Re:If software companies ran the country (1987)
by dredmorbius on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @01:20AM
(#29237491)
True and a fair point.
I was referring more to the fact that software sales and licensing (a delightfully dystopian version of which dominates the essay) is the business model that's projected forward.
Instead, we live in something of a bizarro-world of the IBM / EDS / Tymshare model, in which we-the-users don't pay for compute resources, but our eyeballs and manipulativeness is what's sold to advertisers / propagandists.
In a similar way, reading Arthur C. Clarke's descriptions of future digital technology --- his "minisec" from Imperial Earth (1975) foreshadows the iPhone wonderfully --- describes the hardware but not the business and financial model supporting it. The notion that a decades-old hand-me-down device from the protagonist's clone-twin-father would still be useful is also ... charmingly quaint.
I was referring more to the fact that software sales and licensing (a delightfully dystopian version of which dominates the essay) is the business model that's projected forward.
Instead, we live in something of a bizarro-world of the IBM / EDS / Tymshare model, in which we-the-users don't pay for compute resources, but our eyeballs and manipulativeness is what's sold to advertisers / propagandists.
In a similar way, reading Arthur C. Clarke's descriptions of future digital technology --- his "minisec" from Imperial Earth (1975) foreshadows the iPhone wonderfully --- describes the hardware but not the business and financial model supporting it. The notion that a decades-old hand-me-down device from the protagonist's clone-twin-father would still be useful is also ... charmingly quaint.