The consistent push toward the "sharing economy" and or the "gig economy" makes me very uneasy, especially when it comes to physical things like houses, cars, or food. The end result will be that regular people don't own anything and don't know how to do things, whether that's repair your vehicle or cook a meal at home. When push comes to shove, the corporation actually owning such things can cut you off with virtually no consequences.
This does concern me. For example, if I buy kindle books instead of physical books, my kids can't enjoy those books when I'm gone. I have a car that can now do software unlocking of physical features (e.g. rear heated seats). Am I adding value to the car which I can sell to the next person, or am I licensing the right to that feature for the duration for my own use.
We're moving to a model where we spend the same, but their value is zero when considering the value of our assets.
thanks for pointing this out. For a while i had an uneasy feeling about this, and they way you have put it gives words to those: digital assets that we create and are licensed really can't be passed on generationally. Taking it to an extreme - imagine not having physical transcripts of historic documents - e.g. the constitution - and its effect on a country's trajectory (not that constitution would stay always relevant in it's original form - but still)
To add to that, Kindle store is actually two things combined:
1. An eBook distributor
2. A "PayPal replacement" that let's you send $$$ to authors.
They theoretically have a monopoly on #1, but in practice piracy exists and potentially does it better.
They don't and can't stop people from setting up a platform for sending $$$ to authors - in fact, you could even have a database of authors, their books and the RRP of those books, and an embeddable button to pay the author an RRP's worth. That could then be embedded on arbitrary piracy sites.
The piracy sites could be shut down, but realistically the pirate sites are too portable to be shut down for long, and private trackers make some sites impractical to shut down at all.
Well and is the permanent unlock transferable? There was that fellow who bought a Tesla from a used-car dealer and had a bunch of paperwork stating certain things were unlocked that when he bought them got disabled because he wasn't licensed for them.
Yeah, it's pretty much this. Apparently Tesla locks the features when the car is sold to them. The guy in question had a broken paper trail but apparently it was sorted.
What is worrying is that these aren't clearly explained when you make the purchase. And it's really down to the company's policy, which if all companies do the same, the consumer ends up having no choice.
Supposedly the story is: Tesla bought a car back then sold it to an auction house and enabled FSD as a "demo". The auction house mistakenly listed the features as being enabled, and when the car sold Tesla never disabled the FSD demo. When the user then privately sold the car to a new owner, the new owner performed an ownership transfer - when they did this, either a human or some automated system saw that the FSD demo was enabled and disabled it.
> if I buy kindle books instead of physical books, my kids can't enjoy those books when I'm gone.
Do you think your kids will want to read their ancestors’ books? I have watched even ardent bibliophiles among my friends gradually lose interest in books, because they grow accustomed to consuming snackable content on the internet, and I have little confidence that books will be a mainstream pastime for following generations.
Dude, is your question for real? Just because you hang out with those people, you think it's not necessary for books to be transferrable to kids? It's currently possible to pass on books, DVDs, MP3s to kids, and a corporate-controlled future where that's not possible without them getting a cut is a stupid future.
I really don't think their point was that it's not necessary for books and other physical media to be transferable to kids. I saw it more as an anecdote that I think probably a lot of people would, unfortunately, nod in agreement with.
To your point, however, I do agree. I think one of the major benefits of physical media (or even digital media as long as it's entirely self-hosted) is that you can enjoy it entirely without surveillance, and that it's much more resistant to censorship. Being able to read about and understand how people lived, thought, and created in the past is incredibly important, and it's something we should preserve for the benefit of future generations, even if they might sometimes contain things that one might not necessarily agree with today.
> you think it's not necessary for books to be transferrable to kids?
Where did I say that? Obviously it is nice to be able to hand things down to one's children. But what I am questioning is whether the envisioned scenario (children of the future being enamored by dad or granddad's old books) is really likely to happen.
