3 ms·

I'll the contrarian stance. Through a certain lens, packaging is technology, technology is packaging. The two are indistinguishable. TCP/IP is merely a given p

I'll the contrarian stance. Through a certain lens, packaging is technology, technology is packaging. The two are indistinguishable. TCP/IP is merely a given package of conventions around how bytes should be ordered. Compression even more so! Encryption is likewise just a set of conventions and packaging around how to transmit bytes. So on and so forth. In the physical domain this holds true as well. Any given piece of physical equipment is merely a packaging and rearrangement of other physical components together. Okay so what's the upshot of all this besides word games? By thinking of technology as simply packaging, we can reuse a lot of the prior work that people use to create packaging in how we think about technology as well as explain a lot of technological trends by analogy with how packaging works. We also should realize the opposite direction as well: a lot of packaging concerns are fundamentally the same as technological concerns and many similar trade-offs are made.

0x69420 4y ago
i am in full agreement that, for instance, a shell script consisting of grep piped into sed is as deserving of being called a “program” as grep and sed themselves are it does come down to where you draw the line, though -- is a PaaS subscription plan technology? not the infra behind PaaS firm's epic load balancer that lets them provision leanly and fatten their margins. not the javascript minifier that does its damned best to cut down time from link clicked to prices and features in browser viewport with animated gradients in background. not even the spreadsheet from the accountant who drafted up expected returns across a range of pricing schemes. but the subscription plan itself. that thing, which we conveniently refer to as a package pretty often. is it also technology?
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  turtles all the way down?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dwohnitmok 4y ago
  > is it also technology? In a very meaningful way yes! Business plans are a form of incentive bundling, which is itself an example of a social technology and social technologies are a thing and they follow much the same lifecycle and trade-offs as any other non-social technology. Indeed we can derive a lot of useful insights by using insights derived from looking at social technologies to examine non-social technologies and vice versa.

0x69420 4y ago

i am in full agreement that, for instance, a shell script consisting of grep piped into sed is as deserving of being called a “program” as grep and sed themselves are it does come down to where you draw the line, though -- is a PaaS subscription plan technology? not the infra behind PaaS firm's epic load balancer that lets them provision leanly and fatten their margins. not the javascript minifier that does its damned best to cut down time from link clicked to prices and features in browser viewport with animated gradients in background. not even the spreadsheet from the accountant who drafted up expected returns across a range of pricing schemes. but the subscription plan itself. that thing, which we conveniently refer to as a package pretty often. is it also technology?

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
turtles all the way down?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dwohnitmok 4y ago
> is it also technology? In a very meaningful way yes! Business plans are a form of incentive bundling, which is itself an example of a social technology and social technologies are a thing and they follow much the same lifecycle and trade-offs as any other non-social technology. Indeed we can derive a lot of useful insights by using insights derived from looking at social technologies to examine non-social technologies and vice versa.