A few years ago, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos revealed how he thinks of local PC hardware as antiquated, ready to be replaced by cloud options from companies like AWS and Azure.
Bucha Bull to me.
We went from mass surveillance to hardware confiscation real quick.
These companies are so large that they don’t need the consumer market anymore. The consumer is now the competition. They can essentially purchase the entire planet’s output of computing hardware years in advance to force us out of the market and lease it back to us at inflated rates. Then, they turn all that tensor compute against us to make everyone’s life a living digital surveillance hell.
Forget Internet freedom, computational liberty is now at risk. Who needs all that expensive legal and technological architecture to steal your data, report on you to the government, and enforce DRM when they control bare metal access to your rented corporate cloud hardware because consumer PC equipment is too astronomically expensive to afford for the average person?
We need to elevate the prosecution of anti-trust to the level of religious inquisition, and burn these companies at the stake. They’re using AI to literally enslave humanity, and it’s working.
To be honest I don’t have any personal digital information that I give a shit about. It’s value is only derived from its ability to identify + track me, either for my convenience or for the highest bidder’s. Computational liberty is only an issue because we’ve made everything digital by default and that mindset has leaked into critical social functions (taxes, law, logistics, healthcare, etc…).
Software and data bloat is more astronomical than most people realize. Only about 10% of persisted data is ever touched again (don’t look up the ecological implications). Amazon could capture 90% of all compute hardware and the entire human race could get by just fine on 10%. We wouldn’t have access to niceties like app stores full of niche apps, 24MP phone cameras, 4k movies, 10 sluggish layers of software abstraction, 15 years of photos you never look at, etc…
But you could run a simple message server on basically any scrap of IoT e-waste. A highly available static website can be hosted with an old phone and a solar panel. Any device (fridge/watch/calculator/pregnancy test) can run Doom. All of Apollo 11’s source code is a fraction of the size of most web pages.
We’re continously expanding our hardware usage for infinitesimally small gains. We should demand that our governments legislate digital austerity for dozens of reasons, just pick what resonates best for you. Personal privacy, energy usage, ecological damage, corporate capture, information rot, brittle supply chains, national security, etc…
Yes, and also - if something was normal in 80s, it won’t stop being possible in 2030s. In some sense our civilization now is just reveling in the sea of computational power used wastefully.
There was a moment when I moved from an old PC with 512 MB RAM which seemed nice, but was becoming a bit weak for games and all, to a newer C2D PC with 2 GB RAM. I felt it can do anything I’ll ever need. And web aside, it still can do most.
And that old PC, if we compare it to a machine good for year 1999, was very powerful. And 1999 is around Matrix and Phantom Menace, and the X-Wing: Alliance game, and ICQ popularity growing.
More and more resources spent for the same or less social satisfaction. People like talking in money and graphs and industry slang, but honestly social satisfaction is a far better optimized mechanism than these.
Adopting a kitten seems still more satisfying than computing, but the gap in year 1999 was subjectively less than now.
The old technologies that we used to use for websites never really went away. They’re still around, and you can use them to make websites again if you want.
It’s just that it won’t be as fancy looking as a newer web-site, but you don’t lose too much on functionality.
Fantastic alternative insight, thank you.
I don’t have any personal digital information that I give a shit about
Genuin question. How do you classify your photo’s ? (That’s the data I care about most. almost everything else can be reproduced or is just a pitty if lost)
Photos are the same as most other data, you can store them pretty easily long-term in a physical medium. Of course, capturing an image is much easier and more convenient with a digital device, but that doesn’t mean it has to live digitally indefinitely. It’s simple enough to have an instant digital camera with a built in printer and access to a high quality scanner.
If you held a gun to my head, I could pick out a few dozen personal photos that I own that are worth saving physically. If you allowed me a modern flash drive’s worth of storage (64-128GB, ~5000 good quality images), I could pretty easily store every picture worth a second look from my entire lifetime.
