13 ms·

Everything is amazing, but nothing is ours

344 points by yankcrime 7y ago

WaxProlix 7y ago
This is a good take. Ownership is one of those things that I feel intuitively is important, and I experience frustration around losing it incrementally. But I struggle to put my concerns into concrete, relatable examples that the everyday user might appreciate. The 'access until it is no longer' narrative seems to fit that pretty well.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  This is something I think we have been hit hard by with video games. The first wave of online enabled games has now had their servers shut down and the games rendered unplayable. One of my favorite childhood games from about 2006 (Viva Pinata) is now unplayable on windows because it used Games for Windows Live which has now shut down. The game is basically entirely offline and single player but is now unusable unless you use the xbox 360 version which works fine because it could be used entirely offline.
  - kardos 7y ago
    Maybe, broadly speaking, that's just the way life is. Things exist for awhile and then they don't. Bands eventually stop touring and seeing them live is a thing of the past. The character of your city is likely quite different as compared to a generation ago. That amazing restaurant went out of business. If those servers were still up, would there be anyone on them to play against?
    - wolco 7y ago
      I can still play all of my c64 games and will be able to in 20 years. Some game I buy today not so much.
    - autoexec 7y ago
      I don't expect a band to live forever to keep doing live shows, but if I buy their CD I don't expect someone to break into my home and take it at any point in the future, but plenty of people have lost their music because of shitty DRM schemes and for those who are entirely dependent on streaming their music they will very likely not be able to find some of their favorite songs later, especially for more obscure stuff. I'm glad that I was able to pass some of my favorite games and music and books to the next generation and that they can pass them on to their kids. My collection of favorites will outlive many of the new things they enjoy today.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      Maybe that's how people think life is. It didn't used to be like that. It used to be better. The 7" I bought when I was 10 still plays. So do the tapes I copied in school, though I've moved on from tape. The flacs and mp3s will be around as long as I have a server. I can still play Morrowind - I don't need a server up, and most -not all - online games spoil the game by being online. Quite happy with a LAN mode to play with partner or kids, or ad-hoc server mode to play WAN with friends. Most online games have been updated so they aren't remotely the same game as they were - especially for things like MMOs, Spotify is an ephemeral radio station, Netflix is reducing what they have every month. Whether it's down to company closing, getting bored of keeping service up for an old game, or stopping your monthly sub, the rate of attrition is frightening.
    - baroffoos 7y ago
      >If those servers were still up, would there be anyone on them to play against? It was a single player game. There was never anyone to play against. The online aspects were for DRM only.
    - ollifi 7y ago
      I think this happened to many early movies. There are many lost films where we only have written descriptions and still images left. A whole system for film archiving was put in place to prevent this from happening as it was deemed too important to be left into hands of producers. I believe in order to put something out nowdays you are required to provide a copy to archive. Not sure if it is world wide requirement or local though.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Yes, that's the primary reason why I stopped playing most new games. I value the ability to fire up games that I bought 20 years ago (and I do this regularly), and I'm not willing to invest in any that depend on external services.
    - autoexec 7y ago
      Same here. I even make a point to grab a cracked copy of any game I buy on steam so that if the service goes under, or they decide to remove it from my library (like when amazon secretly removed copies of "1984" from people's kindles) I'll still have access to the games I paid for.
      - Causality1 7y ago
        That goes double for games that come with obnoxious required software like uplay, origin, denuvo, etc.
    - dragontamer 7y ago
      Check out Good Ol' Games, which includes modern gems like Witcher 3, Hollow Knight, Factorio, Stardew Valley, Indivisible. Everything on GoG is DRM-free, simple .exe installers that should work without any servers.
      - JohnFen 7y ago
        Oh, yeah, GOG has quite a lot of my money!
      - baroffoos 7y ago
        I think a lot of these games are actually drm free on steam as well, gog just only lists drm free games so you can be sure its safe to buy. I often run games outside of steam so I can let my bf use steam family share at the same time.
        roxil 7y ago
        You are correct. Being on steam doesn't necessarily mean that a game has DRM. It's up to a game developer to implement steam's DRM or not. Check out the big list of DRM-free steam games: https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games_on_Steam https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games...
  - autoexec 7y ago
    I really hope someone is maintaining a list somewhere of games we've lost because of DRM or just short sighted design like in the case of Missing (https://www.amazon.com/Missing-PC/dp/B000271MCG https://www.amazon.com/Missing-PC/dp/B000271MCG) which was dependent on websites and email accounts that the company is either no longer around to maintain or no longer feels it worth maintaining.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    Not just online games. Imagine if tomorrow Steam shuts down, you can bet we will lose access to thousands of games forever (as in, some of them are not actively maintained out of Steam anywhere).
- journalctl 7y ago
  It’s easy: when you don’t own anything, you’re at the mercy of your lessor. This is why tenant laws exist (sort of, depending on your location). There’s an inescapable power imbalance involved. Except now more and more goods and services are being leased, and the dwindling middle class means fewer and fewer people can properly own things. If we intend to continue into a future of perpetual renting, we at least need stronger renter protections.
  - jdnenej 7y ago
    Europe is heading this way. There was recent news that a country in Europe was planning to require steam to allow users to transfer and sell their games to other accounts.
- rkagerer 7y ago
  It's hugely important - just look how the companies in possession of our cloud leverage it. I'm hopeful creative solutions with decentralization will allow you to retain control even though the vault is in the hands of someone else.
  - wolco 7y ago
    decentralization or fragmented market.
- joshspankit 7y ago
  I feel counter-intuitively enough that music is likely the way many people will relate to in a concrete way. It’s all well and good to trust your service provider until at some point you get nostalgia for a song you “had” or even “owned”, go to queue it up, and find it completely missing. Maybe the record company even took it off YouTube and all the other free platforms, locking it behind their own service. What tasted and smelled like ownership is suddenly revealed in moments like this.
  - IggleSniggle 7y ago
    I experienced this fairly abruptly this year. My toddler loved listening to the Thomas & Friends albums. They were "added to my Library" and an almost daily listen. One day, NONE of these were available. Same thing happened earlier when Disney bought Big Block Singsong. It's funny, because I'm grateful to have an excuse not to listen to these anymore. But in both cases it was quite disappointing to my kid (and irritating on principle). Kids love to consume the same thing over and over again. Netflix has a similar effect: beloved tv or movies are suddenly gone without a trace, and no warning that they will be disappearing. Definitely a low-stakes relatable example.
    - m463 7y ago
      And nothing is out in the open. "We just won't tell them this netflix show is going away, it will just upset people. Maybe they won't notice." (although they do say something about your queue a short time before it disappears)
    - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
      Just to complete the picture - I recently found a box of VHS tapes at my parents' house of all of the cartoons I watched over and over again as a kid. It was fun seeing them again, and of course they still played fine 30 years later.
  - clarry 7y ago
    Youtube kinda gave me a taste of this, a few days ago. They didn't pull the music, but they pulled all the relevant recommendations. So where I used to listen to a song or album and get a long list of relevant recommendations of music from the same artist, label, uploader, or musical style, I suddenly got nothing but local youtubers' nonsense and gaming streams. After I blocked those (not interested & don't recommend this channel again), I got literally no recommendations at all anymore. It was depressing to realize how reliant I am on a company to faciliate music discovery, knowing that they can change their algorithms and/or block certain content any day.
- deogeo 7y ago
  The occasional post on HN to the tune of "proprietary solution our company relies on just increased price by 10x - what can we do?" validates your feelings. When you rely on something you don't own, you are in someone else's control. And they tend to use that control to benefit at your expense.
- Causality1 7y ago
  How about when Zune Pass shut down and obliterated the music collections of people who spent hundreds of dollars in subscription fees? Or when Google bought Revolv, shut down its servers, and turned thousanda of home automation systems into expensive paperweights? To me every new service feels like another leech sucking at my wallet, of which there are far too many. I much prefer the collections of flacs and mp3s to Spotify and my personal media archive to having a dozen different streaming video subscriptions.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Also, it's not like it's totally either/or. You should be able to own your music and movies, but also be able to pay for a service that manages it - removing the logistics burden, while still ensuring the goods you bought will not disappear when the service goes down.
    - Causality1 7y ago
      Plex perfectly encapsulates that philosophy.
      - joshspankit 7y ago
        Actually I would argue with this: Plex used to, but now find themselves trying to “legitimize” and sacrificing user control in order to do it. E.g: All logins (including local LAN) go through their servers.
        Causality1 7y ago
        Considering the plethora of bullshit like news and podcasts I find littering my plex home screen, I agree with your point.
- taneq 7y ago
  > Ownership is one of those things that I feel intuitively is important, and I experience frustration around losing it incrementally. I feel this too, but at the same time I wonder how much of this feeling is due to a scarcity mindset. It used to be you had a small, finite amount of music, movies, games etc. and so each one individually was valuable. Maybe people who've grown up in the Netflix/Spotify era just don't get personally attached to particular shows the way we do? There's an infinite amount of stuff to consume so if the thing you were looking for isn't there any more, just have something else.
  - clarry 7y ago
