
Everything is amazing, but nothing is ours - yankcrime
https://alexdanco.com/2019/10/26/everything-is-amazing-but-nothing-is-ours/
======
TeMPOraL
> _" Worlds of scarcity are made out of things. Worlds of abundance are made
> out of dependencies."_

A nice way of putting it, though I have a slightly different take - the
"worlds of abundance" are made of _relationships_. And not in a good way.

When I own a bunch of files, I own a bunch of files. Nobody can mess with
that. When I use Spotify, I'm in a _relationship_ with Spotify the company. A
relationship governed by a lengthy ToS, a relationship in which I'm at a
disadvantage, but most importantly, it's _another relationship to keep track
of_.

Things you own are out of mind until you need them. Yes, that sometimes means
you'll fail to perform necessary maintenance in a timely fashion. But services
are always on the top of your mind. They drain your bank account monthly or
yearly. They have terms that keep changing. Their offerings keep changing. If
you lose track of some, they'll just keep draining your bank account. Services
create cognitive burden. Personally, I'm already confused and unsure about
just how many things I subscribe to, and I'm someone opposed to X as a Service
as a matter of principle.

I just don't want that many commercial relationships in my life. It's tiring.

~~~
marknadal
Your first paragraph is so salient.

I think most people miss how powerful relationships are in a network of
abundance. You really nailed it.

Unless we can turn these relationships on their head, economically speaking.

Been trying to work out the math on this for the last year. Recently gave a
talk on it
([https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1HJdrBk3BlE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1HJdrBk3BlE))
would you mind sharing your thoughts on it and on abundance/relationships in
general?

One of the technical directors of Silicon Valley TV show and I were talking,
and he's very interested in what they call the "Post-Subscription Economy".

Basically Google and Netflix hijacked Hollywood, and now a lot of the studios
are interested in what's next, for fear of missing out again.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Ok, so I watched your talk. You're a good, charismatic speaker. That said, I
don't think I understood everything on the first pass. I have my concerns that
it's not a solid idea, but I like the direction where it's heading. And so, I
have loads of questions, like:

1) Is the % daily value a self-reported quantity? You seem to strongly suggest
it is.

2) You described a hope - not unreasonable one - that under your ideal
conditions, cheating on self-reporting of % daily values will make no sense
and naturally disappear. But what about the conditions in which your system
exists in parallel to the current one? How to prevent economic arbitrage? I.e.
people misreporting their % daily value estimate to extract goods and services
from your system, which then they sell for money in our current system?

3) Is there any form of money backing your system? If not, then how the people
who have nothing to give to the society are supported? Wouldn't there be a
poverty class in your system too? Does it have better economic mobility?

4) Do you have any more details about algorithms underpinning freeism, and how
should they be created?

Did you write an article or a paper about this that goes into more details?
I'd love to read it.

Cheers!

~~~
marknadal
Thanks for the thoughtful reply!

(1) yes.

This is concerning for me too, but no other model I've explored let's us as
accurately get at what the perceived value is other than directly asking.

Have any ideas for novel models? I'd love to connect you with someone that has
a PhD in Economic Mathematical Models that is helping contribute to the design
of this system.

If the abuses can be more easily adjusted for than the difficulting of
interpreting a proxy measure in value, then I think there is merit.

For instance, if at a macroeconomic level we see coffee has a 2% daily value
with only 1% variance, then we see some outlier claiming coffee was 69% of
their daily value, it might mean something odd is going on. But knowing that
for most people that coffee accurately represents 2% has far more possible
wins in understanding logistics than the assumptions of other methods.

(2) Correct.

From my design stance, I see this as a feature not a bug. Could you expand on
edge cases where this would produce harm for the % system?

It seems the harm would be for the legacy system, and the arbitrage is
strategic.

Giving in this system is not obligatory. So if too many abundant goods get
scraped, they'll turn into scarcity goods that require a higher Giving Index,
OR it will represent market demand for an entrepreneur/startup to scale up the
manufacturing/production of that good, to maintain its abundance factor.

Again, note, in $USD often the more of a good there is causes cost to fall.
This is not true in %, a good may still have a high percent value, even if it
is readily available to all. So there is a lot of profit (higher Giving Index
= access to more luxury goods) to be made on these high demand high valued
items. $USD is self defeating, the more Tesla you can produce outpacing
demand, the cheaper you want to price them. Does this mean Tesla have lower
and lower economic worth or value?

