@clarity if you can make the device you want just using software you get the economies of scale of industrial production (by using generic mass produced PCs and phones) no matter how small or niche your product is. and you can go from no one using a thing to everyone in the world using it overnight without having to ask capital for permission

@bob I’m not convinced that this is a good thing

@clarity the arguments against are basically the same arguments against cheap books and pamphlets in the 19th century. and those arguments had some merits, you might not have had the french revolution or the revolutions of 1848 without them, and arguably that would have been for the better. but that position is fundamentally a conservative one.

@bob how do you square this argument with Weizenbaum’s here? https://xoxo.zone/@clarity/110861149766840562

@clarity mechanical tabulating machines and telegraphs solve that problem well enough, you don't need computers. you certainly don't need personal computers. maybe you'd have to change the way balances are written on the checks, eg: having some kind of scantron-like system at the top that fed into a mechanical sorting/tabulating machine

@bob so your argument is, Weizenbaum is straight up wrong here, & computing exterts a progressive force rather than a conservative one?

@clarity wiezenbaum is straight-up wrong here but I wouldn't go so far as to say computing is a progressive force. it's a lot more ambiguous than that, and a lot depends on how things play out over the next 20 years. it certainly isn't a progressive force in china, and the chinese model of computing could be the one that wins.

@clarity there's an active fight right now between the chinese model ("cloud" and locked down client devices, also what FAANG are pushing) and personal computing (where people store their data on their own devices that they control, and share that data with others directly over the internet instead of via cloud datacenters)