Apple’s marketing driven perception that every single person needs a cinema quality camera (and cinema sized storage) in their pocket is ludicrous. Only a tiny fraction of people actually truly need that. Let them borrow that gear from a library if we want to preserve fair access.
Sorry to break it for you, but no one actually plays Doom anymore.
We made physical toys and games into something expensive for adults and kicked kids out of the equation.
Now all they have are videogames and the most affordable ones (the ones on PC) are soon to disappear.
Sorry to break it for you, but no one actually plays Doom anymore.
ok, zoomer
Oh, even I create maps with my cousin still. Playing though…
Good luck killing off older games, though.
Or indie games.
This is essentially market manipulation via speculation. The artificially create scarcity to drive up demand and price. They do it with food, they do it with housing, and they do it with healthcare. The basic things we need to survive are being held by fewer and fewer owners; then held hostage by those owners via monopolization; just to squeeze more from us. The earth is a fucking resort for the 3000 billionaires in this world, and the rest of us are allowed to work here at the pleasure of our overlords.
Everything seems to eventually link back to class war.
FINALLY SOMEONE GETS IT
I’ve been screaming this since Crucial closed up
At this pace they will make owning a compyter illegal. Being everything a remote service governments doesnt need to preoccupy by cryptography and business will not have to worry about addblockers and user profiling will be easier.
Ok so the tactic is to drain the corporations of their money.
- piracy
- dis-enshittification
- jailbreaking devices
- opensource hardware
- decentralization
But they’re businesses and they need to make money!
Won’t someone think of the people taking us for a ride?
Unsurprising that capitalists want to seize all the means of computation for themselves.
Hey Jeff — you know what I think is antiquated and should be relegated to the annals of history?
Billionaires.
Go away and live your life of luxury and shut the fuck up. Don’t you have enough fucking money?
Huh… Great point
yeah you know what i always thought hey this PC cost me a lot, i wish I could keep paying for it indefinitely.
I’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy?
Yep, just like feudal times.
When AWS had the major outage recently, my self-hosted services kept on running. The programs on my Linux machines and other devices I own were also not impacted. Thanks, Jeff, but I’ll stick with my “antiques”. Also, fuck you.
Friends of mine complained they couldn’t watch stuff and I replied “huh, my Plex is working fine.”
A few years ago, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos revealed how he thinks of local PC hardware as antiquated
People should be more aware that appeal to making you feel old or antiquated is one of the main strategies from corporations to push their products into you.
No, you’re not antiquated. Just be yourself and do things the way you like to do, not the way corporations want to force you into. No one should judge you, and if they do, they’re wrong for judging others for their way to do things. Don’t fall for that trap
If building from wood is not antiquated, then surely local hardware isn’t.
But their power is built on function fulfilled, and unless there is an alternative, they are the future.
I’ll give up computers entirely before I rent one from you greedy pricks.
Yeah bud, maybe if you get just a little more money, you’ll finally be complete. Just a little more money…
I mean, that’s absolutely where this is going at a business level. Cloud computing has been in the cards for decades, and the only real question is who will do the hosting.
With the price of RAM and CPUs going asymptotic, these big cloud compute companies are building an effective monopoly on high end processing capacity. They’re cornering the market on hardware. Eventually, you either use their computers or you stick with legacy hardware (that’s seeded with Planned Obsolescence time bombs) or you (shudders just to think of it) start buying computers from CHINA.
When you think about it, there’s really only one option.
From an IT operations perspective this makes so much sense they’ve already tried it before. They were called “thin clients” and just had enough compute and network to connect to run remote desktop software.
This greatly reduces the amount of spending you need to build out a large corporate network, and centralizes management just like they already do for servers with stuff like VMWare.
I’m assuming privacy isn’t an issue and they don’t mind Amazon picking the winners in business.
Privacy doesn’t exist on corporate networks, so they don’t. However, the early thin clients had local servers. I don’t know how the very largest companies would feel about giving Amazon that much power.
The largest companies already host everything on the cloud.