Arbitraging the system, skimming goods and selling them to legacy for $USD
means you're not gaining inbound % value statements (as in you're not gaining
wealth in the new system, the Giving Index) so perhaps you putting high %
values on the goods you are skimming is more accurate than you'd think?
They're maybe getting more value from it as a result of the arbitrage than
purely somebody in the new system using it (say a banana) for average
consumption.

This is why it would be an intentional feature. But please, if I'm missing an
edge case that results in harm, please illuminate me!

(3) UBI is baked into the system!

First off, UBI doesn't work with money due to the inflation problem.

There is no money. That is because you don't need to pay (transact) for
majority of goods (food, housing, etc. post scarce in USA, tho not other
places) to be given to you, you just need to state how much value you get from
them each day.

Here is a good thread on if Walmart were to give away groceries in this
system:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/marknadal/status/1174489487679709...](https://mobile.twitter.com/marknadal/status/1174489487679709185)

So the "poverty class" becomes the consumer class. Their needs should be taken
care of, they would be material rich, but not prioritized in luxury or in
waiting lines, the Biggest Givers would be able to skip to the front of a
coffee shop, bakery, airport boarding, etc.

Better mobility yes, because you wouldn't need capital before doing a startup
to pay for rent and employees. All you'd need to do is form a team with your
friends (like many do in online games as "guilds") and invest your time into
making or distributing products.

Economics mobility is incentived here because gangs of teenagers could go into
Costco, get bulk of bananas, and then be last-mile distributors (TaskRabbit,
etc.) without needing capital first to buy the bananas (obviously they could
not do this for luxury items yet).

(4) yes!

A soft introduction is [http://free.eco](http://free.eco) and the PhD is
starting [https://github.com/goognin/freeism/wiki/Welcome-to-The-
New-E...](https://github.com/goognin/freeism/wiki/Welcome-to-The-New-
Economics-Game) to help organize thoughts. Plus
[http://chat.free.eco](http://chat.free.eco) is a community of people
discussing this!

I'll email you to follow up more, thanks so much for your time.

------
hprotagonist
_If the current trend of technology is sweeping us in a direction of
“everything is amazing, but nothing is ours”, Technology that’s Actually Yours
could be the next great counter-trend_

So GNU or it’s predecessors, circa the birth of the personal computer.

if “the cloud and apps” is cognate with “timeshare mainframes and thin
clients”, and I think it is, then everything old is new again and i look
forward to taking back what’s ours, again.

~~~
new_realist
GNU is part of the problem. If you depend on GPL software, you depend on
something which isn’t yours, in that your behavior is restricted.

~~~
m463
I think you are mistaken.

GPL places no restrictions on how you USE the software.

You can use it for any purpose. You can modify it, adding or deleting code in
any way you want.

If you don't redistribute the software, it ends there.

The GPL only comes into play if you redistribute the software. You then have
the responsibility to pass on the source code with any modifications you've
made so that subsequent users have the same rights you do.

Other licenses like BSD and MIT do not have these restrictions. You could fork
and close the software, distributing binaries that do things the users might
not agree with but would not be able to discern and counteract.

~~~
jay_kyburz
I've been debating GPL vs MIT in my head a bit lately. I've always thought
that when I do open source my projects they would be GPL because I always
liked the idea that if I am going to share, you have to share as well.

In the last little while I have been wondering if the negative side effects of
forcing others to be open outweigh the benefits.

I don't really have a point. I just think its interesting.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I used to be pro-MIT, now I'm increasingly leaning towards licensing my stuff
under GPL. Yes, this means some of that stuff won't be usable in a typical
commercial settings (and there were times where I had to roll my own
implementation of some functionality at work, because the only good library
available was under GPL). But I want to live in a world GPL tries to make
happen.

MIT & friends are licenses that benefit developers. GPL family focuses on
benefits to _end users_.

------
kauffj
I'm very sensitive to this. The notion of "buying" a piece of content on
Amazon is borderline offensive to me. You don't own anything!

I own a DVD that I can continue to play as long as I own a DVD player. What
I'm "buying" from Amazon is a promise that Amazon will continue to give this
to me and only me, so long as they are around and available. I can't resell it
and I have nothing the moment they cease to exist. That's not ownership.

(Setting aside the somewhat absurd notion of "renting" vs. "buying", when both
do the same thing. Renting just requires you to throw away the bits after...)

If you agree with the above, you might like LBRY
([https://lbry.com](https://lbry.com) or
[https://lbry.tech](https://lbry.tech)), which in addition to letting you
stream or download no-DRM files, permanently records your access rights in a
blockchain.

