You can list a hundred negative aspects of present day PC use like this article does, but it totally ignores improvements and positive aspects. Like yeah you could use word 95 without it contacting a Microsoft server but office 95 compared to office 2010 or later is like a night and day difference.
They mention DRM and say it’s gotten bad in the last decade but DRM has been terrible for the last 25 years. You used to buy a music CD (in like 2003) and put it in the computer and you couldn’t play it because of DRM.
It’s just not a balanced article. I actually think they have a lot of good content here and they make some good points but they shoehorned all these things to fit their conclusion and there’s no counter-point.
Edit: it’s just factually incorrect that “The PC is dead”
You have DJs making electronic music, artists painting, PC Gaming, You can manage your finances, keep photo albums, and basically anything they are being romantic about in this article is just a talking point, I could argue counter points for almost every paragraph. Things are better than they were. Email barely worked, always getting flooded with spam because there weren’t any spam filters. Devices weren’t plug and play, they were very difficult to get working. So what if there are garbage products on Amazon or wherever, that doesn’t make the point the author is pretending that it makes.
We do need privacy rights and right to repair like the author says, but there have always been things to fight for. Maybe I’m just missing the point- since 2001 people have been saying “I won’t use .Net!” Because everyone was worried that office suite would run in a web browser or wherever and people thought the PC was dead, we’d all be using terminal sessions instead (where you just see the remote desktop not the computing is done on a server somewhere else). The point the author is making isn’t any more true today than it was 20 years ago, it’s not a new point, it’s something people have always agreed with. But the PC is not dead.
it’s just factually incorrect that “The PC is dead”
I think the author’s point on this wasn’t so much that “nobody uses PC anymore”, but rather the concept of a Personal Computer, which you fully owned. There’s also the irony of the first Apple computers being personal computers you could open, fix and modify. Software is where few people feel like they own their computers. Free software being sold to shady companies isn’t new, even FOSS projects have been bought. That’s the main problem the author wants to point out, which is essentially the same as Cory Doctorow’s piece on enshitification.
The author also left this:
I’ve shown this editorial to friends, and some people felt that I did not emphasize the benefits of current technology enough. But I argue that my criticism is less about the actual technology and more about how we use it—and how companies make money from it.
I think the point the author was trying to make is that the “personal” part of PC is what is dying. the profit model for modern tech is no longer about supplying the best or most useful product but instead exploiting users, either to manipulate them into buying more crap or harvesting their data to sell off to someone else who wants to sell them more crap. Even many of the products we buy these days we don’t really own. Steam just released a policy statement saying that users don’t actually own the games they’ve purchased, but are merely buying a license to access them. If Steam decides not to support a particular title anymore than poof, it’s gone forever from your account. For the most part it seems that if you aren’t running strictly FOSS software or pirating, you can’t really own anything on your PC aside from the hardware. I think the gist of their argument is not that computing has gotten worse, but that while software, hardware, and user experience have massively improved, the exploitation of the user has greatly tainted that progress.
You can list a hundred negative aspects of present day PC use like this article does, but it totally ignores improvements and positive aspects. Like yeah you could use word 95 without it contacting a Microsoft server but office 95 compared to office 2010 or later is like a night and day difference.
They mention DRM and say it’s gotten bad in the last decade but DRM has been terrible for the last 25 years. You used to buy a music CD (in like 2003) and put it in the computer and you couldn’t play it because of DRM.
It’s just not a balanced article. I actually think they have a lot of good content here and they make some good points but they shoehorned all these things to fit their conclusion and there’s no counter-point.
Edit: it’s just factually incorrect that “The PC is dead” You have DJs making electronic music, artists painting, PC Gaming, You can manage your finances, keep photo albums, and basically anything they are being romantic about in this article is just a talking point, I could argue counter points for almost every paragraph. Things are better than they were. Email barely worked, always getting flooded with spam because there weren’t any spam filters. Devices weren’t plug and play, they were very difficult to get working. So what if there are garbage products on Amazon or wherever, that doesn’t make the point the author is pretending that it makes.
We do need privacy rights and right to repair like the author says, but there have always been things to fight for. Maybe I’m just missing the point- since 2001 people have been saying “I won’t use .Net!” Because everyone was worried that office suite would run in a web browser or wherever and people thought the PC was dead, we’d all be using terminal sessions instead (where you just see the remote desktop not the computing is done on a server somewhere else). The point the author is making isn’t any more true today than it was 20 years ago, it’s not a new point, it’s something people have always agreed with. But the PC is not dead.
I think the author’s point on this wasn’t so much that “nobody uses PC anymore”, but rather the concept of a Personal Computer, which you fully owned. There’s also the irony of the first Apple computers being personal computers you could open, fix and modify. Software is where few people feel like they own their computers. Free software being sold to shady companies isn’t new, even FOSS projects have been bought. That’s the main problem the author wants to point out, which is essentially the same as Cory Doctorow’s piece on enshitification.
The author also left this:
I think the point the author was trying to make is that the “personal” part of PC is what is dying. the profit model for modern tech is no longer about supplying the best or most useful product but instead exploiting users, either to manipulate them into buying more crap or harvesting their data to sell off to someone else who wants to sell them more crap. Even many of the products we buy these days we don’t really own. Steam just released a policy statement saying that users don’t actually own the games they’ve purchased, but are merely buying a license to access them. If Steam decides not to support a particular title anymore than poof, it’s gone forever from your account. For the most part it seems that if you aren’t running strictly FOSS software or pirating, you can’t really own anything on your PC aside from the hardware. I think the gist of their argument is not that computing has gotten worse, but that while software, hardware, and user experience have massively improved, the exploitation of the user has greatly tainted that progress.