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When Everything Works Like Your Cell Phone
The Atlantic is running an article about how "smart" devices are starting to see everyday use in many people's home. The authors say this will fundamentally change the concept of what it means to own and control your possessions. Using smartphones as an example, they extrapolate this out to a future where many household items are dependent on software. Quoting:
These phones come with all kinds of restrictions on their possible physical capabilities. You may not take them apart. Depending on the plan, not all software can be downloaded onto them, not every device can be tethered to them, and not every cell phone network can be tapped. "Owning" a phone is much more complex than owning a plunger. And if the big tech players building the wearable future, the Internet of things, self-driving cars, and anything else that links physical stuff to the network get their way, our relationship to ownership is about to undergo a wild transformation.
They also suggest that planned obsolescence will become much more common. For example, take watches: a quality dumbwatch can last decades, but a smartwatch will be obsolete in a few years.
You forgot to mention that all the while, the gadgets report your habits.
Drive a long time? Cook very little or mostly fried (unhealthy) dishes? Oooh, health risk, insurance companies would love to know that.
Filling up the tank only by halves instead of full? Potential cash inflow on the horizon, let loose the repo-man!.
Sounds to me more like your 'things' own you, instead of you owning them -- or should I look at it as corporations owning us?
To be blunt about it: Fuck that shit. It's already bad enough that for too many people, their 'phone' is more like a 'lifestyle' instead of just being a communications tool; is it serving them, or are they serving it? Will so-called self-driving cars (something else I have less than zero interest in having anything to do with) be a tool for us to use? Or will it be just another way to control us? When every goddamned thing in your house, right down to your lightbulbs and your toilet, are connected to the Internet, is it really your home anymore, or is it a prison, and all these things are just there to facilitate the monitoring of you by corporations and governments? For fuck's sake, you can't even ride your bike somewhere anymore without some corporation trying to convince you that you should take a GPS tracker with you, and voluntarily upload the tracking data to them (Strava).
No thanks. I don't live to serve things, it's the other way around.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
> You mean, just like basically every electric appliance ever made for the past, what?, 40 years?
No not even close.
None of those devices were deliberately restricted. The difference is that before phones (and other manifestations like tivoization) the cases were the manufacture actively interfered with the owner's ability to tinker were few and far between.
In fact, congress thought that the right of owners to tinker with their property was so important that they passed the Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act which forbid manufacturers from denying warranty claims just because the owner had tinkered with the device in ways unrelated to the failure.
No, only iPhones are like that. I don't know a single Android phone that doesn't have a replacable battery. And most phones are not from Apple.
Actually, most Android phones have sealed non-user replaceable batteries. Samsung has been the exception to that, always having replaceable batteries, and LG's latest G3 has one, too, but their previous generation, the G2, and a sealed, welded-in battery. HTC's previous "Vivid" generation had a replaceable battery, but their latest popular HTC One (M7 and M8) line of phones do not. So pretty much everybody except Samsung and (recently) LG are producing Android phones with embedded batteries, including Motorola (and Google), HTC, Nokia and Amazon.
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