9 ms·

The Tyranny of Convenience

95 points by colinprince 9y ago

mhb 9y ago
Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394027
tomrod 9y ago
> Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the illicit thrill of Freud’s unconscious sexual desires or the mathematical elegance of the economist’s incentives. Convenience is boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial. The mapping of convenience to cost is called "transaction costs." It's certainly prevalent in a lot of economic work!
- nabla9 9y ago
  That's not what transaction cost is. Transaction costs are expenses incurred when buying or selling a good or service. Convenience is a factor in preference (ordering of alternatives based on their relative utility)
  - tomrod 9y ago
    Disagree. Convenience is a factor in the cost of use and acquisition of the utility-generating bundle. Though I can see your view, if we were to take it to the logical extreme one could say that all costs are an input of utility/preferences, rather than a factor limiting the consumption set.
alfonsodev 9y ago
I heard this concept the first time from Richard Stallman in the context of trading freedom for convenience. I think it was this video [1] when discussing innovation at any cost. [1] https://youtu.be/SUJtMlEwd6Q?t=1012 https://youtu.be/SUJtMlEwd6Q?t=1012
redka 9y ago
> As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions. Aren't those things also filled with convenience? We use convenient tools, places, etc. for them. As the author described earlier "By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us". Since this is most likely, at least to a point, true then couldn't convenience be thought of as something allowing us to advance in areas that are of interest to us instead of wasting time for things that aren't? > “Even with all the new labor-saving appliances,” she wrote, “the modern American housewife probably spends more time on housework than her grandmother.” Even if that's the case I'm sure it's not if we take into account more than a single generation. Imagine, for example, the convenience of the washer. Before it, washing the clothes was a very tedious and time-consuming task.
- jfk13 9y ago
  > Imagine, for example, the convenience of the washer. Before it, washing the clothes was a very tedious and time-consuming task. True; but I suspect that in the past, people didn't wash as many clothes as frequently as we do now. It seems possible that the total amount of laundry being done in a typical household has grown so that although the process is easier/more efficient, we still spend a similar amount of time on it.
  - andrepd 9y ago
    I don't think this is true; see e.g. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/time-spent-in-home-production-in-the-twentiethcentury-united-states-new-estimates-from-old-data/59CAB406A472381356E80B92B90B6860 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- lazyjones 9y ago
  > And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us". Or perhaps it gives us time to spend on addictions. It might be the other way around: addictive behavior and the time it requires, fuelled by a plethora of available addictive products (drugs, computer games, social media...) causes us to value convenience more than we should.
nylin93 9y ago
Really agree with the author's point that there is something fulfilling about inconvenience and struggling. After I started fishing in my spare time, I've had really good days where the fish are hammering my lures and I'm catching them every 10 minutes. Those days always start out well, but towards the end it's almost boring since I know they'll end up biting and there's no sense of accomplishment. But the days where the fish aren't biting and I have to switch out lures, tie different rigs, and search for the fish make it much more rewarding when I do catch one.
- nine_k 9y ago
  Fishing for sport (not a significant source of food), at your leisure, is a luxury. A well-chosen luxury is bound to be pleasurable, it's the whole point. A washing machine, or running water, or not having to bake one's own bread, are much less of a luxury, closer to basic necessities outside dire poverty. Washing by hand or bringing water from a river may be fulfilling and fun if you choose to do so, and are free to change your choice when you see fit. For basic necessities, it is much less so.
Jedd 9y ago
> Once you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it might be cheaper. It'd require some impressive mental gymnastics to consider hand-washing cheaper than a washing machine. The societal changes (improvements) that washing machines brought are immense, and fairly well documented. > After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified. Renting vhs/beta/laserdisc/bluray/hd etc has long been preferable to watching something littered with advertisements every 12-15 minutes - leaving aside the frequent censorship, lower quality audio or video, the inability to pause or rewind at will. The phrase 'streaming television' just seems wrong. > To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism. I know plenty of people that don't have a smartphone, but have a 4G / LTE 'feature' phone. There's no stigma there - it's down to a combination of cost, functionality, and signal range. The suggestion implies there's a clear downside - an evil, perhaps - to using a cellphone or any of Google's services (naturally conflating the two is not useful).
- edanm 9y ago
  Tangentially, I've heard it talked about that while the washing machine gets a lot of credit, it didn't have the effect most people think. When it was much harder to clean clothes, people just cleaned them less, and wore dirty clothes more often. In fact, a much bigger timesaver was prepackaged food/microwave/ etc. For preparing food, there really isn't an alternative, because you have to eat every day - you can't simply eat less, as you can with the washing clothes case.
- naeemtee 9y ago
  Wait, why is a washing machine cheaper than hand-washing?
  - colordrops 9y ago
    opportunity cost - most people can make more money using a washing machine than they'd save hand washing.
