In college I built my own computer. It was a great experience, and I still use that computer 7 years later when writing this. Saying you built your own computer tends to earn a lot of tech savvy points with the average person, but it's really not that hard. A lot's changed since the days of Wozniak's home brew club & the Altair, and these days you can by the parts and put them together without much more difficulty than assembling a piece of Ikea furniture. If you need an upgrade later, you can open your case up & snap a piece in.
This ease is based in no small part on the standardization of the ATX & PCI standards, a set of guidelines for how hardware should be made in such a way as to be compatible with other devices. One thing that's impressed and worried me lately is the dearth of such a standard for cell phones, and the perhaps anemic attempts to create one. It's an unfortunate marker of the way technology has gone from a scientific industry with the goal of empowering individuals and humankind to a consumer industry chasing fashion and trendiness, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
People are talking a lot these days about a little thing a little, 3.5 millimeter thing. Apple decided not to include a headphone jack on their phones, Google is following suit with their latest Pixel, and the creator of the android OS also axed the jack with the Essential Phone. The last one really bugs me, because empowering the tech consumer with more choices is one of the reasons why essential was founded, and yet the most ubiquitous, easy to use, and powerful interface options was deemed unnecessary.
OK, when I started this blog I wanted to stick to bigger issues, things that effect society or even humanity. Why am I letting myself get distracted by the minutia of what's popular in cell phones these days? Well, it's because this is a symptom of a larger, much more insidious cultural disease. Wow, OK that could be overselling it, but as I've mentioned before the choice to go with something stylish or convenient instead of something which creates an empowering infrastructure is perilous.
The Essential phone has some special connectors for accessories. Motorola is making phones with attachable accessories as well, but they go the extra mile of providing a developer kit for independent companies that want to produce these. The highest level of this was the now tragically defunct Project Ara which planned to produce an entirely modular smartphone. It also had the distinction of being the only project I know of that would have released a standard that could be used by any company to produce appropriate components. If the essential accessories or moto mods take off, any other manufacturer that wants to let customers use these will have to license the specifications from essential or Motorola, and that means they probably won't proliferate anytime soon.
And thus we, the consumer, have to be content taking whatever the phone companies decide to give us. Oh, we can shop around a little for more memory here or a better camera there, but the reality is we can't really choose what we want in our phones, or how they work. A handful of tech giants makes those decisions for us. And that's not only true for phones. that's true for social networks, gaming platforms, and more. What's the more? Well, perhaps news organizations, political parties, and advertisements. This is where the insidious cultural disease part comes up. Most people have their phone on them for most of the day in 2017. We can't act like decisions about how that works being made by some team of marketers and engineers rather than individuals is OK and won't siphon away independence and freedom from the individual.
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Thursday, November 2, 2017
Monday, June 1, 2015
Are We Ready for Post Scarcity? Part 2
It's easy to romanticize scarcity when looking to address the problems that arise as it fades from the eyes of humankind. Recent bouts in popular culture of "paleo-nostalgia" show us just how absurd our longing for "the good old days" can get. But the good old days were never as good as we pretend they were. The fifties had Jim Crow laws. Pre-industrial society was awash in the filth of both the horses that pulled carriages and the humans that rode in them. Why I should have to point out the scourges of humanity in medieval, bronze age, or stone age days is beyond me, but I'll mention crusades and inquisitions, the slavery that built the pyramids, and war among rival tribes of cave men just to be safe.
I bring this up because it's important to note that I'm not advocating we avoid creating a post scarcity world. Precisely the opposite, I want to acknowledge that we're in the middle of doing so, and embrace the change. To do that though, we need to be wary and accepting of the consequences. Some of those may be unimaginable and have to be addressed as they come. Others are more predictable, especially when we consider history.
I mentioned the abundance of food in part one. Now consider farming, the production of that food. Farming is remarkably different in the modern world, and it's so efficient that we can produce so much food that our primary concerns don't regard abundance. We take abundance of food for granted, instead seeking better quality and solutions for what to do with the excess. This has come at a price, though.
