5.11.2011

The Digital Patriarchy

The corporate enthusiasm for THE CLOUD continues apace...at least some of the corporations.

Second, when you do upload your own music, you’ll be uploading every single bit of it, and Google will be storing every single bit of it. Google could have made a system that just checks your music for a “digital signature”, recognizes that you have a copy of a Britney Spears album, and stores a tiny little marker in your account pointing to one universal copy of “Oops I Did It Again”. This would allow you to upload a few bytes of information instead of megabytes of song data. But, again, the record labels wouldn’t like that, so Google will be storing millions of copies of the same music in everyone’s individual account, and millions of bytes of upload bandwidth will be wasted uploading these identical copies.

I like all mistermix's points.
Folk love to extol the virtues of the 'free market' and pretend that it solves all consumer problems with a few peremptory claps of its Invisible Hands, but business is looking out for business and the consumer is little more than an annoying variable in larger calculations.

In an increasingly wireless, networked civilization it seems reasonable that people should be able to listen to stuff they bought, that they own, anywhere on anything. But the evolving corporate vision seems to be we own nothing, they own everything and we either lease content from them (the ebook model) or rent content from them (the Netflix model). This seems to be supplanting the old vision, where consumers had to re-purchase their stuff over and over again as technology dictated- the failure of Blu Ray to inspire Joe n' Jane Sixpack to crack their wallets for yet another round of home theater upgrades seems to have been the stick in the spokes of that particular cycle.

So, it's a digital patriarchy.
Instead of the Church, we've got the Corp.
Repository off all secret knowledge, to be doled out to the proles as dictated by the mystic injunctions of the bottom line.

Me, I'll stick with my (physical) books and my vinyl LPs and give Amazon and Google and whoever else is next on the Cloud bandwagon the benefit of my hairy middle finger.

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