bhauer 9y ago
It's certainly the force that is pushing a majority to willingly hand over all of their personal data to third parties. Presently, it is inconvenient to set up a virtual private network and application servers to host personal omnipresent applications ("PAO" applications) and share data with friends. But some of us insist on keeping personal data personal. Rather than store my data on third-party services, I use my own disks with a virtual network that makes the data available everywhere. Here at HN, similar-minded people are fairly common. Convenience is simply one variable used in decision making. Some of us value it more than others. In many spaces, I value preference and self-ownership higher than convenience, so many of the examples in the article do not resonate with me. I see the described behavior in others. As the article points out, technology evolves. Personal hosting will become simpler with time and perhaps at some point, we will hit the tipping point where it is approximately as convenient as third-party "cloud" data and application hosting. Incremental steps along this path that merges self-ownership and convenience (e.g., the work being done by ZeroTier) are visible if you're looking for them.
gukov 9y ago
Inconvenience and boredom People's lives are hyperoptimized leaving little room for random encounters and chance. They just take the shortest route from point A to point B. Also, boredom is fought ruthlessly. Boredom wasn't useless. It was used to "entertain" the brain by pondering one's life problems, come up with solutions. Today feeling bored means it's time to check facebook.
- gcp123 9y ago
  Amen
- thisacctforreal 9y ago
  Or ctrl-t n enter. For this I made a separate chromium profile who's tabs reopen on boot, homepage is hn, and search engine is hn algolia. It's stopped the ctrl-t n enter habit successfully.
mitchtbaum 9y ago
See also The Tyranny of Stuctureless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne... and The Tyranny of Tyrannosaurus Rexes http://rarrrrrrrr.com/ http://rarrrrrrrr.com/
adamio 9y ago
Convenience is just another word for removing waste. Wasted movement, or time.
- gcp123 9y ago
  The author's point is that we've thrown out too much of what we've perhaps to broadly labeled as waste. We're realizing that some of the "waste" (to use your term) actually has value in it that we previously didn't recognize. It's a waste of effort to climb to the top of a mountain when you could've taken a vehicle to the top, perhaps, but for some folks that value isn't in the destination alone. Author's point is that we should be more aware of what we value, and how much of the "waste" a convenience a convenience removes is truly "waste" vs meaningful/valuable experience/effort for growth and fulfillment.
  - adventured 9y ago
    The fundamental problem with the author's premise, to use your example, is that the effort needed to climb to the top of a mountain every day, is ridiculous. There's no outsized value in washing your clothes by hand every day, week, month. It's monotonous, very time consuming and physically punishing. There's also similarly no value in cutting your entire lawn by hand. These things are not comparable to climbing a mountain, which you're going to do rarely. If you have to climb a mountain every day, take a vehicle. Your body will thank you. And so will your loved ones, because climbing a mountain is extremely time consuming, so you'll never see your loved ones again.
astro_robot 9y ago
I have lots of problems with this article's arguments. He uses several simplified examples to show the "cost" of convenience. > When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (which may help explain the low rate at which young people vote). The youth vote has been on decline since the 1980's, long before Ticketmaster ever came along (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_vote_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_vote_in_the_United_State...). > We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free. This argument blows my mind how simplified it is. There are plenty of reasons someone would prefer iTunes over Napster, not illegal and more user friendly to name the two biggest. Why not use the example of a record store versus iTunes or even Napster? To show how conveniency can beat in human experiences or make you bend your morals to steal music? > Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows. This argument totally neglects that Amazon was ever a "little guy." Amazon's growth is the embodiment of American's prizing competition. Without competition, Amazon would never have been able to steal customers from Barnes and Noble, Walmart, Kroger, etc. Also, Amazon's framework allows for "little guy" shops to start up with low cost. > However mundane it seems now, convenience, the great liberator of humankind from labor, was a utopian ideal. By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us. If this was a "utopian ideal", then we would not be able to read this article on the internet. There is a reason that only the wealthy elites were scientists in the past. It's because they didn't have to spend their majority of the day doing laborious tasks. Without conveniency, there would be a lot less engineers, scientists, writers, artists, gamers, etc. This article has no leg to stand on. You can swap out the word conveniency for innovation at many points, which is completely counter-intuitive to human philosophy. I understand that the writer is saying it's nice to take things slow. To not multi-task your brain to death. What he should be arguing for is to practice patience not to wash your clothes by hand.
jgalt212 9y ago
> I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I “prefer.” How is this even remotely true? I always wait on spirit crushing lines at Starbucks. I guess you can order ahead, but the "planning factor" does take away some convenience.
- gyom 9y ago
