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Below is what I feel is a relevant excerpt from Text of SXSW2013, Closing Remarks by Bruce Sterling [1]: --- Why does nobody talk about them? Because nobody wa

by platz 13y ago

Below is what I feel is a relevant excerpt from Text of SXSW2013, Closing Remarks by Bruce Sterling [1]: --- Why does nobody talk about them? Because nobody wants them, that’s why. Imagine somebody brings you a personal desktop computer here at South By, they’re like bringing it in on a trolley. “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.” So — if somebody tried to give you this device, this one I just made the pitch for, a genuinely Personal Computer, it’s just for you — Would you take it? Even for free? Would you even bend over and pick it up? 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.” I really think I’m going to outlive the personal computer. And why not? I outlived the fax machine. I did. I was alive when people thought it was amazing to have a fax machine. Now I’m alive, and people think it’s amazing to still have a fax machine. Why not the personal computer? Why shouldn’t it vanish like the cliff people vanished? Why shouldn’t it vanish like Steve Jobs vanished? It’s not that we return to the status quo ante: don’t get me wrong. It’s not that once we had a nomad life, then we live in high-tech stone dwellings, and we return to chase the bison like we did before. No: we return into a different kind of nomad life. A kind of Alan Kay world, where computation has vanished into the walls and ceiling, as he said many, many years ago. 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. All these machines that tore us away from lived experience, and made us stare into the square screens or hunch over the keyboards, covered with their arcane, petroglyph symbols. Control Dingbat That, backslash R M this. We never really understood that. Not really. --- [1]: http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remarks-by-bruce-sterling/ http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2...

mindslight 13y ago
This isn't universally wrong, but it is dead-wrong with present technology. And covering our eyes and pretending that we are currently that advanced doesn't make it so. Because while basic computation is a universal commodity, what is implemented on top of it certainly isn't - a piece of software always functions as someone's agent. When the systems you end up relying on are entirely defined by someone else, the only thing that represents your will is your mind, and it is effectively executing a complex and ill-defined protocol against always-diligent computers. You've done the computational equivalent of declining a lawyer. But it doesn't seem like a big deal, since you're only compromising a little at any given time. But the software is always changing in ways that benefit its controllers while your expectations are mostly based on the capabilities that they've presented. So the progress you perceive is entirely in their desired paradigm. Features that would benefit you but at the expense of Google/Apple/etc are never explored, because you aren't the user of their software - you're its working set! I can forgive the old-timers who were conditioned by broadcast media to see the world in hierarchal take-it-or-leave terms and don't understand what they're losing by sharecropping in walled gardens. And I can mostly forgive the unclued herd that just buys whatever is advertised. But for everybody who knows the power of personal computers yet pretends webapps and locked appliances are actual progress, either out of personal laziness, cognitive dissonance, or longstanding need for social acceptance: shame on you for abandoning that self-determination you tasted the first time you truly experienced computing.
- platz 13y ago
  Good thoughts here. I am optimistic due to things like raspberry pi and arduino becoming popular, but at the same time these things just feel like this generations version of building radio kits and model airplanes. Ultimately it's the data rather than the computation that's important.
  - mindslight 13y ago
    Yeah exactly, it's not that general purpose CPUs will be outlawed like we worried about in the 90s, it's that the generally popular ways of using technology won't be using their capabilities. It's not just the data itself, but really about protocols used to access the data. Protocols mediate between parties, and by choosing to download a binary blob simply to check your email, you've given up any true bargaining power in that exchange. You still have some autonomy by hacking the blob (userscript injection, etc), but you're only building on unstable ground.

by platz 13y ago

mindslight 13y ago

This isn't universally wrong, but it is dead-wrong with present technology. And covering our eyes and pretending that we are currently that advanced doesn't make it so. Because while basic computation is a universal commodity, what is implemented on top of it certainly isn't - a piece of software always functions as someone's agent. When the systems you end up relying on are entirely defined by someone else, the only thing that represents your will is your mind, and it is effectively executing a complex and ill-defined protocol against always-diligent computers. You've done the computational equivalent of declining a lawyer. But it doesn't seem like a big deal, since you're only compromising a little at any given time. But the software is always changing in ways that benefit its controllers while your expectations are mostly based on the capabilities that they've presented. So the progress you perceive is entirely in their desired paradigm. Features that would benefit you but at the expense of Google/Apple/etc are never explored, because you aren't the user of their software - you're its working set! I can forgive the old-timers who were conditioned by broadcast media to see the world in hierarchal take-it-or-leave terms and don't understand what they're losing by sharecropping in walled gardens. And I can mostly forgive the unclued herd that just buys whatever is advertised. But for everybody who knows the power of personal computers yet pretends webapps and locked appliances are actual progress, either out of personal laziness, cognitive dissonance, or longstanding need for social acceptance: shame on you for abandoning that self-determination you tasted the first time you truly experienced computing.

platz 13y ago
Good thoughts here. I am optimistic due to things like raspberry pi and arduino becoming popular, but at the same time these things just feel like this generations version of building radio kits and model airplanes. Ultimately it's the data rather than the computation that's important.
- mindslight 13y ago
  Yeah exactly, it's not that general purpose CPUs will be outlawed like we worried about in the 90s, it's that the generally popular ways of using technology won't be using their capabilities. It's not just the data itself, but really about protocols used to access the data. Protocols mediate between parties, and by choosing to download a binary blob simply to check your email, you've given up any true bargaining power in that exchange. You still have some autonomy by hacking the blob (userscript injection, etc), but you're only building on unstable ground.