~~~
dcolkitt
> You don't own anything!

This is true. But the counterpoint is the things you own end up owning you.
There's a reason Marie Kondo and the philosophy of minimalism is so popular in
this era.

I don't want to have to worry about a thousand DVDs. I don't want to store
them. I don't want to keep track of them. I don't want another box to pack up
and deal with when moving. I could rip them onto a hard disk. But now I'm
managing a virtual inventory instead of a physical inventory. That's an
improvement, but it's still a pain in the ass.

Yes Amazon could discontinue its library. No, I'm not worried about it. The
chances of a trillion dollar company exiting one of its primary business lines
is definitely lower than the chances of me misplacing my DVDs.

There's a reason that services have replaced products to such an extent. Both
in consumer and enterprise. And that's because throwing a little bit of extra
money at a third party to simplify our already overly messy and disorganized
lives is worth the tradeoff.

That being said, I'm sympathetic to Stallman-esque arguments against giving up
control. And from an ecosystem level standpoint that's probably bad. But from
a purely self-interested standpoint, Amazon is definitely the rational choice.
The reality is that services are here to stay, and if we're worried about
Stallman-type concerns than we need to build better, freer (as in speech)
services.

~~~
pjc50
It seems to me that the "pets v cattle" argument about servers now also
applies to cultural products.

There's so many books and films that you're not supposed to care about them
individually. They just make a Content library, and you consume Content.
Because more Content is continually produced, you'll never run dry of things
to put in front of your eyes.

(I don't like this and think it's bad for culture, as it leads to things like
the Disney Vault)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Conversely, that's why I consider exclusive releases _prima facie_
anticompetitive. Cultural products are to a large extent pets, or non-
substitutable goods. If you want to watch Game of Thrones, you won't accept
the newest Star Wars as a substitute. Exclusive deals essentially destroy
competitive pressures that would otherwise apply.

(I'm aware that solving this is not as simple as straight out banning
exclusive releases.)

------
WaxProlix
This is a good take. Ownership is one of those things that I _feel_
intuitively is important, and I experience frustration around losing it
incrementally. But I struggle to put my concerns into concrete, relatable
examples that the everyday user might appreciate. The 'access until it is no
longer' narrative seems to fit that pretty well.

~~~
baroffoos
This is something I think we have been hit hard by with video games. The first
wave of online enabled games has now had their servers shut down and the games
rendered unplayable. One of my favorite childhood games from about 2006 (Viva
Pinata) is now unplayable on windows because it used Games for Windows Live
which has now shut down. The game is basically entirely offline and single
player but is now unusable unless you use the xbox 360 version which works
fine because it could be used entirely offline.

~~~
kardos
Maybe, broadly speaking, that's just the way life is. Things exist for awhile
and then they don't. Bands eventually stop touring and seeing them live is a
thing of the past. The character of your city is likely quite different as
compared to a generation ago. That amazing restaurant went out of business. If
those servers were still up, would there be anyone on them to play against?

~~~
autoexec
I don't expect a band to live forever to keep doing live shows, but if I buy
their CD I don't expect someone to break into my home and take it at any point
in the future, but plenty of people have lost their music because of shitty
DRM schemes and for those who are entirely dependent on streaming their music
they will very likely not be able to find some of their favorite songs later,
especially for more obscure stuff. I'm glad that I was able to pass some of my
favorite games and music and books to the next generation and that they can
pass them on to their kids. My collection of favorites will outlive many of
the new things they enjoy today.

------
BenoitEssiambre
This does not only apply to consumer software. I was just thinking that the
past decade of business software has been about connecting off-the-shelf saas
and cloud systems together to run businesses.

This was good for businesses wanting to quickly get onboard new technologies
but it has real downsides because all these systems are scattered across the
world and managed independently, making them more distributed, less
transactional (more corruptible) and less tailored to the specific industries
they're used in.

Overly distributed systems are fundamentally hard and fundamentally
inefficient (
[https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/podc89.pdf](https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/podc89.pdf)
). Data that spends more time in memory and cpu cache instead of being thrown
over global networks can be processed a lot more efficiently.

Also, if your infrastructure is made of a lot of components that anyone can
buy, it's much likely for competition to emerge. You lose an important moat.
Plus, oftentimes, the outside organizations holding your data can leverage it
to make you pay high prices.