  The point would still stand even if Starbucks was indeed instantaneous. There's is something nice about being able to spend 2-5 minutes to prepare your own coffee. Sometimes you don't want to do it, but I think the point here is that if you have the convenient Starbucks alternative right in your face, you might "accidentally" surrender the pleasure of brewing your own coffee due to your laziness of the moment.
joncrane 9y ago
"The Tyranny of Convenience" reminds me of a book I read called "The Paradox of Choice." Basically, these things that modern technology and optimization have wrought tend to be burdens to those of us who tend to think more deeply about things. It's good to stay aware of the pitfalls of modern life. However there can be no doubt that overall, the changes that bring about increases in convenience and choice are good for most people. Their effect on society is a little more nuanced.
btrettel 9y ago
This is a real trade-off, but the "convenient" choice is not always bad if you have control over the situation. As a transportation cyclist, some people I know think I must have superhuman willpower. But the reality is that I don't own a car, don't like the bus, and live too far away for walking regularly to be practical. I structured my life so that cycling is the most convenient option. I do this to save money and stay in shape. (It's good for the environment too but that's not as convincing to me. My pollution is a drop in the bucket, cycling or not.) Here's an example most would consider less extreme: Switching to a "feature phone" or not using a cell phone at all. In that case, calling from a feature or landline phone becomes the most convenient option. Few would be surprised by the general principle: When possible, structure your life so that doing what you believe is right comes naturally. What seems more surprising are the specific applications, perhaps because they often are personal and consequently not applicable to others.
- the_gastropod 9y ago
  > It's good for the environment too but that's not as convincing to me. My pollution is a drop in the bucket, cycling or not. Hey, don't sell yourself short! Of course an individual's pollution contributions are a "drop in the bucket". Just like a presidential vote is a drop in the bucket. In aggregate, these drops do a lot of good (or could do a lot of bad). You're walking the walk, so to speak. That inspires people to do the same. Keep it up!
cs702 9y ago
This is a thought-provoking but ultimately unsatisfying essay. Its exhortation to "resist the stupefying power of convenience" is unlikely to work, because convenience, which I would define as "getting what you need or want with less effort," gives rise to economic incentives: Between any two otherwise equal options, the more convenient one requires a lower investment of time and work from you and is therefore, in the end, cheaper. Exhortations against economic incentives rarely if ever work.
dpflan 9y ago
I noticed the "referrer=" parameter in the submitted URL is for MetaFilter. > https://www.metafilter.com/172744/Technologies-of-Mass-Individualization https://www.metafilter.com/172744/Technologies-of-Mass-Indiv... I thought it'd be cool to see all the comments and discussion people are having about this: How can the comments on all three sites {MetaFilter, NYT, HN} be collated to into one discussion? Is there a service that exists for this that my morning brain isn't thinking of?
- skybrian 9y ago
  You could do three searches? Perhaps that's not convenient enough.
  - dpflan 9y ago
    That could be a start for a prototype browser plug-in.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  Depending on the subreddit, reddit comments could be worth combining in as well. As to "how" to accomplish it, my mind is immediately jumping towards a browser extension that automatically searches the other sites for matching content when you're viewing the discussion page on any of them, and then incorporates the relevant info somehow.
- monort 9y ago
  I made a small Chrome extension for that, it shows links to all discussions about the URL on HN and Reddit. Viewing comments on one page would be cool, but it is probably a copyright infringement.
jancsika 9y ago
> Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free. tldr; Convenient does not beat free. A convenient system with fees and with no propaganda against it whose use carries no risk of ruining one's life/finances/reputation beats a gratis system with widespread propaganda against it whose use, development, and distribution carries a risk to everyone's life/finances/reputation. * you can get sued into oblivion for even using the free option. This is such a danger that Bram Cohen, original author of Bittorrent, has stated publicly he decided from the outset never to download content over it so that nobody could ever impeded his current or future work with threats of lawsuits over copyright infringement. (And the current debacle with Project Gutenberg shows how big a danger those lawsuits can be.) * you can get jail time for publishing the locations of the free options * you can be threatened with lawsuit and/or criminal penalties for developing an application like Popcorn Time that makes the free options discoverable and user-friendly * you will eventually get your domain name suspended if you ignore all the risks above and serve up an app/site for the free option * even projects like Gutenberg and IMSLP which serve up content exclusively that is no longer under copyright have to spend considerable resources consulting with lawyers to make sure parties who would rather sell what they offer cannot simply strongarm them or sue them out of existence Take all those risks into account, plus the fact that RIAA and Hollywood have enormous resources to throw against the free option. It is amazing that the free options have existed at all, much less in the user-friendly and convenient form of something like Popcorn Time.
jonathansorum 9y ago
Why can't a publication like NY Times put 2 minutes into editing an article or op ed piece into something a bit more pleasant to the eyes? It wouldn't take much to add some subheadings, make key words/phrases bold. Getting tired of publications where Wall of Text hits you for +100 hp...

