• 1 Post
  • 13 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 15th, 2023

help-circle
  • Technology has started to make it easier and easier to be anti consumer. To maximise how much you can extract out of consumers.

    It is making it easier to understand and control exactly how they use products and services. This allows you to structure your price and offering to give them the minimum amount they’ll accept at the maximum price. Allows you to strip features out and offer them for extra. Allows you to hide things behind ongoing subscriptions. Allows you to better lock people into products and services, making it more difficult to switch/leave.

    All of this was possible (and being done) before, but technology makes this so much easier/better.

    Technologies often start out by making something easier for the consumer. But beyond the early stages, it’s all about making the world better - for the corporations developing and selling products and services.









  • A decent percentage of Gen X and early millennials grew up familiar with computers. You kind of had to be, to some extent. Stuff didn’t always work smoothly or easily, so some tinkering and understanding of how things work beneath the surface was required.

    We’re moving towards a future where a computer becomes just like an appliance, like a TV. Both the hardware and software will be locked down and set up to work. You just tap and press buttons to get it to do its thing.

    Eventually, we may even get to the point where computers are required to be locked down “for our safety”.

    If we get that far, then I can imagine those who want to build their own and have full freedom to install and customise it any way they want could be considered the very fringe/fanatical elements of society.

    “Hey, you want an illegal unauthorised computer, why on earth would you need that, are you a terrorist or criminal or something?”

    I hope things don’t go quite that far. But I don’t think it’s out of the question.