The next decade might be about recreating the logic of these cobbled together
generic saas systems into streamlined and fully tailored software systems for
each industry. There is now a lot of mature open source code for companies to
use as a foundation.

As the article suggests, this could also allow moving towards fully owning
data and stack instead of having too much in other companies' platforms. There
is probably more incentive for this reshoring of data and software to happen
for businesses so it might happen there before it does for consumers.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Competitive moats are evil.

Learn a trade. Be useful. Save your money. You don’t need a moat if you’re
useful and have savings.

By building moats you are selling our children’s future to corporate
scavengers.

~~~
BenoitEssiambre
Knowledge and ability is a type of moat. That's why it allows you to get paid
a premium.

------
gitgud
> _" years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of
> dependencies."_

This is true, plain old HTML files just depended on the browser's
compatibility. Whereas modern _node_modules_ based projects also depend on
thousands, sometimes tens of thousands additional npm dependencies...

What I've learnt with opening old node projects (2 years+), is that you better
be ready to fix some things, thank god it's all open-source!

~~~
DavidPiper
> thank god it's all open-source!

It feels like there's something super important/relevant about that throwaway
comment, but I can't quite put my finger on what.

Beyond the idea that you wouldn't even be able to fix what you had built
yourself if it wasn't all open source. Perhaps it just resonates with the idea
that if something is open source, everybody owns it and nobody owns it at the
same time?

~~~
TeMPOraL
I have a different take. Being open source doesn't matter at all in cases like
these, because if half of your NPM dependencies suddenly break on you, you
aren't going to even look at them. Nobody has time for that crap. You'll just
swear out loud, and pin your dependencies to older versions.

------
zachkatz
This is true of social media content, too. If a tweet/IG post/whatever you
like disappears, you'll never see it again; you might not even know it
disappeared until you remember it two years later, try to look for it, and
can't find it. That's one of the reasons I started Framed Tweets
([http://framedtweets.com/](http://framedtweets.com/)).

------
esjeon
> our phones are fully in the future ... But our computers are still kind of
> in the past

I wonder if our app-based ecosystem is really the "future". The reason is
simple: apps lock you down. Apps store your data somewhere you don't have
access to, and you can't control your data. Sometimes you even can't move your
work to another device. On the other hand, file-based storage naturally
encourages data migration.

Also, file-based storage allows 3rd party integration. You can use
applications from different companies and of different purposes to work on the
same piece of data. Even in case of software development, source code can be
edited with various editors, compiled with compatible compilers, analyzed with
lints and formatters, and revision-controlled through git, svn, or random
custom solutions, where all those tools are developed by different parties. I
don't think app-based ecosystem can achieve this level of freedom, versatility
and flexibility at once.

So, no. Files are not the thing of the past, nor should be buried deep below
"future" stack. It should be kept as an _official_ backdoor to give users
precise control over their data.

------
platz
“Look, this device is personal. It computes and it’s totally personal, just
for you, and you alone. It doesn’t talk to the internet. No sociality. You
can’t share any of the content with anybody. Because it’s just for you, it’s
private. It’s yours. You can compute with it. Nobody will know! You can
process text, and draw stuff, and do your accounts. It’s got a spreadsheet. No
modem, no broadband, no Cloud, no Facebook, Google, Amazon, no wireless. This
is a dream machine. Because it’s personal and it computes. And it sits on the
desk. You personally compute with it. You can even write your own software for
it. It faithfully executes all your commands.”

'Isn’t it basically the cliff house in Walnut Canyon? Isn’t it the stone box?'

“Look, I have my own little stone box here in this canyon! I can grow my own
beans and corn. I harvest some prickly pear. I’m super advanced here.”

...

'Why shouldn’t it vanish like the cliff people vanished?'

...

'Then we look back in nostalgia at the Personal Computer world. It’s not that
we were forced out of our stone boxes in the canyon. We weren’t driven away by
force. We just mysteriously left. It was like the waning of the moon.

They were too limiting, somehow. They computed, but they just didn’t do enough
for us. They seemed like a fantastic way forward, but somehow they were
actually getting in the way of our experience.'

\- [https://www.wired.com/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-
remar...](https://www.wired.com/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remarks-by-
bruce-sterling/)

~~~
xg15
> _We just mysteriously left._

"Mysteriously", as in "getting dragged out kicking and screaming by an
industry that realized providing a service makes for a _way_ better business
than selling software".