95 points by colinprince 9y ago

mhb 9y ago

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394027

> Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the illicit thrill of Freud’s unconscious sexual desires or the mathematical elegance of the economist’s incentives. Convenience is boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial. The mapping of convenience to cost is called "transaction costs." It's certainly prevalent in a lot of economic work!

nabla9 9y ago
That's not what transaction cost is. Transaction costs are expenses incurred when buying or selling a good or service. Convenience is a factor in preference (ordering of alternatives based on their relative utility)
- tomrod 9y ago
  Disagree. Convenience is a factor in the cost of use and acquisition of the utility-generating bundle. Though I can see your view, if we were to take it to the logical extreme one could say that all costs are an input of utility/preferences, rather than a factor limiting the consumption set.

alfonsodev 9y ago

I heard this concept the first time from Richard Stallman in the context of trading freedom for convenience. I think it was this video [1] when discussing innovation at any cost. [1] https://youtu.be/SUJtMlEwd6Q?t=1012 https://youtu.be/SUJtMlEwd6Q?t=1012

redka 9y ago

> As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions. Aren't those things also filled with convenience? We use convenient tools, places, etc. for them. As the author described earlier "By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us". Since this is most likely, at least to a point, true then couldn't convenience be thought of as something allowing us to advance in areas that are of interest to us instead of wasting time for things that aren't? > “Even with all the new labor-saving appliances,” she wrote, “the modern American housewife probably spends more time on housework than her grandmother.” Even if that's the case I'm sure it's not if we take into account more than a single generation. Imagine, for example, the convenience of the washer. Before it, washing the clothes was a very tedious and time-consuming task.

