing was cool although I sucked at it. Roller hockey was semi lame but I thought it was cool.
Watching TV or talking about shows wasn't cool. Movies were. Having a pager or godforbid a giant cell phone was extremely uncool as it meant your parents could find you. The closest thing to a smart phone was a TI-82 calculator and that wasn't cool at all. I had a Palm Pilot... I even got a cell cradle for it and could browse the web in black and white in 1996. That was considered insanely not cool, and something only a total nerd would do. (But a Lynx or a Game Gear was alright - and a neogeo meant your parents were super rich). Clove bidi cigarettes were cool but they could make your lungs bleed. Weed and LSD were cool. Fake IDs were cool and making them made you popular. Playing in a band even if you didn't have a lot of shows was cool, and if you did have a show half the kids from your school would be there.
I can't really think of anything I did as a teenager that collected data about me or anything that was a "service" run by a company that was cool or would have been considered cool. AOL was extremely uncool, the way facebook is now. A bit later, I guess a lot of us used Friendster and Myspace (and boards like LnC) but none of those things were central to daily activity or something you spent a lot of time on. It wasn't even the third or fourth thing you'd do to waste time, let alone a place to spend time with friends. So just because it wasn't very central to the teenage experience, and the technology wasn't there to track your interactions and location, there was by definition a lot less data to collect.
I'm describing a world that is for all practical purposes dead, buried and forgotten, in which human interaction was mostly unmediated by corporate grifters.
Watching TV or talking about shows wasn't cool. Movies were. Having a pager or godforbid a giant cell phone was extremely uncool as it meant your parents could find you. The closest thing to a smart phone was a TI-82 calculator and that wasn't cool at all. I had a Palm Pilot... I even got a cell cradle for it and could browse the web in black and white in 1996. That was considered insanely not cool, and something only a total nerd would do. (But a Lynx or a Game Gear was alright - and a neogeo meant your parents were super rich). Clove bidi cigarettes were cool but they could make your lungs bleed. Weed and LSD were cool. Fake IDs were cool and making them made you popular. Playing in a band even if you didn't have a lot of shows was cool, and if you did have a show half the kids from your school would be there.
I can't really think of anything I did as a teenager that collected data about me or anything that was a "service" run by a company that was cool or would have been considered cool. AOL was extremely uncool, the way facebook is now. A bit later, I guess a lot of us used Friendster and Myspace (and boards like LnC) but none of those things were central to daily activity or something you spent a lot of time on. It wasn't even the third or fourth thing you'd do to waste time, let alone a place to spend time with friends. So just because it wasn't very central to the teenage experience, and the technology wasn't there to track your interactions and location, there was by definition a lot less data to collect.
I'm describing a world that is for all practical purposes dead, buried and forgotten, in which human interaction was mostly unmediated by corporate grifters.