Welcome to the Future Having spent the past five days mired in Google Apps, Microsoft 365, the latest and worst version of iTunes, and Amazon’s Cloud Drive”, here is my theory. Its no longer enough for companies to sell something, take the profit, and move on. In the digital world, selling something is not the endgame; leasing content is. That way, after a companys initial investment in goods (be it software, music, film), the only remaining costs are enough infrastructure to keep the product on line and customers vaguely satisfied, royalties (if any), and the cost of server space and maintenance. Heres the future, then. Just as e-books we purchase dont actually belong to us, our music, films, software will not longer belong to us. We’ll be forced to rent our software, which will be stored in the cloud, allowing the owners to keep track of whos buying what and using it how - and to remove it from our use at any moment. This “lease ecology” allows for a continuous stream of income to the owner. It’s also the only way to completely control the entire revenue stream. We will have to store our music, film, digital photographs, documents, business information, in fact any digital items, on line, where they can be used for multiple purposes - both benign and nefarious - by anyone with access to the servers and their content. “The cloud” as a description was invented by Compaq in 1996, when many people were still scared of the Internet, and “getting on line” was a big deal. Amazon embraced the term around 2008, but really began pushing it just a few years ago. When I noticed, my first thought was How silly - The Cloud. Its just a bunch of servers off the coast of Greenland. But I realized how brilliant their move was when someone tried to convince my wife, an attorney, to store all her files in The Cloud. She asked for my opinion, and I asked what she thought it was. A satellite, right? Up in space, by the clouds. Ah.... Think about it. What does the word cloud conjure? Big, fleecy things, soft to the touch. Pretty. You can’t touch them, but they’re always there, reliable as the sun. You see cute pictures in them. Maybe you believe heavens up there, with angels standing guard over your documents, and God watching over the entire system to make sure it never goes down. How benign. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google – every digitally-based corporation is trying desperately to get us to move everything off our own hard drives and onto their servers. And I, for one, do not trust it further than I can throw a piano. I live by the old hacker rule (not cracker, please, hacker) - if you can make it, you can break it. Storing sensitive data on a server someone else controls is dangerous and foolhardy, no matter what assurances you may receive. I keep regular backups of my own hard drive in two different places, buy DRM-free items whenever possible, and hope that if Amazon pull my Kindle I can find something else to use as a .mobi reader. Maybe you think Im crazy - but Im not the one trying to monetize the universe at the expense of my community, or secretively gather data on everyone in it! We live in a relentlessly disposable world, where music has become devalued because it is ubiquitous - stores, sidewalks, even zoos are littered with it, playing to all people all the time. We have become convinced its necessary to be on line constantly, for fear of missing something - what, we dont know, but we dont want to miss it! Our ability to connect with one another, so closely tied to our visual and aural centers, is deteriorating into selfies, online dating sites, and avoiding the telephone in favor of email whenever possible - because why actually talk WITH someone when you can just talk AT them? We are living in a future where everything needed in a hospital operating room is dependent on wireless access, where you cant make an emergency call if the server is down, and where more and more young people cant look me in the eye because theyre so used to communicating by text, and in person scares them. How, then, will children learn to be self-reliant? How will they learn to exercise their imaginations, when everything is handed to them on a digital plate? More worrisome, what happens to music, to art, to prose, when we lose the ability to look another human being in the eye, touch their skin, feel their breath on ours, include them in our physical space? The act of holding hands does more to foster connection than any text. Such a small, simple physical connection immediately lowers stress and blood pressure, improves the immune system, even softens physical pain. For thousands of years, we’ve been tactile beings, reading emotions with our eyes and ears, communicating through all five senses – will they begin to atrophy as we continue to digitize our lives? How will we grow into a more nurturing, caring society if every new thing in our lives just creates more distance between us? The buzzword a few years ago was “Content is king.” Now the owners of that content want to keep it all for themselves, allowing us a taste now and then, when it suits them – and when we can afford it. I see no way around it. We can’t conduct business without using software. We can’t stay current in school without a computer. More and more of our information comes from the on line world, information that is both real and unreal, often paranoid in the extreme, and overwhelming in its hyperbole. With all this information, we grow more ignorant and more obese by the day. Which is good for the manufacturers, because the less we know, the more easily we’re manipulated. It’s a brave new world, folks. Welcome to the future.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 11:56:40 +0000
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