    I've always been one to make strong emotional bonds to the music I listen to. I don't think it's got that much to do with scarcity, it's more about what role the music fills in my life. Having an endless stream of music just isn't quite as satisfying as picking out the tunes I resonate with and hearing them again and again. And this is exactly what happens when I listen to music streams: I get the urge to pick out the tunes I like. But only after I've heard the same song more than a couple times (it takes time to bond). I think music becomes kind of an anchor you can (attempt to) rely on when everything else in the world around you is changing. Friends, home town, jobs, apartments, all change... that makes music that remains the same after a decade all that much more comforting.
draw_down 7y ago
The author doesn't make the connection explicit, but tools like Figma reduce the need for files as a means of conveying information between parties. Instead, you collaborate directly in the tool, freeing the designer from having to constantly export and send around documents, and freeing engineers from having to chase down exports. Figma also has a feature where you can "shoulder surf" another person as they work. The ability to see what others are doing in the document leads to some interesting interactions. (You see my cursor moving in a way that indicates I'm counting the number of rows in a design; you message me and tell me it's 15.)
gt2 7y ago
Agreed overall but.. Most people don't want to/can't run their own backup service, so they count on the services they use to keep things alive. Add to that users wanting to use multiple devices. Maybe I'm over estimating software literacy but many people who want these things often write their own solutions or do without shiny new things which are often just cloud based versions of the old!
nharada 7y ago
Interesting that email feels like ours -- "Gmail is the new Finder ... Most importantly, your inbox is yours." But really isn't it just us trusting Gmail not to pull our access?
- FpUser 7y ago
  >But really isn't it just us trusting Gmail not to pull our access Nope, not trusting Google and I do not use it (or any other cloudy stuff) to keep what is mine.
- mparramon 7y ago
  I think that the difference is that someone can have a similar experience to Gmail by using their own mail server and any mail client. The same cannot be said about Uber, for example.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
    You can't call a friend and ask them for a lift?
pjc50 7y ago
See also the book "Information Feudalism", which does a good job of looking at this from an IP perspective.
zachkatz 7y ago
This is true of social media content, too. If a tweet/IG post/whatever you like disappears, you'll never see it again; you might not even know it disappeared until you remember it two years later, try to look for it, and can't find it. That's one of the reasons I started Framed Tweets (http://framedtweets.com/ http://framedtweets.com/).
hprotagonist 7y ago
If the current trend of technology is sweeping us in a direction of “everything is amazing, but nothing is ours”, Technology that’s Actually Yours could be the next great counter-trend So GNU or it’s predecessors, circa the birth of the personal computer. if “the cloud and apps” is cognate with “timeshare mainframes and thin clients”, and I think it is, then everything old is new again and i look forward to taking back what’s ours, again.
- api 7y ago
  Yes, absolutely. Cloud is the new mainframe and SaaS is the new closed-source even if the software it's running behind the scenes is nominally open.
  - code_duck 7y ago
    The infrastructure might be open, mostly, but all of the important software the consumers interact with on a higher level is closed and secret.
  - drskrzyk 7y ago
    I'm hoping that the AGPL has or will curb some of this lock in, though I suspect that the people with the funding to run SaaS at scale will route around AGPL.
    - brian-armstrong 7y ago
      It's even easier to avoid AGPL than that - there is approximately 0 software of any value licensed only in AGPL.
    - erikpukinskis 7y ago
      I’ve been ruminating on this problem for a decade or more and my belief is it’s not the licensing that’s the problem, it’s the infrastructure. In the old world of tarballs, you could throw a file on an ftp server and someone could take an afternoon, mess with the paths and the make and make install and all that, and have your thing up and running. And mostly keep using it without fuss. With web services you just can’t. You minimum need security patches applies, and in truth, you need the original author to be able to keep refactoring and updating the service architecture. We don’t have infrastructure that can facilitate that. That’s the real problem, not licensing. You can put a Heroku buildpack or whatever in your repo. That gets us pretty close to one-click deploy, and almost automatic security patching. But Heroku will penalize us with a 30 delay for being non-profit, when we access the service, which is pretty much a deal breaker. Even if I am paying them a hundred dollars a month (and I am) they will still pause for 30 seconds every time I access one of my cold “free” services. If there was a hosting solution, even if it involved users paying a monthly fee, but it solved this issue of shared maintenance of open source services, it would usher in a new golden age of free software. Ostensibly Ethereum solves this problem, but we’ll see if the ergonomics get where they need to be. It would be nice to be able to do this in a trustless way, although I don’t think that’s necessary for a MVP.
saagarjha 7y ago
> I learned, for instance, that a great way to get people to click on your blog post is to make them mad Ha, this is a common way to get on the frontpage of Hacker News.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
  Wasn't one of those lesser discussed findings of FB that making people angry makes them more engaged.
  - tunesmith 7y ago
    Yeah, I think so. I wonder if is a special case of "surprise" - things that are surprising have more information value, and people react to information. There's also the aspect of something being wrong - if something is wrong, people want to correct it - often angrily if the source advancing the wrong viewpoint is obstinate - and that's engagement. I wonder if both of those can be teased out. Like, if something is surprising and correct, what's the engagement of that? That probably doesn't drive engagement as much as surprising and wrong.
  - Splines 7y ago
    As always, relevant xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/386/ https://www.xkcd.com/386/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
mwkaufma 7y ago
"We love services." Citation needed.
gumby 7y ago
This reminds me of the arrival of the PC (MS-DOS and Mac): file formats were typically silos: proprietary and could only be opened in their special app. Coming from a different tradition this was completely weird and uncomfortable to me so I never really got into those systems. Gradually some open formats pried this open: GIF/JPEG/MP3/ZIP (all only somewhat open at the time) then turning into PNG/HTML... etc. In this regard the phones feel like a step backwards as each app really manages its own data. Email programs these days are like that -- for example you can't keep a project's mail folder with its files any more.
- incompatible 7y ago
  Back in the early Windows days, I was helping somebody on Windows get some data somewhere else where I needed it. I started by opening the file manager and finding the data files. He was like "Whoa ... you are in no-mans-land" ... he just wasn't familiar with accessing files outside of an application. There are a couple of orthogonal concepts are work here a) how data is stored, in files with a well-known format, in files with a proprietary format, or perhaps in some kind of database b) who has control of the data, perhaps defined by who would be able to delete it, or whether the data would cease to be accessible if a particular organization ceased to exist.
generationP 7y ago
This is surprisingly out of touch with reality -- at least with my reality and that around me. Then again I'm 30 and in academia, so it might not be the latest update. Do people access their music through their apps instead of a file manager these days? Sure. But how does it get into the apps in the first place? I couldn't find half of my music library on amazon, let alone the money to actually buy it. The same applies to tech books, even more glaringly so because there is no streaming option. Do people use GMail as a quasi-storage for everything they need to keep up with in life? Yeah. Do they want to use it that way? Not really. It doesn't scale up that well, and yes, you will slam into Google's 15GB limit soon enough. So at least I only have the "temporary" stuff on GMail, for a wide but not all-encompassing notion of "temporary". I'm not aware of anyone storing family photos on GMail. And that's just the stuff we consume. As for producing, there's very little you can do without working with files at least a bit. Attach a photo to a post, run a python script, exchange documents with someone who isn't using the same clouds as you... Actually, even if all of your stuff is on clouds, you'll sooner or later want or have to move it around between different clouds, and what do you export it to? Files.
- grawprog 7y ago
  Because my phone's not rooted, there are hundreds of files on my phone i don't 'own'. I can't access them, in many cases I can't even see them. My phone tells me i don't have permission. If they were.kine, i could do whatever i like with them.The OS and apps on my phone can access them though, modify them, delete them. WhatsApp for example can delete pictures and messages from my phone at the whim of the person that sent them, if left in the default folder.
  - taneq 7y ago
    Never give anything to your phone that you don't have stored elsewhere on hardware you own.
- judge2020 7y ago
  > I'm not aware of anyone storing family photos on GMail. https://www.google.com/photos/about/ https://www.google.com/photos/about/ 2010: There's an App for that 2019: There's a Google service for that* *: at risk of shutting down depending on the number of years since last product update
JohnFen 7y ago
This essay describes very well why I resist anything-as-a-service. I value stability over time as well as convenience. Fortunately, most of the things that I find valuable are things that I can host myself (giving me both stability and convenience), and I can easily do without those things that I can't.
- rapnie 7y ago
  I favor self-hosting too, but it adds the inconvenience of dedicated maintenance to ensure your stability. For a one-man shop there is a lot to think about. So many balls in the air. I recently found my AWS instances compromised because I forgot to timely upgrade nginx on them. Got me the scares and renewed interest in at least some SaaS where it matters most.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Yes, it's more work. But I've been doing this for years, and on average, it really just takes a couple of hours a month of my personal time (monitoring, intrusion detection, etc., are all automated, so most of my time is spent just eyeballing logs to make sure nothing was missed). My approach is certainly not for everyone, but it's the best solution for me.
kauffj 7y ago
I'm very sensitive to this. The notion of "buying" a piece of content on Amazon is borderline offensive to me. You don't own anything! I own a DVD that I can continue to play as long as I own a DVD player. What I'm "buying" from Amazon is a promise that Amazon will continue to give this to me and only me, so long as they are around and available. I can't resell it and I have nothing the moment they cease to exist. That's not ownership. (Setting aside the somewhat absurd notion of "renting" vs. "buying", when both do the same thing. Renting just requires you to throw away the bits after...) If you agree with the above, you might like LBRY (https://lbry.com https://lbry.com or https://lbry.tech https://lbry.tech), which in addition to letting you stream or download no-DRM files, permanently records your access rights in a blockchain.