jfk13 9y ago
> Imagine, for example, the convenience of the washer. Before it, washing the clothes was a very tedious and time-consuming task. True; but I suspect that in the past, people didn't wash as many clothes as frequently as we do now. It seems possible that the total amount of laundry being done in a typical household has grown so that although the process is easier/more efficient, we still spend a similar amount of time on it.
- andrepd 9y ago
  I don't think this is true; see e.g. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/time-spent-in-home-production-in-the-twentiethcentury-united-states-new-estimates-from-old-data/59CAB406A472381356E80B92B90B6860 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
lazyjones 9y ago
> And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us". Or perhaps it gives us time to spend on addictions. It might be the other way around: addictive behavior and the time it requires, fuelled by a plethora of available addictive products (drugs, computer games, social media...) causes us to value convenience more than we should.

nylin93 9y ago

Really agree with the author's point that there is something fulfilling about inconvenience and struggling. After I started fishing in my spare time, I've had really good days where the fish are hammering my lures and I'm catching them every 10 minutes. Those days always start out well, but towards the end it's almost boring since I know they'll end up biting and there's no sense of accomplishment. But the days where the fish aren't biting and I have to switch out lures, tie different rigs, and search for the fish make it much more rewarding when I do catch one.

nine_k 9y ago
Fishing for sport (not a significant source of food), at your leisure, is a luxury. A well-chosen luxury is bound to be pleasurable, it's the whole point. A washing machine, or running water, or not having to bake one's own bread, are much less of a luxury, closer to basic necessities outside dire poverty. Washing by hand or bringing water from a river may be fulfilling and fun if you choose to do so, and are free to change your choice when you see fit. For basic necessities, it is much less so.

Jedd 9y ago

> Once you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it might be cheaper. It'd require some impressive mental gymnastics to consider hand-washing cheaper than a washing machine. The societal changes (improvements) that washing machines brought are immense, and fairly well documented. > After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified. Renting vhs/beta/laserdisc/bluray/hd etc has long been preferable to watching something littered with advertisements every 12-15 minutes - leaving aside the frequent censorship, lower quality audio or video, the inability to pause or rewind at will. The phrase 'streaming television' just seems wrong. > To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism. I know plenty of people that don't have a smartphone, but have a 4G / LTE 'feature' phone. There's no stigma there - it's down to a combination of cost, functionality, and signal range. The suggestion implies there's a clear downside - an evil, perhaps - to using a cellphone or any of Google's services (naturally conflating the two is not useful).

edanm 9y ago
Tangentially, I've heard it talked about that while the washing machine gets a lot of credit, it didn't have the effect most people think. When it was much harder to clean clothes, people just cleaned them less, and wore dirty clothes more often. In fact, a much bigger timesaver was prepackaged food/microwave/ etc. For preparing food, there really isn't an alternative, because you have to eat every day - you can't simply eat less, as you can with the washing clothes case.
naeemtee 9y ago
Wait, why is a washing machine cheaper than hand-washing?
- colordrops 9y ago
  opportunity cost - most people can make more money using a washing machine than they'd save hand washing.

bhauer 9y ago

It's certainly the force that is pushing a majority to willingly hand over all of their personal data to third parties. Presently, it is inconvenient to set up a virtual private network and application servers to host personal omnipresent applications ("PAO" applications) and share data with friends. But some of us insist on keeping personal data personal. Rather than store my data on third-party services, I use my own disks with a virtual network that makes the data available everywhere. Here at HN, similar-minded people are fairly common. Convenience is simply one variable used in decision making. Some of us value it more than others. In many spaces, I value preference and self-ownership higher than convenience, so many of the examples in the article do not resonate with me. I see the described behavior in others. As the article points out, technology evolves. Personal hosting will become simpler with time and perhaps at some point, we will hit the tipping point where it is approximately as convenient as third-party "cloud" data and application hosting. Incremental steps along this path that merges self-ownership and convenience (e.g., the work being done by ZeroTier) are visible if you're looking for them.

gukov 9y ago

Inconvenience and boredom People's lives are hyperoptimized leaving little room for random encounters and chance. They just take the shortest route from point A to point B. Also, boredom is fought ruthlessly. Boredom wasn't useless. It was used to "entertain" the brain by pondering one's life problems, come up with solutions. Today feeling bored means it's time to check facebook.

