4 ms·

"It feels like sooner or later, big companies will have all the hardware and software hosted on their side and people will only get access to play it according

by api 12y ago

"It feels like sooner or later, big companies will have all the hardware and software hosted on their side and people will only get access to play it according to companies rules." I agree. The "PC revolution" has gone into full reverse. It's the revenge of the mainframe and the whole mentality behind it. There's many reasons for this, but the biggest one I think is piracy and the general mentality that "everything should be free" (as in beer). The problem is that nothing is free. Everything costs money. Really polished software costs a lot of money. So far three strategies for dealing with this misalignment have emerged: (1) Push everything back to the mainframe and return the user to serfdom. (2) Create completely jailed devices (iOS, jailed Android deployments) linked to completely closed app stores and use cryptography to effectively achieve #1 without having to offload all computation. (3) Create "free" products and services for which the user is the product -- this is the surveillance and manipulation business model of sites like Facebook. I've come to believe that free is actually the enemy of freedom, and that the "pirate party" crowd is worse than wrong. What they're promoting is actively pushing us toward a radically less free world. The "everything should be free" ideology creates a complete decoupling between the user and the economics of software and content creation -- so now the only viable business models are either serfdom or exploitation. In a sense free places the user in the ultimate position of disempowerment. Since you're not paying there is no reason anyone should care about you or your needs/preferences. It works for content too. In a world where people pay for music, music is made for you. In a world where nobody pays for music, it has to be made for someone else. I envision a future where pretty much all non-hobbyist / starving artist music is made at the behest of advertisers or political propagandists. It's all full of either product placements or messages crafted to get you to vote or think a certain way, and it has negative artistic integrity.

penguindev 12y ago
A comprehensive post. Just to add to 2) Chromebooks are DRM friendly, and chromecasts are locked as well. Google bought wildvine DRM and my guess is DRM can be pretty much expected to win for media/software, since hardware makers are on board and they've had enough tries to get the crypto implemented right. Even intel cpus have DRM on board (intel insider). The only threat to DRM now is it relies on human beings keeping secrets [edit: and having as few people / companies who know the master secret as possible], so if the economic value in breaking it is high enough, someone will get paid off / extorted to leak it... whereas 1) is probably safer from attack, and 3) can get hit by adblock+ right now... Definitely fun watching the battle play out, and as a programmer with a family to feed I must admit I'm hoping for a way to value virtual creative goods that isn't $0.00 :-)
xg15 12y ago
I agree with you that this mentality is likely how we gotten into the mess, but I think the way out is less clear. Thanks to the whole piracy dilemma, there was motivation your three strategies and develop the technology and services that they require. But now the technologies are there and aren't going away anymore, even if everyone would suddenly start paying again for everything. Take Adobe for example: They moved from selling Photoshop as a software to a subscription-based model where they are effectively selling the same thing as a service. They didn't just use the cloud technology to secure their old business model, they actually made it even more restrictive. Similarly, when you buy a phone, you don't get to choose between a cheap, locked down phone and an expensive free phone - you're paying the full price and still get the locked down phone. So I believe, it is necessary that we get an alternative to the "free" culture, but it isn't enough. As things are today, it makes the most economic sense to abandon the "free" culture and still keeping your users in serfdom. Something else has to happen to shift balance, but I have no idea what that could be.
- api 12y ago
  Agreed. Making things even harder is how deeply entrenched the piracy-is-good mentality still is. Try arguing against it over at Reddit or on any thread about Popcorn Time or Kim.Com (what a douche) and see how far you get. You'll get attacked pretty viciously and downvoted into lower Hades, even at Hacker News. If you don't pay, you don't matter. Free means serfdom. This is one of those things that absolutely nobody gets, IMHO, and I see no sign of more people getting it for a while. It's gonna have to get a lot worse before it gets better.
  - quadrangle 12y ago
    Free can also be Free/Libre/Open. You don't pay for Wikipedia and you're not a serf as a reader / user, you're not the product.
    - api 12y ago
      That only works for a subset of things, namely those things that can be effectively crowdsourced at small increments. I'd also argue that Wikipedia is heavily indirectly subsidized by academia and government. Large coherent software products and great works of art are by definition the products of individuals or small teams focusing intensely for long periods of time. That is inherently expensive. Only the independently wealthy or the otherwise subsidized can afford to focus for thousands upon thousands of hours and then give the product away... not unless they have another idea for revenue like freemium, SaaS, etc. (... and those don't work for music, movies, books, etc.) ... and "otherwise subsidized" takes us back to some of the pathologies I mention... propaganda, advertising, etc. driving art and surveillance/manipulation based business models driving software. Do we really want a future where only trust fund kids and propagandists create art? Do we really want a future where software is created exclusively to monetize its users? The Wikipedia model can only work for everything in a true post-scarcity society where the marginal cost of everything is zero and everyone can live with no real "income." Until someone finds a way to draw unlimited energy from the quantum vacuum, we are stuck with some form of economy where everything I said applies. Another way of thinking about the pirate economy is as a deflationary spiral in which monetary velocity collapses and all kinds of pathologies emerge from that. Deflationary spirals are actually really great for uber-capitalists that already own lots of rentier assets, but they're bad for workers, entrepreneurs, and other non-rentiers. Sound familiar?