- michaelbuckbee 7y ago
  It's actually slightly worse than that as licensing deals can collapse on the backend that would remove an item that you had paid for from your library. While it seems unlikely that Amazon would do this, consider that Microsoft has on several occassions with their various attempted music services.
  - jdnenej 7y ago
    Amazon has already done this and pulled a book from people's kindles that they had purchased because Amazon didn't have a license to sell it
  - tomc1985 7y ago
    This is exactly what's happening with Netflix. I've heard stories of this happening on Steam, where games receive essentially post-humous updates to remove licensed content for which the license expired (I believe Rockstar did this to Steam users with its GTA3-era titles). One could also argue that shutting off multiplayer servers is like this, when there is no LAN/TCPIP option available.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      If you think paying for Netflix means you’re paying for access to anything Netflix has a license for at a certain point time for all of eternity, you’ve obviously got an erroneous model of the business in mind. Netflix is subject to licensing agreements, just like cable and broadcast is.
floe 7y ago
'Ownership' is a pretty overloaded term. It's never really clear which sense of 'ownership' the author is invoking at any given moment. Also, lol. "100 years ago, food came from a farm, then it came for [sic] a grocery store, and now it comes from DoorDash." I'm pretty sure most people didn't own their own farm in the 1920s... So what is this saying about ownership?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > I'm pretty sure most people didn't own their own farm in the 1920s... So what is this saying about ownership? But they did own it in the sense of day-to-day control. Soviet Union turned farming into service, a move that caused lots of suffering and is widely remembered today as a Bad Idea.
  - KozmoNau7 7y ago
    The Soviet Union's troubles with farming stemmed more from politicians ordering the farmers to plant specific crops, with absolutely no understanding of farming, soil, climate, seasons or anything, really.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Fair. But then again, if you outsource your movies, music or farming to one of the megacorps everyone else outsources too, you're still under rule of some distant managers that don't have your best interest in mind.
      - KozmoNau7 7y ago
        That fits well with the analogy of the distant overlords with no connection to either production nor the end user. To them, we're all just interchangeable cogs in the machine, our input and experience is not important, we're just supposed to fit in a predefined box.
gitgud 7y ago
> "years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies." This is true, plain old HTML files just depended on the browser's compatibility. Whereas modern node_modules based projects also depend on thousands, sometimes tens of thousands additional npm dependencies... What I've learnt with opening old node projects (2 years+), is that you better be ready to fix some things, thank god it's all open-source!
- DavidPiper 7y ago
  > thank god it's all open-source! It feels like there's something super important/relevant about that throwaway comment, but I can't quite put my finger on what. Beyond the idea that you wouldn't even be able to fix what you had built yourself if it wasn't all open source. Perhaps it just resonates with the idea that if something is open source, everybody owns it and nobody owns it at the same time?
  - headsoup 7y ago
    Perhaps 'nobody owns it, everybody can change (fix) it'
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I have a different take. Being open source doesn't matter at all in cases like these, because if half of your NPM dependencies suddenly break on you, you aren't going to even look at them. Nobody has time for that crap. You'll just swear out loud, and pin your dependencies to older versions.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
    > Beyond the idea that you wouldn't even be able to fix what you had built yourself if it wasn't all open source. Perhaps GP was talking about working with other people's node projects?
- m463 7y ago
  There's a darker side to this... The dependencies on "fonts" or "media" from the googles and the CDNs are tracking plays. (decentraleyes plugin ftw)
platz 7y ago
“Look, this device is personal. It computes and it’s totally personal, just for you, and you alone. It doesn’t talk to the internet. No sociality. You can’t share any of the content with anybody. Because it’s just for you, it’s private. It’s yours. You can compute with it. Nobody will know! You can process text, and draw stuff, and do your accounts. It’s got a spreadsheet. No modem, no broadband, no Cloud, no Facebook, Google, Amazon, no wireless. This is a dream machine. Because it’s personal and it computes. And it sits on the desk. You personally compute with it. You can even write your own software for it. It faithfully executes all your commands.” 'Isn’t it basically the cliff house in Walnut Canyon? Isn’t it the stone box?' “Look, I have my own little stone box here in this canyon! I can grow my own beans and corn. I harvest some prickly pear. I’m super advanced here.” ... 'Why shouldn’t it vanish like the cliff people vanished?' ... 'Then we look back in nostalgia at the Personal Computer world. It’s not that we were forced out of our stone boxes in the canyon. We weren’t driven away by force. We just mysteriously left. It was like the waning of the moon. They were too limiting, somehow. They computed, but they just didn’t do enough for us. They seemed like a fantastic way forward, but somehow they were actually getting in the way of our experience.' - https://www.wired.com/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remarks-by-bruce-sterling/ https://www.wired.com/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remar...
- xg15 7y ago
  > We just mysteriously left. "Mysteriously", as in "getting dragged out kicking and screaming by an industry that realized providing a service makes for a way better business than selling software". I honestly don't think many users wanted to give up ownership in trade of access. At least I know enough non-technical people that cling to their files collections for dear life. However, what they of course want is to take part in modern life and not stay behind on technology. And if you don't want to miss that, there is hardly a way around services these days. (There is the valid point of troubleshooting and maintenance. Your very own personal computer is wonderful until something stops working. However, I think most non-technical people dealt with this problem the same way you'd deal with a broken car: They'd ask someone knowledgeable to "fix" it, either a family member, company admin or commercial service. However, I don't think many people were desperately wishing for their hardware manufacturer or software developer to have a permanent link to their PC, just so they can fix the occasional problem.) > We weren’t driven away by force. The amount of effort Microsoft had to employ to make people stop using Windows XP tells a different story.
api 7y ago
"Worlds of scarcity are made out of things. Worlds of abundance are made out of dependencies." I don't necessarily agree with the abundance premise. Worlds of dependencies are worlds that demand time-consuming labor (ours or someone else's) to resolve and manage those dependencies, and time today is considerably more scarce than matter or energy. Even worse time unlike matter or energy cannot be manufactured or extracted with increasing efficiency. We have only so much time, period. I remain unconvinced that post-skeuomorphism and everything-is-a-service are steps forward. In particular everything-is-a-service seems to work well only in domains where the thing being offered actually is a service in that it actually does require a continuous input of something behind the scenes.
aSplash0fDerp 7y ago
Are there any terms that cover the different digital native generations? Natives that started with 3.5 and 5 1/4 floppies in the 80's vs starting when Gmail went from MB's to GB's in the mid/late 2k's probably view files much differently. In 2019, we can carry 1 TB+ on a smartphone, so the next gen of natives may actually find a new appreciation for files and ownership (plus newfound privacy, not relying on expensive data plans and working/playing from anywhere w/o requiring a connection for most things). Once storage and connections can exceed 10 Gb transfer rates on mobile, it'll take around 15 minutes to fill per TB... And the next era/counter trend begins! The kids nowadays have it so easy (minus getting overserviced by every industry at the same time, being fed doom and gloom about climate change everyday and basically getting raked over the coals by pre-existing debt that was not of their doing).
BenoitEssiambre 7y ago
This does not only apply to consumer software. I was just thinking that the past decade of business software has been about connecting off-the-shelf saas and cloud systems together to run businesses. This was good for businesses wanting to quickly get onboard new technologies but it has real downsides because all these systems are scattered across the world and managed independently, making them more distributed, less transactional (more corruptible) and less tailored to the specific industries they're used in. Overly distributed systems are fundamentally hard and fundamentally inefficient ( https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/podc89.pdf https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/podc89.pdf ). Data that spends more time in memory and cpu cache instead of being thrown over global networks can be processed a lot more efficiently. Also, if your infrastructure is made of a lot of components that anyone can buy, it's much likely for competition to emerge. You lose an important moat. Plus, oftentimes, the outside organizations holding your data can leverage it to make you pay high prices. The next decade might be about recreating the logic of these cobbled together generic saas systems into streamlined and fully tailored software systems for each industry. There is now a lot of mature open source code for companies to use as a foundation. As the article suggests, this could also allow moving towards fully owning data and stack instead of having too much in other companies' platforms. There is probably more incentive for this reshoring of data and software to happen for businesses so it might happen there before it does for consumers.
- jarvuschris 7y ago
  And to add to that, the more generic saas systems you cobble together, the shorter the likely time window until one of them gets acquired/folds/pivots and disrupts you Invested in building your workflow on a SaaS system and it's become critical to your business? It doesn't matter how much you depend on it, or how useful it is to you, you have _no rights_ that top the backers' playing their numbers This effect gets worse the closer to the ground you get, where small orgs don't have the technical capacity to absorb such disruptions. Small orgs are being conditioned to avoid depending on technology, or at least to avoid depending on specialized technology. The net effect this will have is creating yet another bias towards concentrated power winning in the marketplace
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
Cyder 7y ago