I honestly don't think many users _wanted_ to give up ownership in trade of
access. At least I know enough non-technical people that cling to their files
collections for dear life. However, what they of course want is to take part
in modern life and not stay behind on technology. And if you don't want to
miss that, there is hardly a way around services these days.

(There is the valid point of troubleshooting and maintenance. Your very own
personal computer is wonderful until something stops working. However, I think
most non-technical people dealt with this problem the same way you'd deal with
a broken car: They'd ask someone knowledgeable to "fix" it, either a family
member, company admin or commercial service.

However, I don't think many people were desperately wishing for their hardware
manufacturer or software developer to have a permanent link to their PC, just
so they can fix the occasional problem.)

> _We weren’t driven away by force._

The amount of effort Microsoft had to employ to make people stop using Windows
XP tells a different story.

~~~
themacguffinman
Oh please, consumers decide the market. If consumers didn't want services they
wouldn't buy it. If consumers wanted "owned" software, businesses would sell
enough "owned" software to soak up all that demand. But consumers didn't, and
businesses didn't, and so we arrive at today.

Few people kicked and screamed as they bought Spotify. It turns out that
streaming a wide variety of music for an access fee is a pretty good sell. Few
people kicked and screamed as they picked Gmail over Postfix, turns out a
portable, maintenance-free, magic email inbox with practically unlimited
storage is exactly what people wanted, no coercion needed. They didn't just
desperately wish for their hardware and software to have a permanent link to
their PC, they went one step further and gave it money and attention.

Maybe I'm completely wrong. Easy way to find out: go make your own broadly
successful "owned" software business. Consumers are clamoring for it, aren't
they? I'm sure there's plenty of money in selling one-time-fee project
management software for customers to own and setup themselves. I mean, who
wouldn't want to pay a one-time fee for self-hosted email software that
generously provides the "your own friends and family" support package?

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Oh please, consumers decide the market. If consumers didn 't want services
> they wouldn't buy it. If consumers wanted "owned" software, businesses would
> sell enough "owned" software to soak up all that demand. But consumers
> didn't, and businesses didn't, and so we arrive at today._

That's false. Consumers don't decide shit. They don't compare things they see
to what they could be, they chose from what's available. Add to that the sales
and marketing doing their best to hide the true costs of their offerings, and
you have what you have today - customers being played like a fiddle, coaxed
towards making suboptimal choices.

> _Few people kicked and screamed as they bought Spotify. It turns out that
> streaming a wide variety of music for an access fee is a pretty good sell._

Spotify was a legal alternative to _pirating music_ , that was one of their
bigger selling point.

> _Few people kicked and screamed as they picked Gmail over Postfix_

GMail, at least for now, still lets you own the data. The story may change if
they ever decide to shut down IMAP access.

> _Consumers are clamoring for it, aren 't they?_

They are, after they get burned a couple of times. See also the reactions to
Adobe or Jetbrains going SaaS; the latter actually yielded under pressure and
brought back the perpetual licenses.

It's hard to compete with SaaS on price and convenience, because benefits are
immediate and true costs are delayed. "Free basic, $9/month advanced" for a
shiny-looking product is great at the point of customer acquisition; it's only
later on that the customer discovers that the service sucks under any
reasonable workload, in one year it costs 1.5x as much, and in 5 years it may
just be gone, taking all your data with it.

------
saagarjha
> I learned, for instance, that a great way to get people to click on your
> blog post is to make them mad

Ha, this is a common way to get on the frontpage of Hacker News.

~~~
A4ET8a8uTh0
Wasn't one of those lesser discussed findings of FB that making people angry
makes them more engaged.

~~~
tunesmith
Yeah, I think so.

I wonder if is a special case of "surprise" \- things that are surprising have
more information value, and people react to information.

There's also the aspect of something being wrong - if something is wrong,
people want to correct it - often angrily if the source advancing the wrong
viewpoint is obstinate - and that's engagement.

I wonder if both of those can be teased out. Like, if something is surprising
and correct, what's the engagement of that? That probably doesn't drive
engagement as much as surprising and wrong.

------
JohnFen
This essay describes very well why I resist anything-as-a-service. I value
stability over time as well as convenience.

Fortunately, most of the things that I find valuable are things that I can
host myself (giving me both stability and convenience), and I can easily do
without those things that I can't.