gcp123 9y ago
Amen
thisacctforreal 9y ago
Or ctrl-t n enter. For this I made a separate chromium profile who's tabs reopen on boot, homepage is hn, and search engine is hn algolia. It's stopped the ctrl-t n enter habit successfully.

mitchtbaum 9y ago

See also The Tyranny of Stuctureless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne... and The Tyranny of Tyrannosaurus Rexes http://rarrrrrrrr.com/ http://rarrrrrrrr.com/

adamio 9y ago

Convenience is just another word for removing waste. Wasted movement, or time.

gcp123 9y ago
The author's point is that we've thrown out too much of what we've perhaps to broadly labeled as waste. We're realizing that some of the "waste" (to use your term) actually has value in it that we previously didn't recognize. It's a waste of effort to climb to the top of a mountain when you could've taken a vehicle to the top, perhaps, but for some folks that value isn't in the destination alone. Author's point is that we should be more aware of what we value, and how much of the "waste" a convenience a convenience removes is truly "waste" vs meaningful/valuable experience/effort for growth and fulfillment.
- adventured 9y ago
  The fundamental problem with the author's premise, to use your example, is that the effort needed to climb to the top of a mountain every day, is ridiculous. There's no outsized value in washing your clothes by hand every day, week, month. It's monotonous, very time consuming and physically punishing. There's also similarly no value in cutting your entire lawn by hand. These things are not comparable to climbing a mountain, which you're going to do rarely. If you have to climb a mountain every day, take a vehicle. Your body will thank you. And so will your loved ones, because climbing a mountain is extremely time consuming, so you'll never see your loved ones again.

astro_robot 9y ago

I have lots of problems with this article's arguments. He uses several simplified examples to show the "cost" of convenience. > When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (which may help explain the low rate at which young people vote). The youth vote has been on decline since the 1980's, long before Ticketmaster ever came along (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_vote_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_vote_in_the_United_State...). > We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free. This argument blows my mind how simplified it is. There are plenty of reasons someone would prefer iTunes over Napster, not illegal and more user friendly to name the two biggest. Why not use the example of a record store versus iTunes or even Napster? To show how conveniency can beat in human experiences or make you bend your morals to steal music? > Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows. This argument totally neglects that Amazon was ever a "little guy." Amazon's growth is the embodiment of American's prizing competition. Without competition, Amazon would never have been able to steal customers from Barnes and Noble, Walmart, Kroger, etc. Also, Amazon's framework allows for "little guy" shops to start up with low cost. > However mundane it seems now, convenience, the great liberator of humankind from labor, was a utopian ideal. By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us. If this was a "utopian ideal", then we would not be able to read this article on the internet. There is a reason that only the wealthy elites were scientists in the past. It's because they didn't have to spend their majority of the day doing laborious tasks. Without conveniency, there would be a lot less engineers, scientists, writers, artists, gamers, etc. This article has no leg to stand on. You can swap out the word conveniency for innovation at many points, which is completely counter-intuitive to human philosophy. I understand that the writer is saying it's nice to take things slow. To not multi-task your brain to death. What he should be arguing for is to practice patience not to wash your clothes by hand.

jgalt212 9y ago

> I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I “prefer.” How is this even remotely true? I always wait on spirit crushing lines at Starbucks. I guess you can order ahead, but the "planning factor" does take away some convenience.

gyom 9y ago
The point would still stand even if Starbucks was indeed instantaneous. There's is something nice about being able to spend 2-5 minutes to prepare your own coffee. Sometimes you don't want to do it, but I think the point here is that if you have the convenient Starbucks alternative right in your face, you might "accidentally" surrender the pleasure of brewing your own coffee due to your laziness of the moment.

joncrane 9y ago

"The Tyranny of Convenience" reminds me of a book I read called "The Paradox of Choice." Basically, these things that modern technology and optimization have wrought tend to be burdens to those of us who tend to think more deeply about things. It's good to stay aware of the pitfalls of modern life. However there can be no doubt that overall, the changes that bring about increases in convenience and choice are good for most people. Their effect on society is a little more nuanced.