This is exactly why i hate Windows-as-a-service that Microsoft is moving toward. If your software is a service then you can only do what they let you. Linux is better but the tradeoff is ease & convenience-- like the author said.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Most Linux distributions are effectively services as well. Debian (or Ubuntu, Mint, CentOS, Fedora, Slack, Gentoo, etc. etc.) are not worth much without the repositories, access to them, and updates, provided by those distributions. An extension of the notion that it's the package management that makes the distro: it's the package archive and access which make the distro. (Details of packagers, packaging, deps resolution, etc., also matter.) But that is a service offered, to revive an old fashioned term, not based on commerce but with grace.
mjevans 7y ago
X as a Service - that's a very positive spin on "rent perpetually" and "you never own". This is different if you own the service, but that's another matter entirely.
paulpauper 7y ago
sucks how dropbox deletes inactive accounts. with all that ipo and vc money how hard is it to keep things running? I remember in the early 2000s when yahoo mails lasted forever. same Hotmail. now everything shuts down if you don't use it.
- solstice 7y ago
  Not to contradict your main point, but I seem to remember that I lost a Hotmail account to inactivity sometime after 2005. So maybe Hotmail isn't the best example
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    My Yahoo account did the same, though that was around 2010 I think.
bmosm 7y ago
For me the main problem is the fact when you own a physical copy you own a snapshot of that exact version of a product. I agree with the practical aspect of having a digital library but the problem is you relinquish almost all aspects of ownership when you purchase a digital product. When you own a digital product you have whatever version its owner decided to share at that time in history and that represents a crucial difference, which enables things like a movie cut differently from its initial release, a remastered/clean/censored version of a song instead of the original, games with certain features, songs or items removed due to expired licenses. We're now in a situation where most people got used to this model without giving it any second thoughts because of comfort and any changes that give users more control are unlikely to happen.
- rdiddly 7y ago
  Yeah like the copy I laboriously sought out, of that one rap song without all the naughty words bleeped out. Or that one "yet another song with a stupid 'car revving' sound effect at the beginning," that I personally chopped off using Audacity.
neilobremski 7y ago
This reminds me of another rising sentiment: "feeling disconnected while everything is connected". Perhaps a loss of ownership in all things also means trading in pieces of identity? If everything is a service then is everyone a consumer?
drskrzyk 7y ago
This is timely considering google's announcement to dump indexing of flash (swf) assets. I get it, the format is unused, buggy, and possibly insecure. That said, much of the nascent internet was built on that. Even "All Your Base" was originally in flash.
- taneq 7y ago
  On the plus side, a lot of the non-interactive Flash content is now on YouTube. I was going through old Weebls Stuff animations the other day, it was a real blast from the past.
jay_kyburz 7y ago
I don't really care what everybody else is doing, I'm just glad I can still buy a NAS and fill it with 10TB drives if I wanted to. I don't even have to search to hard to find them. It probably even pretty easy to make those drives public.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  Indeed, I have a NAS full of my own ripped media and find myself using Kodi more often than the streaming services (I pay for Spotify, Netflix and Amazon) just so I can watch whatever I want to watch rather than whatever they happen to have available at any given moment. Another bonus is it's all ad-free.
- tremon 7y ago
  Economies of scale work against you. If the consumer hardware market shrinks, there will be fewer players on the market. Fewer players may lead to erratic supply and/or monopoly-driven price hikes (see e.g. pharma). So you should care, on at least some level, what everybody else is doing.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> "Worlds of scarcity are made out of things. Worlds of abundance are made out of dependencies." A nice way of putting it, though I have a slightly different take - the "worlds of abundance" are made of relationships. And not in a good way. When I own a bunch of files, I own a bunch of files. Nobody can mess with that. When I use Spotify, I'm in a relationship with Spotify the company. A relationship governed by a lengthy ToS, a relationship in which I'm at a disadvantage, but most importantly, it's another relationship to keep track of. Things you own are out of mind until you need them. Yes, that sometimes means you'll fail to perform necessary maintenance in a timely fashion. But services are always on the top of your mind. They drain your bank account monthly or yearly. They have terms that keep changing. Their offerings keep changing. If you lose track of some, they'll just keep draining your bank account. Services create cognitive burden. Personally, I'm already confused and unsure about just how many things I subscribe to, and I'm someone opposed to X as a Service as a matter of principle. I just don't want that many commercial relationships in my life. It's tiring.
- someguyorother 7y ago
  > the "worlds of abundance" are made of relationships. And not in a good way. That doesn't sound entirely true. Imagine TNG, the typical abundance utopia (or Culture, insert your favorite post-scarcity society here). While it's true that you need relationships to be on the Enterprise, you don't need relationships to go to your replicator and get whatever material product you fancy. Instead, dependencies seem come from two things combined: abundance plus centralization. Or economically: a fixed cost, and abundance beyond that fixed cost. You need a relationship with Spotify because Spotify is the one who holds the keys to the library. Contrast it to a world where piracy is legal: you wouldn't need a relationship with BitTorrent to download music, because it has no entry cost. You might need a relationship with private trackers if you're not content with the public ones, but again - that's because the private trackers hold the keys to the abundance beyond.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    You're correct. That's why I put "worlds of abundance" in (scare) quotes - I don't particularly like that term, but it is what the author used. To me, our reality more closely resembles life on Ferenginar than in the Federation. I'm not against all business relationships, just the proliferation of them. You don't need a relationship with the replicator to use one on Enterprise - just being there (even as a guest) gives you access. But that's Starfleet. I assume that Federation citizens don't need relationships to operate their household replicators either - they most likely own one. And while this is just my head canon, I imagine on Ferenginar you typically rent food replicators from Replicate.ly or some other competing startup. I'm not agreeing with the author that the "worlds of abundance" need to have everything as services. I'm just complaining that our world is heading this way. Ultimately, I want our world to be more like the Federation, and less like the Ferengi.
SllX 7y ago
I think what isn’t fully realized in this article is that the real abundance is in the choices we have today. You can subscribe to Spotify or some equivalent, but you can also buy CDs, buy Vinyls, DRM-free versions of just that one song you want off an album, you can play the song you want off the Piano, or find it in a game, or listen to the radio (AM, FM, even Satellite!), or go to a live show, or download someone else’s recording of a live show. You can partake in all of these ways or any combination thereof, and I forgot to even mention music boxes! I think it’s more fair to say “Everything is amazing, but you don’t have to own all of it to enjoy it”. Some things are tangible and worth having in a hard copy so to speak, and some things are ephemeral so enjoy them while you can, for nothing and no things last forever.
- m463 7y ago
  The problem is when your choices are marginalized and "you own it" becomes unavailable. Examples: Games nowadays (some have drm, some are online only). Anything adobe. Smartphones. Cars.
  - SllX 7y ago
    Yet there are still games you can buy with no DRM, and there have never been more games available for purchase than now. There’s an abundance of games, and yes, some of them have a shelf life and abusive to their customers. Those games are what I would call ephemeral experiences, or at least they are deeper into the ephemeral experience end than games available for purchases.
- matheusmoreira 7y ago
  Owning a copy is not possible. Making more copies is illegal. Sending one of those copies to a friend is illegal. Sharing those copies with people on the internet is illegal. Artificial scarcity means the only choices available to you are the choices the copyright holders want you to have.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
    "Home taping is killing music"
Havoc 7y ago
First thing that comes to mind are containers/virtual envs and freezing versions with requirements.txt files. That could get interesting unpiecing that a decade later. Scavenger hunts for old versions...
buboard 7y ago
That's a broader trend of choosing to rent rather than buy and wage labour instead of entrepreneurship. It's also coming to the point though that people's "digital trail" is no longer just a trail, it's their entire output in life. I think people will recognize this and the next iteration of tech will be property-centered again. What we live today is a bubble of inequality and the shallow freedom of not owning things. Neither extreme is good, people always end up gravitating somewhere in the middle.
esjeon 7y ago
> our phones are fully in the future ... But our computers are still kind of in the past I wonder if our app-based ecosystem is really the "future". The reason is simple: apps lock you down. Apps store your data somewhere you don't have access to, and you can't control your data. Sometimes you even can't move your work to another device. On the other hand, file-based storage naturally encourages data migration. Also, file-based storage allows 3rd party integration. You can use applications from different companies and of different purposes to work on the same piece of data. Even in case of software development, source code can be edited with various editors, compiled with compatible compilers, analyzed with lints and formatters, and revision-controlled through git, svn, or random custom solutions, where all those tools are developed by different parties. I don't think app-based ecosystem can achieve this level of freedom, versatility and flexibility at once. So, no. Files are not the thing of the past, nor should be buried deep below "future" stack. It should be kept as an official backdoor to give users precise control over their data.
hamilyon2 7y ago
Surprisingly shallow discussion here. Ownership itself is lease. Sibling comment mentioned home ownership and tenant laws. Home and land ownership is one of trickiest types of ownership. It turns out, that in democratic and civilized sosieties you don't actually own realty. You lease it with significant restrictions. Inheritance laws make it even more clear. Law might decide that particular part of property is valued $x euro. A trademark. A patent. An option. So, you must cede control of this part of inherited good to state. If you truly owned it, inheritance taxes would be zero.
whyleyc 7y ago
"Files are dead" is an oft-quoted meme, but they aren't going away anytime soon. I wrote a piece offering a counterpoint to this view five years ago (in response to a similar article by Fred Wilson) and I think most of the points still hold true today: https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-wrong-files-arent-dead/ https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-wrong-...