The largest companies are the cloud.
Eh, depends. The price for something like VMware horizon was already damn expensive and that’s before you got to citrix prices (and this is pre broadcom takeover.)
For some places the costs are able to be recouped but it really depends. You still need plenty of scale to have that be viable IME.
My main point being there are a millions of small businesses and medium size ones that are still always going to be far better off with normal physical hardware.
I hope China keeps manufacturing affordable computers and doesn’t go all in on the cloud too. There might be profit in selling computers, but I bet there are politicians in the CCP who would love to have everyone rent cloud computing that’s more easily watched and controlled.
The Chinese government doesn’t want to have to deal with routing the world’s email spam through their domestic servers. Nevermind the nightmare of latency going round trip from a terminal in Sao Paulo to a data center in Beijing, just so some mid-level bureaucrat can know the porn habits of Brazil.
I would say the bigger threat of Chinese hardware is an end to the effective technology embargo the US sanctions regime has imposed on the Global South. Far scarier to Americans than a Chinese bureaucrat with access to the Amazon web store history is a Cuban Communist with a standard of living that outpaces their Miami peers.
I was thinking more that they’d like the idea of better surveillance of their own population. If that happened there might be an incentive for them not to make it affordable to own capable hardware.
But if you’re right about what you just said and China of all places ends up democratizing tech around the world, that will be something of a silver lining.
the only real question is who will do the hosting.
Who? Me! Self hosting is a thing.
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Nothing is ever enough for these greedy fucks
They have OCD that manifests as economic hoarding. They are mentally ill, and are damaging society worse than any mass shooter. They need to be separated from society, forced to undergo mental health treatment, and their fortunes confiscated.
forced to undergo mental health treatment
Greed is not a mental health issue, is a character flaw
and their fortunes confiscated
100% agreed
It is a mental health problem when it is simply the way their hoarding disorder presents. Some people hoard cats, or old cars, or random junk, but these people hoard money.
What else could you call it when they accumulate so much money that neither they nor the next 100 generations of their heirs could ever spend it? If someone had so many cats that she had enough cats for generations of her family, you’d get her help, and remove the cats from her custody, and distribute them to people who would give them good homes.
That’s what we need to do with these mentally ill money hoarders.
Every 5 years someone invests a bunch of money into thin clients, and then we’re right back where we started.
I’ll believe it’s possible when America’s networking infrastructure isn’t covered in holes.
when was the last such case
Chromebooks and cloud gaming come to mind.
Imagine the unparalleled censorship when the far-right tech elites decide what you can do on “your” computer.
One way or another, major company-backed OSes are moving towards that. Checking all your pictures, messages, videos, audio, for your own good. For now it’s creeping on mobile, but don’t worry, it’ll come to a windows near you soon enough.
Good thing you can uninstall Windows for now, then.
Also, I have a feeling that Bezos’ threats to kill the PC (yes, I’m calling them threats because they sound like threats), and the KYC stuff going around are somehow linked.
Bezos’ threats against the very existence of the PC could also be construed as a threat against self-hosting, including the Fediverse, and against the existence of alt OSes as well.
Reverse piracy; “Design and store your copyrightable and patentable ideas in our AI incubators!”
Of course they want that. So they can control and see everything that people can do on their devices. With Moore’s law there is absolutely no reason why centralizing computers should make sense. This is pure corporate greed and nothing else.
You will own nothing and be happy.
With Moore’s law
It’s not really a law and it’s not true anymore.
there is absolutely no reason why centralizing computers should make sense
There is, and it’s not too different from central heating.
You could live 20 years with the same dumb terminal, while on the remote side you could rent better and better hardware.
I like p2p networks and think socially it’s better to have a decentralized way of providing such resources and paying for them.
But the benefit of renting computing resources is obvious. Except I like the idea of having a local system, and offloading some tasks to remote performers, not renting a remote system.
I mean, of course they want the world working their way and that’s what they are offering. If those thinking differently can’t compete, then that’s how it happens.