~~~
rapnie
I favor self-hosting too, but it adds the inconvenience of dedicated
maintenance to ensure your stability. For a one-man shop there is a lot to
think about. So many balls in the air. I recently found my AWS instances
compromised because I forgot to timely upgrade nginx on them. Got me the
scares and renewed interest in at least some SaaS where it matters most.

~~~
JohnFen
Yes, it's more work. But I've been doing this for years, and on average, it
really just takes a couple of hours a month of my personal time (monitoring,
intrusion detection, etc., are all automated, so most of my time is spent just
eyeballing logs to make sure nothing was missed).

My approach is certainly not for everyone, but it's the best solution for me.

------
gumby
This reminds me of the arrival of the PC (MS-DOS and Mac): file formats were
typically silos: proprietary and could only be opened in their special app.
Coming from a different tradition this was completely weird and uncomfortable
to me so I never really got into those systems. Gradually some open formats
pried this open: GIF/JPEG/MP3/ZIP (all only somewhat open at the time) then
turning into PNG/HTML... etc.

In this regard the phones feel like a step backwards as each app really
manages its own data. Email programs these days are like that -- for example
you can't keep a project's mail folder with its files any more.

~~~
incompatible
Back in the early Windows days, I was helping somebody on Windows get some
data somewhere else where I needed it. I started by opening the file manager
and finding the data files. He was like "Whoa ... you are in no-mans-land" ...
he just wasn't familiar with accessing files outside of an application.

There are a couple of orthogonal concepts are work here a) how data is stored,
in files with a well-known format, in files with a proprietary format, or
perhaps in some kind of database b) who has control of the data, perhaps
defined by who would be able to delete it, or whether the data would cease to
be accessible if a particular organization ceased to exist.

------
pjc50
See also the book "Information Feudalism", which does a good job of looking at
this from an IP perspective.

------
generationP
This is surprisingly out of touch with reality -- at least with _my_ reality
and that around me. Then again I'm 30 and in academia, so it might not be the
latest update.

Do people access their music through their apps instead of a file manager
these days? Sure. But how does it get into the apps in the first place? I
couldn't find half of my music library on amazon, let alone the money to
actually buy it. The same applies to tech books, even more glaringly so
because there is no streaming option.

Do people use GMail as a quasi-storage for everything they need to keep up
with in life? Yeah. Do they _want_ to use it that way? Not really. It doesn't
scale up that well, and yes, you will slam into Google's 15GB limit soon
enough. So at least I only have the "temporary" stuff on GMail, for a wide but
not all-encompassing notion of "temporary". I'm not aware of anyone storing
family photos on GMail.

And that's just the stuff we consume. As for producing, there's very little
you can do without working with files at least a bit. Attach a photo to a
post, run a python script, exchange documents with someone who isn't using the
same clouds as you... Actually, even if all of your stuff is on clouds, you'll
sooner or later want or have to move it around between different clouds, and
what do you export it to? Files.

~~~
Normal_gaussian
I'm five years your junior and not in academia.

My music collection, my peers music collections, my mother's music
collection... they are Spotify.

I have a friend who DJ's and he has the tracks themselves, but only to remove
the internet dependency. The consumers of his kind of cutting edge not on
Spotify music get it on Soundcloud.

Tech books? I do have some. I did buy some this year. However my consumption
of blog posts, wikis, pdfs of papers, forums, moocs and stack overflows dwarfs
all physical reading.

I hate to say it, but production has seen movement away from files. There is a
Photoshop extension that allows graphic designers to "connect" the image into
the wordpress assets (which auto creates varioud sizes) and tye marketer
selects the asset from a web ui list.

I've seen CMS' that let you write js "handlers" that are shoved into the db
and can be attached to buttons or page loads etc.

For your last point - moving between clouds - you use a service. Multcloud is
just one example.

Its scary just how far things have come.

~~~
selimthegrim
Wonder how Turbosquid is faring with that these days

~~~
why_only_15
PixelSquid now has a subscription option. I think the issue with TurboSquid is
that convenience is less important. Spotify is ok with giving people access to
songs knowing that they can easily rip them and put them online because
Spotify's experience is a lot better than just searching for ripped songs.
With TurboSquid I think people would probably just turn around and sell the
models online and then others could just pirate them. Maybe I'm wrong, though
- I don't know a ton about the industry.

------
nharada
Interesting that email feels like ours -- "Gmail is the new Finder ... Most
importantly, your inbox is yours."

But really isn't it just us trusting Gmail not to pull our access?

~~~
mparramon
I think that the difference is that someone can have a similar experience to
Gmail by using their own mail server and any mail client. The same cannot be
said about Uber, for example.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
You can't call a friend and ask them for a lift?