344 points by yankcrime 7y ago

This is a good take. Ownership is one of those things that I feel intuitively is important, and I experience frustration around losing it incrementally. But I struggle to put my concerns into concrete, relatable examples that the everyday user might appreciate. The 'access until it is no longer' narrative seems to fit that pretty well.

baroffoos 7y ago
This is something I think we have been hit hard by with video games. The first wave of online enabled games has now had their servers shut down and the games rendered unplayable. One of my favorite childhood games from about 2006 (Viva Pinata) is now unplayable on windows because it used Games for Windows Live which has now shut down. The game is basically entirely offline and single player but is now unusable unless you use the xbox 360 version which works fine because it could be used entirely offline.
- kardos 7y ago
  Maybe, broadly speaking, that's just the way life is. Things exist for awhile and then they don't. Bands eventually stop touring and seeing them live is a thing of the past. The character of your city is likely quite different as compared to a generation ago. That amazing restaurant went out of business. If those servers were still up, would there be anyone on them to play against?
  - wolco 7y ago
    I can still play all of my c64 games and will be able to in 20 years. Some game I buy today not so much.
  - autoexec 7y ago
    I don't expect a band to live forever to keep doing live shows, but if I buy their CD I don't expect someone to break into my home and take it at any point in the future, but plenty of people have lost their music because of shitty DRM schemes and for those who are entirely dependent on streaming their music they will very likely not be able to find some of their favorite songs later, especially for more obscure stuff. I'm glad that I was able to pass some of my favorite games and music and books to the next generation and that they can pass them on to their kids. My collection of favorites will outlive many of the new things they enjoy today.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Maybe that's how people think life is. It didn't used to be like that. It used to be better. The 7" I bought when I was 10 still plays. So do the tapes I copied in school, though I've moved on from tape. The flacs and mp3s will be around as long as I have a server. I can still play Morrowind - I don't need a server up, and most -not all - online games spoil the game by being online. Quite happy with a LAN mode to play with partner or kids, or ad-hoc server mode to play WAN with friends. Most online games have been updated so they aren't remotely the same game as they were - especially for things like MMOs, Spotify is an ephemeral radio station, Netflix is reducing what they have every month. Whether it's down to company closing, getting bored of keeping service up for an old game, or stopping your monthly sub, the rate of attrition is frightening.
  - baroffoos 7y ago
    >If those servers were still up, would there be anyone on them to play against? It was a single player game. There was never anyone to play against. The online aspects were for DRM only.
  - ollifi 7y ago
    I think this happened to many early movies. There are many lost films where we only have written descriptions and still images left. A whole system for film archiving was put in place to prevent this from happening as it was deemed too important to be left into hands of producers. I believe in order to put something out nowdays you are required to provide a copy to archive. Not sure if it is world wide requirement or local though.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Yes, that's the primary reason why I stopped playing most new games. I value the ability to fire up games that I bought 20 years ago (and I do this regularly), and I'm not willing to invest in any that depend on external services.
  - autoexec 7y ago
    Same here. I even make a point to grab a cracked copy of any game I buy on steam so that if the service goes under, or they decide to remove it from my library (like when amazon secretly removed copies of "1984" from people's kindles) I'll still have access to the games I paid for.
    - Causality1 7y ago
      That goes double for games that come with obnoxious required software like uplay, origin, denuvo, etc.
  - dragontamer 7y ago
    Check out Good Ol' Games, which includes modern gems like Witcher 3, Hollow Knight, Factorio, Stardew Valley, Indivisible. Everything on GoG is DRM-free, simple .exe installers that should work without any servers.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      Oh, yeah, GOG has quite a lot of my money!
    - baroffoos 7y ago
      I think a lot of these games are actually drm free on steam as well, gog just only lists drm free games so you can be sure its safe to buy. I often run games outside of steam so I can let my bf use steam family share at the same time.
      - roxil 7y ago
        You are correct. Being on steam doesn't necessarily mean that a game has DRM. It's up to a game developer to implement steam's DRM or not. Check out the big list of DRM-free steam games: https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games_on_Steam https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games...
- autoexec 7y ago
  I really hope someone is maintaining a list somewhere of games we've lost because of DRM or just short sighted design like in the case of Missing (https://www.amazon.com/Missing-PC/dp/B000271MCG https://www.amazon.com/Missing-PC/dp/B000271MCG) which was dependent on websites and email accounts that the company is either no longer around to maintain or no longer feels it worth maintaining.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Not just online games. Imagine if tomorrow Steam shuts down, you can bet we will lose access to thousands of games forever (as in, some of them are not actively maintained out of Steam anywhere).
journalctl 7y ago
It’s easy: when you don’t own anything, you’re at the mercy of your lessor. This is why tenant laws exist (sort of, depending on your location). There’s an inescapable power imbalance involved. Except now more and more goods and services are being leased, and the dwindling middle class means fewer and fewer people can properly own things. If we intend to continue into a future of perpetual renting, we at least need stronger renter protections.
- jdnenej 7y ago
  Europe is heading this way. There was recent news that a country in Europe was planning to require steam to allow users to transfer and sell their games to other accounts.
rkagerer 7y ago
It's hugely important - just look how the companies in possession of our cloud leverage it. I'm hopeful creative solutions with decentralization will allow you to retain control even though the vault is in the hands of someone else.
- wolco 7y ago
  decentralization or fragmented market.
joshspankit 7y ago
I feel counter-intuitively enough that music is likely the way many people will relate to in a concrete way. It’s all well and good to trust your service provider until at some point you get nostalgia for a song you “had” or even “owned”, go to queue it up, and find it completely missing. Maybe the record company even took it off YouTube and all the other free platforms, locking it behind their own service. What tasted and smelled like ownership is suddenly revealed in moments like this.
- IggleSniggle 7y ago
  I experienced this fairly abruptly this year. My toddler loved listening to the Thomas & Friends albums. They were "added to my Library" and an almost daily listen. One day, NONE of these were available. Same thing happened earlier when Disney bought Big Block Singsong. It's funny, because I'm grateful to have an excuse not to listen to these anymore. But in both cases it was quite disappointing to my kid (and irritating on principle). Kids love to consume the same thing over and over again. Netflix has a similar effect: beloved tv or movies are suddenly gone without a trace, and no warning that they will be disappearing. Definitely a low-stakes relatable example.
  - m463 7y ago
    And nothing is out in the open. "We just won't tell them this netflix show is going away, it will just upset people. Maybe they won't notice." (although they do say something about your queue a short time before it disappears)
  - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
    Just to complete the picture - I recently found a box of VHS tapes at my parents' house of all of the cartoons I watched over and over again as a kid. It was fun seeing them again, and of course they still played fine 30 years later.
- clarry 7y ago
  Youtube kinda gave me a taste of this, a few days ago. They didn't pull the music, but they pulled all the relevant recommendations. So where I used to listen to a song or album and get a long list of relevant recommendations of music from the same artist, label, uploader, or musical style, I suddenly got nothing but local youtubers' nonsense and gaming streams. After I blocked those (not interested & don't recommend this channel again), I got literally no recommendations at all anymore. It was depressing to realize how reliant I am on a company to faciliate music discovery, knowing that they can change their algorithms and/or block certain content any day.
deogeo 7y ago
The occasional post on HN to the tune of "proprietary solution our company relies on just increased price by 10x - what can we do?" validates your feelings. When you rely on something you don't own, you are in someone else's control. And they tend to use that control to benefit at your expense.
Causality1 7y ago
How about when Zune Pass shut down and obliterated the music collections of people who spent hundreds of dollars in subscription fees? Or when Google bought Revolv, shut down its servers, and turned thousanda of home automation systems into expensive paperweights? To me every new service feels like another leech sucking at my wallet, of which there are far too many. I much prefer the collections of flacs and mp3s to Spotify and my personal media archive to having a dozen different streaming video subscriptions.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Also, it's not like it's totally either/or. You should be able to own your music and movies, but also be able to pay for a service that manages it - removing the logistics burden, while still ensuring the goods you bought will not disappear when the service goes down.
  - Causality1 7y ago
    Plex perfectly encapsulates that philosophy.
    - joshspankit 7y ago
      Actually I would argue with this: Plex used to, but now find themselves trying to “legitimize” and sacrificing user control in order to do it. E.g: All logins (including local LAN) go through their servers.
      - Causality1 7y ago
        Considering the plethora of bullshit like news and podcasts I find littering my plex home screen, I agree with your point.
taneq 7y ago
> Ownership is one of those things that I feel intuitively is important, and I experience frustration around losing it incrementally. I feel this too, but at the same time I wonder how much of this feeling is due to a scarcity mindset. It used to be you had a small, finite amount of music, movies, games etc. and so each one individually was valuable. Maybe people who've grown up in the Netflix/Spotify era just don't get personally attached to particular shows the way we do? There's an infinite amount of stuff to consume so if the thing you were looking for isn't there any more, just have something else.
- clarry 7y ago
  I've always been one to make strong emotional bonds to the music I listen to. I don't think it's got that much to do with scarcity, it's more about what role the music fills in my life. Having an endless stream of music just isn't quite as satisfying as picking out the tunes I resonate with and hearing them again and again. And this is exactly what happens when I listen to music streams: I get the urge to pick out the tunes I like. But only after I've heard the same song more than a couple times (it takes time to bond). I think music becomes kind of an anchor you can (attempt to) rely on when everything else in the world around you is changing. Friends, home town, jobs, apartments, all change... that makes music that remains the same after a decade all that much more comforting.

draw_down 7y ago

The author doesn't make the connection explicit, but tools like Figma reduce the need for files as a means of conveying information between parties. Instead, you collaborate directly in the tool, freeing the designer from having to constantly export and send around documents, and freeing engineers from having to chase down exports. Figma also has a feature where you can "shoulder surf" another person as they work. The ability to see what others are doing in the document leads to some interesting interactions. (You see my cursor moving in a way that indicates I'm counting the number of rows in a design; you message me and tell me it's 15.)

gt2 7y ago

Agreed overall but.. Most people don't want to/can't run their own backup service, so they count on the services they use to keep things alive. Add to that users wanting to use multiple devices. Maybe I'm over estimating software literacy but many people who want these things often write their own solutions or do without shiny new things which are often just cloud based versions of the old!

nharada 7y ago

Interesting that email feels like ours -- "Gmail is the new Finder ... Most importantly, your inbox is yours." But really isn't it just us trusting Gmail not to pull our access?