The great depression featured, "Farming communities and rural areas suffer[ing] as crop prices fell by approximately 60%." (wikipedia, citing three other sources) The abundance and efficiency of farming is so staggering that only through heavy subsidies is agriculture profitable today. These subsidies are so severe that Lawrence Lessig in his book Republic, Lost titles his chapter on government farming subsidies, "Why don't we have free markets?" We recoil at the realization that government is deciding what food gets grown, and yet this might be important and beneficial to society, since we all like to eat. Surely subsidizing agriculture is better than milk being spilled into gutters while thousands only a few hundred miles away starved, a characteristic image of the depression?
Food is one thing, it's physical and tangible. We're all familiar with it and easily understand what it means. Information is quite another, yet it's the next thing whose scarcity is being obliterated. Personal computing and the internet have done a pretty good job already, once again changing the problems from availability to find-ability of information of high enough quality and relevance.
What have humans done with this? We haven't become a society of well read polyglots that understand the conflicts between relativity and quantum mechanics as we might hope. We're very well entertained, though. Entertainment is just a form of information, after all. A textbook has roughly the same form as a storybook. With Netflix, Hulu, & Youtube, for videos alone we can spend our entire day being entertained for probably not quite $100 a month.
This doesn't (necessarily) mean we're stupid or shallow, though. Many of the most popular shows are sharply written character and political dramas like House of Cards, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. The recent revival of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series did well. It could be argued more people are writing than ever before thanks to blogging sites like what you're reading now and maybe even social media.
OK, I'll admit I might not be buying the idea that the lack of scarcity in entertainment is improving us as a people either, but on the other hand I'm not going to dismiss it outright. A stronger example might be video games. The juggernaut game Minecraft is almost exclusively a creative tool rather than a traditional game. Gaming has a strong community of "modding," or learning some basic (or in some cases extremely complex) programming tools used in a game to create a variant of that game. These variants span anything between the original game with a failure message changed from, "You died." to "Thanks, Obama!" to entirely new games built on the same graphics and gameplay engine.
In both food and entertainment we do see demand for quality now that availability is so high. People grow from just being happy to have something to eat to wanting something that is organic, gluten-free, or maybe even something actually important. People start paying attention to what their food is over whether or not it's there. Likewise in entertainment we are demanding quality more and more. We are seeking entertainment that we can, as Kevin Spacey says, "engage with...with a passion and an intimacy that a blockbuster movie could only dream of."
Bertrand Russell writes in his essay In Praise of Idleness about the odd disconnect that exists between our valuation of production and consumption. While we admire productivity we don't highly value consumption. Those who earn money have prestige, but not those eager to spend it. He points out the oddity of this, particularly when we only earn money is by others' spending of it. "We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer."
Russell also alludes to the caste and class scaffolds that these attitudes seem to stem from. He even goes so far to argue that the traditional work ethic arose largely as a tool of slave-owners and autocrats to keep their populations content with their tyrannical rule. If this is starting to sound like Marxist thinking to you then you're actually very clever. A serious point of departure I must take to this essay is his praise given to the (only ten years old at the time of writing) Russian revolution and newly formed USSR.
We all know how that experiment turned out, so how can I possibly be suggesting that going at it again is a going to be a good thing? The short answer is that I'm not. I am arguing that an economy with abundance for humanity requiring very little input of labor from humanity is on the horizon, or even just finishing its arrival and is starting to settle in. One of my great concerns is the way this could create a dictatorship masquerading as efforts to provide equally for all men like existed in communist Russia. I'll delve into this a little more in part 3.
I bring this up because it's important to note that I'm not advocating we avoid creating a post scarcity world. Precisely the opposite, I want to acknowledge that we're in the middle of doing so, and embrace the change. To do that though, we need to be wary and accepting of the consequences. Some of those may be unimaginable and have to be addressed as they come. Others are more predictable, especially when we consider history.