------
floe
'Ownership' is a pretty overloaded term. It's never really clear which sense
of 'ownership' the author is invoking at any given moment.

Also, lol. "100 years ago, food came from a farm, then it came for [sic] a
grocery store, and now it comes from DoorDash." I'm pretty sure most people
didn't own their own farm in the 1920s... So what is this saying about
ownership?

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _I 'm pretty sure most people didn't own their own farm in the 1920s... So
> what is this saying about ownership?_

But they did own it in the sense of day-to-day control. Soviet Union turned
farming into service, a move that caused lots of suffering and is widely
remembered today as a Bad Idea.

~~~
KozmoNau7
The Soviet Union's troubles with farming stemmed more from politicians
ordering the farmers to plant specific crops, with absolutely no understanding
of farming, soil, climate, seasons or anything, really.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Fair. But then again, if you outsource your movies, music or farming to one of
the megacorps everyone else outsources too, you're still under rule of some
distant managers that don't have your best interest in mind.

~~~
KozmoNau7
That fits well with the analogy of the distant overlords with no connection to
either production nor the end user.

To them, we're all just interchangeable cogs in the machine, our input and
experience is not important, we're just supposed to fit in a predefined box.

------
aSplash0fDerp
Are there any terms that cover the different digital native generations?

Natives that started with 3.5 and 5 1/4 floppies in the 80's vs starting when
Gmail went from MB's to GB's in the mid/late 2k's probably view files much
differently.

In 2019, we can carry 1 TB+ on a smartphone, so the next gen of natives may
actually find a new appreciation for files and ownership (plus newfound
privacy, not relying on expensive data plans and working/playing from anywhere
w/o requiring a connection for most things).

Once storage and connections can exceed 10 Gb transfer rates on mobile, it'll
take around 15 minutes to fill per TB... And the next era/counter trend
begins!

The kids nowadays have it so easy (minus getting overserviced by every
industry at the same time, being fed doom and gloom about climate change
everyday and basically getting raked over the coals by pre-existing debt that
was not of their doing).

------
bmosm
For me the main problem is the fact when you own a physical copy you own a
snapshot of that exact version of a product.

I agree with the practical aspect of having a digital library but the problem
is you relinquish almost all aspects of ownership when you purchase a digital
product. When you own a digital product you have whatever version its owner
decided to share at that time in history and that represents a crucial
difference, which enables things like a movie cut differently from its initial
release, a remastered/clean/censored version of a song instead of the
original, games with certain features, songs or items removed due to expired
licenses.

We're now in a situation where most people got used to this model without
giving it any second thoughts because of comfort and any changes that give
users more control are unlikely to happen.

~~~
rdiddly
Yeah like the copy I laboriously sought out, of that one rap song without all
the _naughty words_ bleeped out. Or that one "yet another song with a stupid
'car revving' sound effect at the beginning," that I personally chopped off
using Audacity.

------
neilobremski
This reminds me of another rising sentiment: "feeling disconnected while
everything is connected". Perhaps a loss of ownership in all things also means
trading in pieces of identity?

If everything is a service then is everyone a consumer?

------
Cyder
This is exactly why i hate Windows-as-a-service that Microsoft is moving
toward. If your software is a service then you can only do what they let you.

Linux is better but the tradeoff is ease & convenience-- like the author said.

~~~
dredmorbius
Most Linux distributions are effectively services as well. Debian (or Ubuntu,
Mint, CentOS, Fedora, Slack, Gentoo, etc. etc.) are not worth much without the
repositories, access to them, and updates, provided by those distributions. An
extension of the notion that it's the package management that makes the
distro: it's the package _archive_ and _access_ which make the distro.

(Details of packagers, packaging, deps resolution, etc., also matter.)

But that is a service offered, to revive an old fashioned term, not based on
commerce but with grace.

------
buboard
That's a broader trend of choosing to rent rather than buy and wage labour
instead of entrepreneurship. It's also coming to the point though that
people's "digital trail" is no longer just a trail, it's their entire output
in life. I think people will recognize this and the next iteration of tech
will be property-centered again. What we live today is a bubble of inequality
and the shallow freedom of not owning things. Neither extreme is good, people
always end up gravitating somewhere in the middle.

------
mjevans
X __as a Service __\- that 's a very positive spin on "rent perpetually" and
"you never own".

This is different if you own the service, but that's another matter entirely.

------
gt2
Agreed overall but..