FpUser 7y ago
>But really isn't it just us trusting Gmail not to pull our access Nope, not trusting Google and I do not use it (or any other cloudy stuff) to keep what is mine.
mparramon 7y ago
I think that the difference is that someone can have a similar experience to Gmail by using their own mail server and any mail client. The same cannot be said about Uber, for example.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  You can't call a friend and ask them for a lift?

pjc50 7y ago

See also the book "Information Feudalism", which does a good job of looking at this from an IP perspective.

zachkatz 7y ago

This is true of social media content, too. If a tweet/IG post/whatever you like disappears, you'll never see it again; you might not even know it disappeared until you remember it two years later, try to look for it, and can't find it. That's one of the reasons I started Framed Tweets (http://framedtweets.com/ http://framedtweets.com/).

hprotagonist 7y ago

If the current trend of technology is sweeping us in a direction of “everything is amazing, but nothing is ours”, Technology that’s Actually Yours could be the next great counter-trend So GNU or it’s predecessors, circa the birth of the personal computer. if “the cloud and apps” is cognate with “timeshare mainframes and thin clients”, and I think it is, then everything old is new again and i look forward to taking back what’s ours, again.

api 7y ago
Yes, absolutely. Cloud is the new mainframe and SaaS is the new closed-source even if the software it's running behind the scenes is nominally open.
- code_duck 7y ago
  The infrastructure might be open, mostly, but all of the important software the consumers interact with on a higher level is closed and secret.
- drskrzyk 7y ago
  I'm hoping that the AGPL has or will curb some of this lock in, though I suspect that the people with the funding to run SaaS at scale will route around AGPL.
  - brian-armstrong 7y ago
    It's even easier to avoid AGPL than that - there is approximately 0 software of any value licensed only in AGPL.
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    I’ve been ruminating on this problem for a decade or more and my belief is it’s not the licensing that’s the problem, it’s the infrastructure. In the old world of tarballs, you could throw a file on an ftp server and someone could take an afternoon, mess with the paths and the make and make install and all that, and have your thing up and running. And mostly keep using it without fuss. With web services you just can’t. You minimum need security patches applies, and in truth, you need the original author to be able to keep refactoring and updating the service architecture. We don’t have infrastructure that can facilitate that. That’s the real problem, not licensing. You can put a Heroku buildpack or whatever in your repo. That gets us pretty close to one-click deploy, and almost automatic security patching. But Heroku will penalize us with a 30 delay for being non-profit, when we access the service, which is pretty much a deal breaker. Even if I am paying them a hundred dollars a month (and I am) they will still pause for 30 seconds every time I access one of my cold “free” services. If there was a hosting solution, even if it involved users paying a monthly fee, but it solved this issue of shared maintenance of open source services, it would usher in a new golden age of free software. Ostensibly Ethereum solves this problem, but we’ll see if the ergonomics get where they need to be. It would be nice to be able to do this in a trustless way, although I don’t think that’s necessary for a MVP.

saagarjha 7y ago

> I learned, for instance, that a great way to get people to click on your blog post is to make them mad Ha, this is a common way to get on the frontpage of Hacker News.

A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
Wasn't one of those lesser discussed findings of FB that making people angry makes them more engaged.
- tunesmith 7y ago
  Yeah, I think so. I wonder if is a special case of "surprise" - things that are surprising have more information value, and people react to information. There's also the aspect of something being wrong - if something is wrong, people want to correct it - often angrily if the source advancing the wrong viewpoint is obstinate - and that's engagement. I wonder if both of those can be teased out. Like, if something is surprising and correct, what's the engagement of that? That probably doesn't drive engagement as much as surprising and wrong.
- Splines 7y ago
  As always, relevant xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/386/ https://www.xkcd.com/386/
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

mwkaufma 7y ago

"We love services." Citation needed.

gumby 7y ago

This reminds me of the arrival of the PC (MS-DOS and Mac): file formats were typically silos: proprietary and could only be opened in their special app. Coming from a different tradition this was completely weird and uncomfortable to me so I never really got into those systems. Gradually some open formats pried this open: GIF/JPEG/MP3/ZIP (all only somewhat open at the time) then turning into PNG/HTML... etc. In this regard the phones feel like a step backwards as each app really manages its own data. Email programs these days are like that -- for example you can't keep a project's mail folder with its files any more.

incompatible 7y ago
Back in the early Windows days, I was helping somebody on Windows get some data somewhere else where I needed it. I started by opening the file manager and finding the data files. He was like "Whoa ... you are in no-mans-land" ... he just wasn't familiar with accessing files outside of an application. There are a couple of orthogonal concepts are work here a) how data is stored, in files with a well-known format, in files with a proprietary format, or perhaps in some kind of database b) who has control of the data, perhaps defined by who would be able to delete it, or whether the data would cease to be accessible if a particular organization ceased to exist.

generationP 7y ago

This is surprisingly out of touch with reality -- at least with my reality and that around me. Then again I'm 30 and in academia, so it might not be the latest update. Do people access their music through their apps instead of a file manager these days? Sure. But how does it get into the apps in the first place? I couldn't find half of my music library on amazon, let alone the money to actually buy it. The same applies to tech books, even more glaringly so because there is no streaming option. Do people use GMail as a quasi-storage for everything they need to keep up with in life? Yeah. Do they want to use it that way? Not really. It doesn't scale up that well, and yes, you will slam into Google's 15GB limit soon enough. So at least I only have the "temporary" stuff on GMail, for a wide but not all-encompassing notion of "temporary". I'm not aware of anyone storing family photos on GMail. And that's just the stuff we consume. As for producing, there's very little you can do without working with files at least a bit. Attach a photo to a post, run a python script, exchange documents with someone who isn't using the same clouds as you... Actually, even if all of your stuff is on clouds, you'll sooner or later want or have to move it around between different clouds, and what do you export it to? Files.

grawprog 7y ago
Because my phone's not rooted, there are hundreds of files on my phone i don't 'own'. I can't access them, in many cases I can't even see them. My phone tells me i don't have permission. If they were.kine, i could do whatever i like with them.The OS and apps on my phone can access them though, modify them, delete them. WhatsApp for example can delete pictures and messages from my phone at the whim of the person that sent them, if left in the default folder.
- taneq 7y ago
  Never give anything to your phone that you don't have stored elsewhere on hardware you own.
judge2020 7y ago
> I'm not aware of anyone storing family photos on GMail. https://www.google.com/photos/about/ https://www.google.com/photos/about/ 2010: There's an App for that 2019: There's a Google service for that* *: at risk of shutting down depending on the number of years since last product update

JohnFen 7y ago

This essay describes very well why I resist anything-as-a-service. I value stability over time as well as convenience. Fortunately, most of the things that I find valuable are things that I can host myself (giving me both stability and convenience), and I can easily do without those things that I can't.

rapnie 7y ago
I favor self-hosting too, but it adds the inconvenience of dedicated maintenance to ensure your stability. For a one-man shop there is a lot to think about. So many balls in the air. I recently found my AWS instances compromised because I forgot to timely upgrade nginx on them. Got me the scares and renewed interest in at least some SaaS where it matters most.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Yes, it's more work. But I've been doing this for years, and on average, it really just takes a couple of hours a month of my personal time (monitoring, intrusion detection, etc., are all automated, so most of my time is spent just eyeballing logs to make sure nothing was missed). My approach is certainly not for everyone, but it's the best solution for me.

kauffj 7y ago

I'm very sensitive to this. The notion of "buying" a piece of content on Amazon is borderline offensive to me. You don't own anything! I own a DVD that I can continue to play as long as I own a DVD player. What I'm "buying" from Amazon is a promise that Amazon will continue to give this to me and only me, so long as they are around and available. I can't resell it and I have nothing the moment they cease to exist. That's not ownership. (Setting aside the somewhat absurd notion of "renting" vs. "buying", when both do the same thing. Renting just requires you to throw away the bits after...) If you agree with the above, you might like LBRY (https://lbry.com https://lbry.com or https://lbry.tech https://lbry.tech), which in addition to letting you stream or download no-DRM files, permanently records your access rights in a blockchain.

