It’s connected. When there’s no planned obsolescence, one can stop buying electronics until companies or some specific company regains reason. When there is planned obsolescence, you can’t easily start ignoring the vendor, usually. Your device quickly becomes both dangerous and kinda useless without support.
This requires sort of an Ulysses’ pact from companies. Sun would do such things. Sun would also develop fundamentally important technologies for literally every level of the industry. Unfortunately Sun went down.
And the way many companies went down in late 90s and 00s, I can’t blame others for trying to find some way to exist without such unfortunate events. One can’t rely on Ulysses’ pacts anyway. Those work to a limited extent when supported by other mechanisms.
It’s really a case of philosophy being required to find the solution. Not conflicting interests, to which (even in theory, with dialectics on one side’s extreme and fascism on another’s) both left and right movements reduce reality.
Said philosophy is that property rights are intended to share either finite resources or unique resources, and information is not a finite resource, however it is a unique resource.
The “conflicting interests” point of view means that everything unique should be a property and this is how things are done well, that means that everything has an owner who feeds from it, and a crowd of angry apes who think that fighting IP and copyright is evil theft making hardworking people hungry.
The “philosophy” point of view means that only finite resources should have owners, because ownership is a way for those who need a resource to have it, nothing more. Ownership and markets are a distribution mechanism, where those applying more energy to get a resource get more of it. It’s superficial for things which are not finite, and superficial means “bad”.
However work to develop new things and creation are finite resources. But those can actually be commodified. Trade secrets are the way it was called for all of history.
Patents allow rapid modernization and scale, which is an advantage over trade secrets, but patents can be issued for practical time periods, instead of practically indefinite, as it is now.
But I think for a decade or so the Western world can exist without patents at all, before reintroducing them in that improved form. It’s not hard to notice that in the current global economy IP and patents are one of the most powerful assets of the West, so it may seem a leap of faith. But it has to be done. Patents in such a situation are derived from human work, so the “designing” countries won’t lose strength compared to the “manufacturing” countries. The power is not in the patents. It’s roughly similar to the way decolonization in the XX century counterintuitively revitalized old empires when and where done softly and hurt them when and where done harshly.
Exactly. Planned obsolesce is an annoyance to my pocketbook. Violations of my privacy can completely screw me over for life.
We should absolutely solve both, but if I had to pick one, I’d go for privacy every time.
It’s connected. When there’s no planned obsolescence, one can stop buying electronics until companies or some specific company regains reason. When there is planned obsolescence, you can’t easily start ignoring the vendor, usually. Your device quickly becomes both dangerous and kinda useless without support.
This requires sort of an Ulysses’ pact from companies. Sun would do such things. Sun would also develop fundamentally important technologies for literally every level of the industry. Unfortunately Sun went down.
And the way many companies went down in late 90s and 00s, I can’t blame others for trying to find some way to exist without such unfortunate events. One can’t rely on Ulysses’ pacts anyway. Those work to a limited extent when supported by other mechanisms.
It’s really a case of philosophy being required to find the solution. Not conflicting interests, to which (even in theory, with dialectics on one side’s extreme and fascism on another’s) both left and right movements reduce reality.
Said philosophy is that property rights are intended to share either finite resources or unique resources, and information is not a finite resource, however it is a unique resource.
The “conflicting interests” point of view means that everything unique should be a property and this is how things are done well, that means that everything has an owner who feeds from it, and a crowd of angry apes who think that fighting IP and copyright is evil theft making hardworking people hungry.
The “philosophy” point of view means that only finite resources should have owners, because ownership is a way for those who need a resource to have it, nothing more. Ownership and markets are a distribution mechanism, where those applying more energy to get a resource get more of it. It’s superficial for things which are not finite, and superficial means “bad”.
However work to develop new things and creation are finite resources. But those can actually be commodified. Trade secrets are the way it was called for all of history.
Patents allow rapid modernization and scale, which is an advantage over trade secrets, but patents can be issued for practical time periods, instead of practically indefinite, as it is now.
But I think for a decade or so the Western world can exist without patents at all, before reintroducing them in that improved form. It’s not hard to notice that in the current global economy IP and patents are one of the most powerful assets of the West, so it may seem a leap of faith. But it has to be done. Patents in such a situation are derived from human work, so the “designing” countries won’t lose strength compared to the “manufacturing” countries. The power is not in the patents. It’s roughly similar to the way decolonization in the XX century counterintuitively revitalized old empires when and where done softly and hurt them when and where done harshly.