I mentioned the abundance of food in part one. Now consider farming, the production of that food. Farming is remarkably different in the modern world, and it's so efficient that we can produce so much food that our primary concerns don't regard abundance. We take abundance of food for granted, instead seeking better quality and solutions for what to do with the excess. This has come at a price, though.
The great depression featured, "Farming communities and rural areas suffer[ing] as crop prices fell by approximately 60%." (wikipedia, citing three other sources) The abundance and efficiency of farming is so staggering that only through heavy subsidies is agriculture profitable today. These subsidies are so severe that Lawrence Lessig in his book Republic, Lost titles his chapter on government farming subsidies, "Why don't we have free markets?" We recoil at the realization that government is deciding what food gets grown, and yet this might be important and beneficial to society, since we all like to eat. Surely subsidizing agriculture is better than milk being spilled into gutters while thousands only a few hundred miles away starved, a characteristic image of the depression?
Food is one thing, it's physical and tangible. We're all familiar with it and easily understand what it means. Information is quite another, yet it's the next thing whose scarcity is being obliterated. Personal computing and the internet have done a pretty good job already, once again changing the problems from availability to find-ability of information of high enough quality and relevance.
What have humans done with this? We haven't become a society of well read polyglots that understand the conflicts between relativity and quantum mechanics as we might hope. We're very well entertained, though. Entertainment is just a form of information, after all. A textbook has roughly the same form as a storybook. With Netflix, Hulu, & Youtube, for videos alone we can spend our entire day being entertained for probably not quite $100 a month.
This doesn't (necessarily) mean we're stupid or shallow, though. Many of the most popular shows are sharply written character and political dramas like House of Cards, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. The recent revival of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series did well. It could be argued more people are writing than ever before thanks to blogging sites like what you're reading now and maybe even social media.
OK, I'll admit I might not be buying the idea that the lack of scarcity in entertainment is improving us as a people either, but on the other hand I'm not going to dismiss it outright. A stronger example might be video games. The juggernaut game Minecraft is almost exclusively a creative tool rather than a traditional game. Gaming has a strong community of "modding," or learning some basic (or in some cases extremely complex) programming tools used in a game to create a variant of that game. These variants span anything between the original game with a failure message changed from, "You died." to "Thanks, Obama!" to entirely new games built on the same graphics and gameplay engine.
In both food and entertainment we do see demand for quality now that availability is so high. People grow from just being happy to have something to eat to wanting something that is organic, gluten-free, or maybe even something actually important. People start paying attention to what their food is over whether or not it's there. Likewise in entertainment we are demanding quality more and more. We are seeking entertainment that we can, as Kevin Spacey says, "engage with...with a passion and an intimacy that a blockbuster movie could only dream of."
Bertrand Russell writes in his essay In Praise of Idleness about the odd disconnect that exists between our valuation of production and consumption. While we admire productivity we don't highly value consumption. Those who earn money have prestige, but not those eager to spend it. He points out the oddity of this, particularly when we only earn money is by others' spending of it. "We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer."
Russell also alludes to the caste and class scaffolds that these attitudes seem to stem from. He even goes so far to argue that the traditional work ethic arose largely as a tool of slave-owners and autocrats to keep their populations content with their tyrannical rule. If this is starting to sound like Marxist thinking to you then you're actually very clever. A serious point of departure I must take to this essay is his praise given to the (only ten years old at the time of writing) Russian revolution and newly formed USSR.
We all know how that experiment turned out, so how can I possibly be suggesting that going at it again is a going to be a good thing? The short answer is that I'm not. I am arguing that an economy with abundance for humanity requiring very little input of labor from humanity is on the horizon, or even just finishing its arrival and is starting to settle in. One of my great concerns is the way this could create a dictatorship masquerading as efforts to provide equally for all men like existed in communist Russia. I'll delve into this a little more in part 3.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)