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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 can now own a fridge for only $40 / months (on a 2-year plan with select providers)
Your stove has no more credit left. Do you want to purchase a $2.99 "Heat Pack" to continue cooking?
Get a free car! Want to drive? $19.99 in-app purchase for 100 miles. Want to unlock door? $0.99 for a 10-pack. Or $9.99 for a mega-pack with AC.
Do you want a crockpot that has to be replaced at every few years—or at least that will be forever upgrading itself? Would apps change your mind?
When enough others decide to buy an app-able crockpot, you won't have any choice but too buy one as well. The market does not provide what people want -- it provides what is profitable.
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,
You mean, just like basically every electric appliance ever made for the past, what?, 40 years?
My washing machine, fridge, rice cooker, air conditioner, TV, HiFi, radio, electronic alarm clock, etc, ALL comes with "all kinds of restrictions on their possible physical capabilities" and I can't take them apart without voiding their warranty. Most of them have logic circuits, or even CPU, running inside, which I have no way to download ANY software into them.
I have no way of knowing if I am able to utilize EVERY bit of their physical capabilities. Can I, say, tell my rice cooker to heat up beyond its preset safety limit? I would think its heating element should be capable of reaching temperatures way more than cooker normally allows it to before shutting it off. Hey, that's a "restrictions on its possible physical capabilities"! Can I download software into my of PAL TV so it can accept NTSC signal? Can I change the software of my electronic alarm clock to do more?
Gee, so now instead of every lazy journalist just rerunning old stories by add "... on the Internet!", now they rerun old stories by add "... on the smartphone!"?
Oliver.
Everything working OK, only the 'phone' part sucking?
No thanks.
The authors say this will fundamentally change the concept of what it means to own and control your possessions.
So the authors are considering a future where we have to replace all our domestic appliances every 2 years, simply because someone somewhere has decided that the control software *must* have this new feature (that nobody asked for) and that it will only run on version X. You now have 3 months to toss the old fridge / cooker / vacuum cleaner / lightbulb before it gets automatically bricked. Even though it performs its primary function perfectly.
No thank you.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Very true. I have a cheap Casio watch that I've had since the 1980s. The band long-ago broke, but I replaced it with a belt-loop hook. I can only recall changing the battery twice. It runs a tiny bit fast (several seconds a month), but until it completely dies, I see no reason to replace it for telling time at a glance (something that can't be done with a smartphone). Plus, if I lose it, I don't care (I've gotten more than my money's worth out of it) and nobody wants to steal it.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
If I really need to connect my toaster to the internet then I deserve to buy a new one every 2 years.
Comparing a phone to a plunger is silly, and makes me question the cognitive abilities of the person making the analogy.
Everything is a trade off. My car is so complex I can't begin to figure out how to fix it, but I do have a diagnostic tool on my iPad that I could not possible afford 10 years ago. My watch, and iPod Mini, is obsolete but it still tells me the time. As long as that is all I want it do it is fine. I used my 3GS over the summer as a roaming phone. Slip a sim card in it and I was good to go. As long as I wanted it as a phone, I was good to go.
Yes, you can't take stuff apart. OTOH I was one of the few people I knew that actually soldered computers to repair them, rather than just plug and play with a new board. Yes, some phones are not upgradable to current software, but many consumers seen to happy to make that choice to have a cheaper phone or a phone with other features. I can even see the current situation where you pay per page for ink is an option that many people would prefer.
Certainly there is a loss when we do not have a choice, but I think in many cases we still have a choice, it is just that we do not want to pay the real or opportunity costs for that choice.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Just as Digital Restrictions Management and various schemes for 'protecting' 'intellectual property' have not been unqualified successes, this trend also will be undercut, to some extent, by people who hack, make, reverse engineer, re-purpose, and repair hardware, firmware, and software. It just remains to be seen how the legislative and enforcement aspects play out. And that depends largely on Joe and Jane Average's opposition to A) basically renting or leasing most of the stuff in their lives, and B) paying to be spied upon, advertised to, and held hostage by corporate interests.
If even a large minority of citizens refuse to put up with this crap and instead have old stuff fixed and new stuff modified or boutique-built, then it will be hard for governments to justify what will otherwise be a very heavy hand in favour of laws enforcing corporate control. I'm not optimistic that people who have been lulled into thinking there is no alternative, (or that planned obsolescence and corporate nosiness are somehow right and inevitable), will do anything other than cave and roll over. But there is some hope.
I volunteer as a fixer for an organisation called Repair Cafe - we run events wherein once a month people bring items in to be fixed for free. Not just computers, printers, phones, earbuds, and the like, but also household appliances, clothing, books, etc. Many of these people aren't bringing things in because they can't afford replacements; rather, they recognize the quality is better in their older items, and they hate the wasteful and controlling aspects of planned obsolescence. So we may yet see large numbers of average citizens who reject the dystopian plans of those who call their greed-driven view of the future 'Utopia'.
In the category of 'not likely', but still worth considering, is the possibility of simplifying our lives. All of these technological innovations are cool, and they drive our economies, and some of them are significant. But really, how many new shinies contribute to our fundamental sense of worth, fulfillment, happiness, and meaning? I would argue that they tend to undermine those values - and many sociologists and psychologists would agree with me. It's probably too late to try stuffing that genie back in the bottle though...
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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!
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.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
What kind of phone does he own?
Isn't it obvious? he doesn't own the phone and he doesn't know what he is paying his operator for.
It's fairly obvious the author is an american sheeple - who "buys" a 700 bucks cellphone for fifty bucks. never mind that he doesn't actually buy it, just sort of rents it, along with buying internet that he can sort of use only on the sort of devices the operator wants or he can pay extra. I'm fairly certain he also has an UNLIMITED high speed internet on his phone, limited only by a megabyte limit the operator put on there(but don't be scared! the limit is more than what their customers on average use! so next month the limit can be made even lower and the speed even faster, never mind that it's impossible customers to use more than the limit on average.)
it's not about "when everything is like your cellphone" - it's an article about when americans will pay for coke by subscription... and rent their cars with mileage limits.. while thinking they get a good deal while getting shafted.
it's fucking horrendous to read american reviews on cellphones because 99% of the time the reviewer actually thinks the iphone costs fifty or hundred bucks - while he is actually reviewing a 700 dollar product and then comparing them to something that actually factually costs under 100 bucks to own!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.