michaelbuckbee 7y ago
It's actually slightly worse than that as licensing deals can collapse on the backend that would remove an item that you had paid for from your library. While it seems unlikely that Amazon would do this, consider that Microsoft has on several occassions with their various attempted music services.
- jdnenej 7y ago
  Amazon has already done this and pulled a book from people's kindles that they had purchased because Amazon didn't have a license to sell it
- tomc1985 7y ago
  This is exactly what's happening with Netflix. I've heard stories of this happening on Steam, where games receive essentially post-humous updates to remove licensed content for which the license expired (I believe Rockstar did this to Steam users with its GTA3-era titles). One could also argue that shutting off multiplayer servers is like this, when there is no LAN/TCPIP option available.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    If you think paying for Netflix means you’re paying for access to anything Netflix has a license for at a certain point time for all of eternity, you’ve obviously got an erroneous model of the business in mind. Netflix is subject to licensing agreements, just like cable and broadcast is.

floe 7y ago

'Ownership' is a pretty overloaded term. It's never really clear which sense of 'ownership' the author is invoking at any given moment. Also, lol. "100 years ago, food came from a farm, then it came for [sic] a grocery store, and now it comes from DoorDash." I'm pretty sure most people didn't own their own farm in the 1920s... So what is this saying about ownership?

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> I'm pretty sure most people didn't own their own farm in the 1920s... So what is this saying about ownership? But they did own it in the sense of day-to-day control. Soviet Union turned farming into service, a move that caused lots of suffering and is widely remembered today as a Bad Idea.
- KozmoNau7 7y ago
  The Soviet Union's troubles with farming stemmed more from politicians ordering the farmers to plant specific crops, with absolutely no understanding of farming, soil, climate, seasons or anything, really.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Fair. But then again, if you outsource your movies, music or farming to one of the megacorps everyone else outsources too, you're still under rule of some distant managers that don't have your best interest in mind.
    - KozmoNau7 7y ago
      That fits well with the analogy of the distant overlords with no connection to either production nor the end user. To them, we're all just interchangeable cogs in the machine, our input and experience is not important, we're just supposed to fit in a predefined box.

gitgud 7y ago

> "years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies." This is true, plain old HTML files just depended on the browser's compatibility. Whereas modern node_modules based projects also depend on thousands, sometimes tens of thousands additional npm dependencies... What I've learnt with opening old node projects (2 years+), is that you better be ready to fix some things, thank god it's all open-source!

DavidPiper 7y ago
> thank god it's all open-source! It feels like there's something super important/relevant about that throwaway comment, but I can't quite put my finger on what. Beyond the idea that you wouldn't even be able to fix what you had built yourself if it wasn't all open source. Perhaps it just resonates with the idea that if something is open source, everybody owns it and nobody owns it at the same time?
- headsoup 7y ago
  Perhaps 'nobody owns it, everybody can change (fix) it'
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I have a different take. Being open source doesn't matter at all in cases like these, because if half of your NPM dependencies suddenly break on you, you aren't going to even look at them. Nobody has time for that crap. You'll just swear out loud, and pin your dependencies to older versions.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  > Beyond the idea that you wouldn't even be able to fix what you had built yourself if it wasn't all open source. Perhaps GP was talking about working with other people's node projects?
m463 7y ago
There's a darker side to this... The dependencies on "fonts" or "media" from the googles and the CDNs are tracking plays. (decentraleyes plugin ftw)

platz 7y ago

“Look, this device is personal. It computes and it’s totally personal, just for you, and you alone. It doesn’t talk to the internet. No sociality. You can’t share any of the content with anybody. Because it’s just for you, it’s private. It’s yours. You can compute with it. Nobody will know! You can process text, and draw stuff, and do your accounts. It’s got a spreadsheet. No modem, no broadband, no Cloud, no Facebook, Google, Amazon, no wireless. This is a dream machine. Because it’s personal and it computes. And it sits on the desk. You personally compute with it. You can even write your own software for it. It faithfully executes all your commands.” 'Isn’t it basically the cliff house in Walnut Canyon? Isn’t it the stone box?' “Look, I have my own little stone box here in this canyon! I can grow my own beans and corn. I harvest some prickly pear. I’m super advanced here.” ... 'Why shouldn’t it vanish like the cliff people vanished?' ... 'Then we look back in nostalgia at the Personal Computer world. It’s not that we were forced out of our stone boxes in the canyon. We weren’t driven away by force. We just mysteriously left. It was like the waning of the moon. They were too limiting, somehow. They computed, but they just didn’t do enough for us. They seemed like a fantastic way forward, but somehow they were actually getting in the way of our experience.' - https://www.wired.com/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remarks-by-bruce-sterling/ https://www.wired.com/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remar...

xg15 7y ago
> We just mysteriously left. "Mysteriously", as in "getting dragged out kicking and screaming by an industry that realized providing a service makes for a way better business than selling software". I honestly don't think many users wanted to give up ownership in trade of access. At least I know enough non-technical people that cling to their files collections for dear life. However, what they of course want is to take part in modern life and not stay behind on technology. And if you don't want to miss that, there is hardly a way around services these days. (There is the valid point of troubleshooting and maintenance. Your very own personal computer is wonderful until something stops working. However, I think most non-technical people dealt with this problem the same way you'd deal with a broken car: They'd ask someone knowledgeable to "fix" it, either a family member, company admin or commercial service. However, I don't think many people were desperately wishing for their hardware manufacturer or software developer to have a permanent link to their PC, just so they can fix the occasional problem.) > We weren’t driven away by force. The amount of effort Microsoft had to employ to make people stop using Windows XP tells a different story.

api 7y ago

"Worlds of scarcity are made out of things. Worlds of abundance are made out of dependencies." I don't necessarily agree with the abundance premise. Worlds of dependencies are worlds that demand time-consuming labor (ours or someone else's) to resolve and manage those dependencies, and time today is considerably more scarce than matter or energy. Even worse time unlike matter or energy cannot be manufactured or extracted with increasing efficiency. We have only so much time, period. I remain unconvinced that post-skeuomorphism and everything-is-a-service are steps forward. In particular everything-is-a-service seems to work well only in domains where the thing being offered actually is a service in that it actually does require a continuous input of something behind the scenes.

aSplash0fDerp 7y ago

Are there any terms that cover the different digital native generations? Natives that started with 3.5 and 5 1/4 floppies in the 80's vs starting when Gmail went from MB's to GB's in the mid/late 2k's probably view files much differently. In 2019, we can carry 1 TB+ on a smartphone, so the next gen of natives may actually find a new appreciation for files and ownership (plus newfound privacy, not relying on expensive data plans and working/playing from anywhere w/o requiring a connection for most things). Once storage and connections can exceed 10 Gb transfer rates on mobile, it'll take around 15 minutes to fill per TB... And the next era/counter trend begins! The kids nowadays have it so easy (minus getting overserviced by every industry at the same time, being fed doom and gloom about climate change everyday and basically getting raked over the coals by pre-existing debt that was not of their doing).

BenoitEssiambre 7y ago

This does not only apply to consumer software. I was just thinking that the past decade of business software has been about connecting off-the-shelf saas and cloud systems together to run businesses. This was good for businesses wanting to quickly get onboard new technologies but it has real downsides because all these systems are scattered across the world and managed independently, making them more distributed, less transactional (more corruptible) and less tailored to the specific industries they're used in. Overly distributed systems are fundamentally hard and fundamentally inefficient ( https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/podc89.pdf https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/podc89.pdf ). Data that spends more time in memory and cpu cache instead of being thrown over global networks can be processed a lot more efficiently. Also, if your infrastructure is made of a lot of components that anyone can buy, it's much likely for competition to emerge. You lose an important moat. Plus, oftentimes, the outside organizations holding your data can leverage it to make you pay high prices. The next decade might be about recreating the logic of these cobbled together generic saas systems into streamlined and fully tailored software systems for each industry. There is now a lot of mature open source code for companies to use as a foundation. As the article suggests, this could also allow moving towards fully owning data and stack instead of having too much in other companies' platforms. There is probably more incentive for this reshoring of data and software to happen for businesses so it might happen there before it does for consumers.

jarvuschris 7y ago
And to add to that, the more generic saas systems you cobble together, the shorter the likely time window until one of them gets acquired/folds/pivots and disrupts you Invested in building your workflow on a SaaS system and it's become critical to your business? It doesn't matter how much you depend on it, or how useful it is to you, you have _no rights_ that top the backers' playing their numbers This effect gets worse the closer to the ground you get, where small orgs don't have the technical capacity to absorb such disruptions. Small orgs are being conditioned to avoid depending on technology, or at least to avoid depending on specialized technology. The net effect this will have is creating yet another bias towards concentrated power winning in the marketplace
erikpukinskis 7y ago