btrettel 9y ago

This is a real trade-off, but the "convenient" choice is not always bad if you have control over the situation. As a transportation cyclist, some people I know think I must have superhuman willpower. But the reality is that I don't own a car, don't like the bus, and live too far away for walking regularly to be practical. I structured my life so that cycling is the most convenient option. I do this to save money and stay in shape. (It's good for the environment too but that's not as convincing to me. My pollution is a drop in the bucket, cycling or not.) Here's an example most would consider less extreme: Switching to a "feature phone" or not using a cell phone at all. In that case, calling from a feature or landline phone becomes the most convenient option. Few would be surprised by the general principle: When possible, structure your life so that doing what you believe is right comes naturally. What seems more surprising are the specific applications, perhaps because they often are personal and consequently not applicable to others.

the_gastropod 9y ago
> It's good for the environment too but that's not as convincing to me. My pollution is a drop in the bucket, cycling or not. Hey, don't sell yourself short! Of course an individual's pollution contributions are a "drop in the bucket". Just like a presidential vote is a drop in the bucket. In aggregate, these drops do a lot of good (or could do a lot of bad). You're walking the walk, so to speak. That inspires people to do the same. Keep it up!

cs702 9y ago

This is a thought-provoking but ultimately unsatisfying essay. Its exhortation to "resist the stupefying power of convenience" is unlikely to work, because convenience, which I would define as "getting what you need or want with less effort," gives rise to economic incentives: Between any two otherwise equal options, the more convenient one requires a lower investment of time and work from you and is therefore, in the end, cheaper. Exhortations against economic incentives rarely if ever work.

dpflan 9y ago

I noticed the "referrer=" parameter in the submitted URL is for MetaFilter. > https://www.metafilter.com/172744/Technologies-of-Mass-Individualization https://www.metafilter.com/172744/Technologies-of-Mass-Indiv... I thought it'd be cool to see all the comments and discussion people are having about this: How can the comments on all three sites {MetaFilter, NYT, HN} be collated to into one discussion? Is there a service that exists for this that my morning brain isn't thinking of?

skybrian 9y ago
You could do three searches? Perhaps that's not convenient enough.
- dpflan 9y ago
  That could be a start for a prototype browser plug-in.
CydeWeys 9y ago
Depending on the subreddit, reddit comments could be worth combining in as well. As to "how" to accomplish it, my mind is immediately jumping towards a browser extension that automatically searches the other sites for matching content when you're viewing the discussion page on any of them, and then incorporates the relevant info somehow.
monort 9y ago
I made a small Chrome extension for that, it shows links to all discussions about the URL on HN and Reddit. Viewing comments on one page would be cool, but it is probably a copyright infringement.

jancsika 9y ago

> Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free. tldr; Convenient does not beat free. A convenient system with fees and with no propaganda against it whose use carries no risk of ruining one's life/finances/reputation beats a gratis system with widespread propaganda against it whose use, development, and distribution carries a risk to everyone's life/finances/reputation. * you can get sued into oblivion for even using the free option. This is such a danger that Bram Cohen, original author of Bittorrent, has stated publicly he decided from the outset never to download content over it so that nobody could ever impeded his current or future work with threats of lawsuits over copyright infringement. (And the current debacle with Project Gutenberg shows how big a danger those lawsuits can be.) * you can get jail time for publishing the locations of the free options * you can be threatened with lawsuit and/or criminal penalties for developing an application like Popcorn Time that makes the free options discoverable and user-friendly * you will eventually get your domain name suspended if you ignore all the risks above and serve up an app/site for the free option * even projects like Gutenberg and IMSLP which serve up content exclusively that is no longer under copyright have to spend considerable resources consulting with lawyers to make sure parties who would rather sell what they offer cannot simply strongarm them or sue them out of existence Take all those risks into account, plus the fact that RIAA and Hollywood have enormous resources to throw against the free option. It is amazing that the free options have existed at all, much less in the user-friendly and convenient form of something like Popcorn Time.

jonathansorum 9y ago

Why can't a publication like NY Times put 2 minutes into editing an article or op ed piece into something a bit more pleasant to the eyes? It wouldn't take much to add some subheadings, make key words/phrases bold. Getting tired of publications where Wall of Text hits you for +100 hp...