> This anxiety of an imminent all-encompassing wave of DRM where you can only run approved software on all your Windows/Linux devices has been going for more than 10 years.
So much longer. Go read any of the warnings that Cory Doctorow has been writing for 20+ years about the imminent war against general purpose computing, how DRM will end our right to use our own CPU, and then look at the date lines, and then ponder whether literally any of his predictions have come true. Some people have made entire careers out of talking about this.
>So much longer. Go read any of the warnings that Cory Doctorow has been writing for 20+ years about the imminent war against general purpose computing, how DRM will end our right to use our own CPU, and then look at the date lines, and then ponder whether literally any of his predictions have come true. Some people have made entire careers out of talking about this.
Can you say for certain that his writings didn't contribute to those predictions not coming true?
I mean, yeah, I get it. I worry about general purpose computing going away too. I remember Stallman and Doctorow talking about this in the early 2000s and saw many iterations of this same thread pop up on Slashdot, HN, Digg, Reddit, etc. over the years.
I dunno man, I guess I’m just skeptical over the dooming at this point. I think a bigger issue is less about whether we will be able to run whatever we want on our computer, and more that the internet has just become a cesspool of ads, clickbait, ragebait, and app sandboxed content that’s not discoverable by search engines. I think you’ll always have a fairly reasonable choice of computers to run whatever software you want on. But todays internet just isn’t very fun anymore.
I work in the industry and all I see around me everywhere are skilled and talented people doing their level best to ship the best and most useful products to their customers at the lowest prices. The theory that the whole industry was scared off from its former evil plan by the TED talks of a bottom-shelf sci-fi author strikes me as highly unlikely.
>I work in the industry and all I see around me everywhere are skilled and talented people doing their level best to ship the best and most useful products to their customers at the lowest prices. The theory that the whole industry was scared off from its former evil plan by the TED talks of a bottom-shelf sci-fi author strikes me as highly unlikely.
Your hyperbolic and insulting annotations degrade your assertion.
So much longer. Go read any of the warnings that Cory Doctorow has been writing for 20+ years about the imminent war against general purpose computing, how DRM will end our right to use our own CPU, and then look at the date lines, and then ponder whether literally any of his predictions have come true. Some people have made entire careers out of talking about this.