Cyder 7y ago

This is exactly why i hate Windows-as-a-service that Microsoft is moving toward. If your software is a service then you can only do what they let you. Linux is better but the tradeoff is ease & convenience-- like the author said.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Most Linux distributions are effectively services as well. Debian (or Ubuntu, Mint, CentOS, Fedora, Slack, Gentoo, etc. etc.) are not worth much without the repositories, access to them, and updates, provided by those distributions. An extension of the notion that it's the package management that makes the distro: it's the package archive and access which make the distro. (Details of packagers, packaging, deps resolution, etc., also matter.) But that is a service offered, to revive an old fashioned term, not based on commerce but with grace.

mjevans 7y ago

X as a Service - that's a very positive spin on "rent perpetually" and "you never own". This is different if you own the service, but that's another matter entirely.

paulpauper 7y ago

sucks how dropbox deletes inactive accounts. with all that ipo and vc money how hard is it to keep things running? I remember in the early 2000s when yahoo mails lasted forever. same Hotmail. now everything shuts down if you don't use it.

solstice 7y ago
Not to contradict your main point, but I seem to remember that I lost a Hotmail account to inactivity sometime after 2005. So maybe Hotmail isn't the best example
- yellowapple 7y ago
  My Yahoo account did the same, though that was around 2010 I think.

bmosm 7y ago

For me the main problem is the fact when you own a physical copy you own a snapshot of that exact version of a product. I agree with the practical aspect of having a digital library but the problem is you relinquish almost all aspects of ownership when you purchase a digital product. When you own a digital product you have whatever version its owner decided to share at that time in history and that represents a crucial difference, which enables things like a movie cut differently from its initial release, a remastered/clean/censored version of a song instead of the original, games with certain features, songs or items removed due to expired licenses. We're now in a situation where most people got used to this model without giving it any second thoughts because of comfort and any changes that give users more control are unlikely to happen.

rdiddly 7y ago
Yeah like the copy I laboriously sought out, of that one rap song without all the naughty words bleeped out. Or that one "yet another song with a stupid 'car revving' sound effect at the beginning," that I personally chopped off using Audacity.

neilobremski 7y ago

This reminds me of another rising sentiment: "feeling disconnected while everything is connected". Perhaps a loss of ownership in all things also means trading in pieces of identity? If everything is a service then is everyone a consumer?

drskrzyk 7y ago

This is timely considering google's announcement to dump indexing of flash (swf) assets. I get it, the format is unused, buggy, and possibly insecure. That said, much of the nascent internet was built on that. Even "All Your Base" was originally in flash.

taneq 7y ago
On the plus side, a lot of the non-interactive Flash content is now on YouTube. I was going through old Weebls Stuff animations the other day, it was a real blast from the past.

jay_kyburz 7y ago

I don't really care what everybody else is doing, I'm just glad I can still buy a NAS and fill it with 10TB drives if I wanted to. I don't even have to search to hard to find them. It probably even pretty easy to make those drives public.

SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
Indeed, I have a NAS full of my own ripped media and find myself using Kodi more often than the streaming services (I pay for Spotify, Netflix and Amazon) just so I can watch whatever I want to watch rather than whatever they happen to have available at any given moment. Another bonus is it's all ad-free.
tremon 7y ago
Economies of scale work against you. If the consumer hardware market shrinks, there will be fewer players on the market. Fewer players may lead to erratic supply and/or monopoly-driven price hikes (see e.g. pharma). So you should care, on at least some level, what everybody else is doing.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> "Worlds of scarcity are made out of things. Worlds of abundance are made out of dependencies." A nice way of putting it, though I have a slightly different take - the "worlds of abundance" are made of relationships. And not in a good way. When I own a bunch of files, I own a bunch of files. Nobody can mess with that. When I use Spotify, I'm in a relationship with Spotify the company. A relationship governed by a lengthy ToS, a relationship in which I'm at a disadvantage, but most importantly, it's another relationship to keep track of. Things you own are out of mind until you need them. Yes, that sometimes means you'll fail to perform necessary maintenance in a timely fashion. But services are always on the top of your mind. They drain your bank account monthly or yearly. They have terms that keep changing. Their offerings keep changing. If you lose track of some, they'll just keep draining your bank account. Services create cognitive burden. Personally, I'm already confused and unsure about just how many things I subscribe to, and I'm someone opposed to X as a Service as a matter of principle. I just don't want that many commercial relationships in my life. It's tiring.

someguyorother 7y ago
> the "worlds of abundance" are made of relationships. And not in a good way. That doesn't sound entirely true. Imagine TNG, the typical abundance utopia (or Culture, insert your favorite post-scarcity society here). While it's true that you need relationships to be on the Enterprise, you don't need relationships to go to your replicator and get whatever material product you fancy. Instead, dependencies seem come from two things combined: abundance plus centralization. Or economically: a fixed cost, and abundance beyond that fixed cost. You need a relationship with Spotify because Spotify is the one who holds the keys to the library. Contrast it to a world where piracy is legal: you wouldn't need a relationship with BitTorrent to download music, because it has no entry cost. You might need a relationship with private trackers if you're not content with the public ones, but again - that's because the private trackers hold the keys to the abundance beyond.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  You're correct. That's why I put "worlds of abundance" in (scare) quotes - I don't particularly like that term, but it is what the author used. To me, our reality more closely resembles life on Ferenginar than in the Federation. I'm not against all business relationships, just the proliferation of them. You don't need a relationship with the replicator to use one on Enterprise - just being there (even as a guest) gives you access. But that's Starfleet. I assume that Federation citizens don't need relationships to operate their household replicators either - they most likely own one. And while this is just my head canon, I imagine on Ferenginar you typically rent food replicators from Replicate.ly or some other competing startup. I'm not agreeing with the author that the "worlds of abundance" need to have everything as services. I'm just complaining that our world is heading this way. Ultimately, I want our world to be more like the Federation, and less like the Ferengi.

SllX 7y ago

I think what isn’t fully realized in this article is that the real abundance is in the choices we have today. You can subscribe to Spotify or some equivalent, but you can also buy CDs, buy Vinyls, DRM-free versions of just that one song you want off an album, you can play the song you want off the Piano, or find it in a game, or listen to the radio (AM, FM, even Satellite!), or go to a live show, or download someone else’s recording of a live show. You can partake in all of these ways or any combination thereof, and I forgot to even mention music boxes! I think it’s more fair to say “Everything is amazing, but you don’t have to own all of it to enjoy it”. Some things are tangible and worth having in a hard copy so to speak, and some things are ephemeral so enjoy them while you can, for nothing and no things last forever.

m463 7y ago
The problem is when your choices are marginalized and "you own it" becomes unavailable. Examples: Games nowadays (some have drm, some are online only). Anything adobe. Smartphones. Cars.
- SllX 7y ago
  Yet there are still games you can buy with no DRM, and there have never been more games available for purchase than now. There’s an abundance of games, and yes, some of them have a shelf life and abusive to their customers. Those games are what I would call ephemeral experiences, or at least they are deeper into the ephemeral experience end than games available for purchases.
matheusmoreira 7y ago
Owning a copy is not possible. Making more copies is illegal. Sending one of those copies to a friend is illegal. Sharing those copies with people on the internet is illegal. Artificial scarcity means the only choices available to you are the choices the copyright holders want you to have.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  "Home taping is killing music"

Havoc 7y ago

First thing that comes to mind are containers/virtual envs and freezing versions with requirements.txt files. That could get interesting unpiecing that a decade later. Scavenger hunts for old versions...

buboard 7y ago

That's a broader trend of choosing to rent rather than buy and wage labour instead of entrepreneurship. It's also coming to the point though that people's "digital trail" is no longer just a trail, it's their entire output in life. I think people will recognize this and the next iteration of tech will be property-centered again. What we live today is a bubble of inequality and the shallow freedom of not owning things. Neither extreme is good, people always end up gravitating somewhere in the middle.

esjeon 7y ago

> our phones are fully in the future ... But our computers are still kind of in the past I wonder if our app-based ecosystem is really the "future". The reason is simple: apps lock you down. Apps store your data somewhere you don't have access to, and you can't control your data. Sometimes you even can't move your work to another device. On the other hand, file-based storage naturally encourages data migration. Also, file-based storage allows 3rd party integration. You can use applications from different companies and of different purposes to work on the same piece of data. Even in case of software development, source code can be edited with various editors, compiled with compatible compilers, analyzed with lints and formatters, and revision-controlled through git, svn, or random custom solutions, where all those tools are developed by different parties. I don't think app-based ecosystem can achieve this level of freedom, versatility and flexibility at once. So, no. Files are not the thing of the past, nor should be buried deep below "future" stack. It should be kept as an official backdoor to give users precise control over their data.

hamilyon2 7y ago

Surprisingly shallow discussion here. Ownership itself is lease. Sibling comment mentioned home ownership and tenant laws. Home and land ownership is one of trickiest types of ownership. It turns out, that in democratic and civilized sosieties you don't actually own realty. You lease it with significant restrictions. Inheritance laws make it even more clear. Law might decide that particular part of property is valued $x euro. A trademark. A patent. An option. So, you must cede control of this part of inherited good to state. If you truly owned it, inheritance taxes would be zero.

whyleyc 7y ago

"Files are dead" is an oft-quoted meme, but they aren't going away anytime soon. I wrote a piece offering a counterpoint to this view five years ago (in response to a similar article by Fred Wilson) and I think most of the points still hold true today: https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-wrong-files-arent-dead/ https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-wrong-...