It's the inferred interpretation. Fine, your lawyer could go to court and successfully defend that you didn't utter that question, but in my mind you're arguing that would future generations even want to read books, so should we even care about e-products being transferable?
> Do you think your kids will want to read their ancestors’ books?
Maybe they will and maybe they won't, but how are we to know that with certainty today? The whole point is that if the opportunity is taken away now, then that guarantees that they won't be able to in the future. Beyond that, they would also lose the possibility of otherwise sharing them with someone else who might be interested in reading them, and I think that would be a loss as well.
I think there's something to be said for having the physical object that belonged to someone you knew. For example, I was recently given my mother's collection of 7"s. Yes, they're completely impractical by today's standards and I can find almost all of those songs on Spotify, but the collection included her handwritten index and notes scribbled in the columns about memories connected to the various songs in it.
I don't have a specific example in mind, but I'm sure the same applies to books people have inherited from friends and family. People write all sorts of interesting notes in books, tuck photos in between the pages, etc. These items offer a connection that a library book or its digital equivalent (often) cannot.
Yeah, I have a dictionary that belonged to my grandfather, which is in the language he spoke. It's just a generic, paperback book, but the physical item has meaning to me. I can't imagine a $Language Kindle dictionary would have remotely the same relevance.
I'll just quote what I wrote the other day[0] on the topic of "throwing money at things" instead of doing or owning things yourself:
"Why would you own things and accept responsibility for maintaining them, if you could just throw money at the service provider and have the thing be present when it's needed? Of course the thing will be extremely limited in what you can do with it, subject to Terms&Conditions, but why would you want to do anything non-standard with stuff? There's always another service you can throw money at to solve the same problem.
What's the end-game here? That we specialize into sub-species of humans, forever stuck in one role, with zero autonomy? No longer building wealth, we'll only be allocating the flow of money - from what Society gives us in reward for our work, straight to Services of said Society? Will we become specialized cells of the meta-multicellular organism Society becomes?
I can see how we're on the path towards that reality, and I absolutely hate it."
I see the same thing and it's disheartening. At least we're not immortal, now that would be hell in such a system.
And the main problem is (imho) that people just seem to hate responsibility. It all stems from that, at the core it's all just shifting responsibility onto something or someone who will take it.
Try not paying your real estate taxes and you'll discover that you're only renting the land under your house. The local authorities have the ability to confiscate and sell your dwelling if you don't pay your taxes.
There's a slight difference between paying government taxes for the land you've purchased and renting a book from a private corporation.
The government taxes pay for services which can directly and indirectly benefit you. For example, they pay for providing a force which will help against unlawful intruders, pay for the manpower who will help you should your house catch on fire, pay for the maintenance of roads, and so forth.
Amazon's revenue... lines the pockets of Amazon's investors.
I want to add one thing here: Owning is sometimes also a burden. There is a whole sub culture focusing on downsizing (there are fans which are owning less than 100 items .. and that includes battery cable).
Yes, but normally you have some degree of choice. You can choose to rent or buy depending on your circumstances and needs. It's bad enough enough that the degree of 'choice' is very limited for a lot of people, but it is clear that the political direction of tax law, corporate law, is toward the direction of establishment of a permanent aristocracy that owns everything and everyone else is completely dependent on them.
I got a new build last year and it's not really an issue, just something to be aware of. The only thing I worry about is the escalating prices in a few years, but you have the benefit of the whole estate being in the same situation, so you can club together to complain I guess.
I don't think it's just that. I think it's the corporations having engaged in decades long propaganda pushing towards unlimited capitalism. It's a new brand of authoritarianism. Corporations make all the rules and have all the power. If we as a consumer make a single mistake, we are to pay for it, yet consumers have essentially zero power towards a corporation. Corporations are given nearly endless rights on what they can do and own, and consumers are quickly having ownership rights yanked out from us. Corporations own our data, many of the products we "buy", and even what we can do with the things we "buy".