by api 12y ago

penguindev 12y ago

A comprehensive post. Just to add to 2) Chromebooks are DRM friendly, and chromecasts are locked as well. Google bought wildvine DRM and my guess is DRM can be pretty much expected to win for media/software, since hardware makers are on board and they've had enough tries to get the crypto implemented right. Even intel cpus have DRM on board (intel insider). The only threat to DRM now is it relies on human beings keeping secrets [edit: and having as few people / companies who know the master secret as possible], so if the economic value in breaking it is high enough, someone will get paid off / extorted to leak it... whereas 1) is probably safer from attack, and 3) can get hit by adblock+ right now... Definitely fun watching the battle play out, and as a programmer with a family to feed I must admit I'm hoping for a way to value virtual creative goods that isn't $0.00 :-)

xg15 12y ago

I agree with you that this mentality is likely how we gotten into the mess, but I think the way out is less clear. Thanks to the whole piracy dilemma, there was motivation your three strategies and develop the technology and services that they require. But now the technologies are there and aren't going away anymore, even if everyone would suddenly start paying again for everything. Take Adobe for example: They moved from selling Photoshop as a software to a subscription-based model where they are effectively selling the same thing as a service. They didn't just use the cloud technology to secure their old business model, they actually made it even more restrictive. Similarly, when you buy a phone, you don't get to choose between a cheap, locked down phone and an expensive free phone - you're paying the full price and still get the locked down phone. So I believe, it is necessary that we get an alternative to the "free" culture, but it isn't enough. As things are today, it makes the most economic sense to abandon the "free" culture and still keeping your users in serfdom. Something else has to happen to shift balance, but I have no idea what that could be.

api 12y ago
Agreed. Making things even harder is how deeply entrenched the piracy-is-good mentality still is. Try arguing against it over at Reddit or on any thread about Popcorn Time or Kim.Com (what a douche) and see how far you get. You'll get attacked pretty viciously and downvoted into lower Hades, even at Hacker News. If you don't pay, you don't matter. Free means serfdom. This is one of those things that absolutely nobody gets, IMHO, and I see no sign of more people getting it for a while. It's gonna have to get a lot worse before it gets better.
- quadrangle 12y ago
  Free can also be Free/Libre/Open. You don't pay for Wikipedia and you're not a serf as a reader / user, you're not the product.
  - api 12y ago
    That only works for a subset of things, namely those things that can be effectively crowdsourced at small increments. I'd also argue that Wikipedia is heavily indirectly subsidized by academia and government. Large coherent software products and great works of art are by definition the products of individuals or small teams focusing intensely for long periods of time. That is inherently expensive. Only the independently wealthy or the otherwise subsidized can afford to focus for thousands upon thousands of hours and then give the product away... not unless they have another idea for revenue like freemium, SaaS, etc. (... and those don't work for music, movies, books, etc.) ... and "otherwise subsidized" takes us back to some of the pathologies I mention... propaganda, advertising, etc. driving art and surveillance/manipulation based business models driving software. Do we really want a future where only trust fund kids and propagandists create art? Do we really want a future where software is created exclusively to monetize its users? The Wikipedia model can only work for everything in a true post-scarcity society where the marginal cost of everything is zero and everyone can live with no real "income." Until someone finds a way to draw unlimited energy from the quantum vacuum, we are stuck with some form of economy where everything I said applies. Another way of thinking about the pirate economy is as a deflationary spiral in which monetary velocity collapses and all kinds of pathologies emerge from that. Deflationary spirals are actually really great for uber-capitalists that already own lots of rentier assets, but they're bad for workers, entrepreneurs, and other non-rentiers. Sound familiar?