Making the Future
3rd April 2010
There’s a reason most of us aren’t Cory Doctorow. We don’t want to open up our devices. We don’t want to hack them. We want them to just goddamned work, thanks, and if gluing the case shut makes that possible, bring on the Elmers.
Hate that as much as you want, old-school corner-cases, but it’s the future, it always has been. It’s called “progress,” the continual refinement of the social contract. And it’s no more a betrayal of something vital than any other decision made in rational self-interest. Make your arguments about DRM and closed systems and “Wal-Martization”, but they still don’t come anywhere close to tipping the scale. The iPad (or something like it) is the future of computing for an enormous slice of the population — despite all its political and philosophical flaws — because it’s a pretty goddamned great future. It’s a future that we want.
There is a not-always-visible tension inside the Avante Garde between people who are self-proclaimed ‘progressives’ politically and socially but who are closet libertarians technologically, and those who carry the ‘progressive’ I-Love-Big-Brother corporatist mindset through to its logical conclusion. This appears to be a rant by one of the latter ripping (en passant) one of the former. It’s pretty amusing, and also very illuminating regarding the practical effects of the ‘progressive’ point of view.