Most people don't want to/can't run their own backup service, so they count on
the services they use to keep things alive.

Add to that users wanting to use multiple devices.

Maybe I'm over estimating software literacy but many people who want these
things often write their own solutions or do without shiny new things which
are often just cloud based versions of the old!

------
SllX
I think what isn’t fully realized in this article is that the real abundance
is in the choices we have today.

You _can_ subscribe to Spotify or some equivalent, but you can also buy CDs,
buy Vinyls, DRM-free versions of just that one song you want off an album, you
can play the song you want off the Piano, or find it in a game, or listen to
the radio (AM, FM, even Satellite!), or go to a live show, or download someone
else’s recording of a live show. You can partake in all of these ways or any
combination thereof, and I forgot to even mention music boxes!

I think it’s more fair to say “Everything is amazing, but you don’t have to
own all of it to enjoy it”. Some things are tangible and worth having in a
hard copy so to speak, and some things are ephemeral so enjoy them while you
can, for nothing and no things last forever.

~~~
matheusmoreira
Owning a copy is not possible. Making more copies is illegal. Sending one of
those copies to a friend is illegal. Sharing those copies with people on the
internet is illegal.

Artificial scarcity means the only choices available to you are the choices
the copyright holders want you to have.

~~~
SllX
Mate, since when is owning a copy of music impossible?

Call me over when you can stop buying music, not for the lone example or two
where some artist has gone all in on crap like Spotify and refuses to sell
their music anywhere.

------
api
"Worlds of scarcity are made out of things. Worlds of abundance are made out
of dependencies."

I don't necessarily agree with the abundance premise. Worlds of dependencies
are worlds that demand time-consuming labor (ours or someone else's) to
resolve and manage those dependencies, and time today is considerably more
scarce than matter or energy. Even worse time unlike matter or energy cannot
be manufactured or extracted with increasing efficiency. We have only so much
time, period.

I remain unconvinced that post-skeuomorphism and everything-is-a-service are
steps forward. In particular everything-is-a-service seems to work well only
in domains where the thing being offered actually is a service in that it
actually does require a continuous input of something behind the scenes.

------
hamilyon2
Surprisingly shallow discussion here. Ownership itself is lease. Sibling
comment mentioned home ownership and tenant laws.

Home and land ownership is one of trickiest types of ownership. It turns out,
that in democratic and civilized sosieties you don't actually own realty. You
lease it with significant restrictions.

Inheritance laws make it even more clear. Law might decide that particular
part of property is valued $x euro. A trademark. A patent. An option. So, you
must cede control of this part of inherited good to state. If you truly owned
it, inheritance taxes would be zero.

------
whyleyc
"Files are dead" is an oft-quoted meme, but they aren't going away anytime
soon.

I wrote a piece offering a counterpoint to this view five years ago (in
response to a similar article by Fred Wilson) and I think most of the points
still hold true today:

[https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-
wrong-...](https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-wrong-files-
arent-dead/)

------
drskrzyk
This is timely considering google's announcement to dump indexing of flash
(swf) assets. I get it, the format is unused, buggy, and possibly insecure.
That said, much of the nascent internet was built on that. Even "All Your
Base" was originally in flash.

~~~
taneq
On the plus side, a _lot_ of the non-interactive Flash content is now on
YouTube. I was going through old Weebls Stuff animations the other day, it was
a real blast from the past.

------
jay_kyburz
I don't really care what everybody else is doing, I'm just glad I can still
buy a NAS and fill it with 10TB drives if I wanted to. I don't even have to
search to hard to find them. It probably even pretty easy to make those drives
public.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Indeed, I have a NAS full of my own ripped media and find myself using Kodi
more often than the streaming services (I pay for Spotify, Netflix and Amazon)
just so I can watch whatever I want to watch rather than whatever they happen
to have available at any given moment. Another bonus is it's all ad-free.

------
Havoc
First thing that comes to mind are containers/virtual envs and freezing
versions with requirements.txt files.

That could get interesting unpiecing that a decade later. Scavenger hunts for
old versions...

------
mwkaufma
"We love services." Citation needed.

------
paulpauper
sucks how dropbox deletes inactive accounts. with all that ipo and vc money
how hard is it to keep things running? I remember in the early 2000s when
yahoo mails lasted forever. same Hotmail. now everything shuts down if you
don't use it.

~~~
solstice
Not to contradict your main point, but I seem to remember that I lost a
Hotmail account to inactivity sometime after 2005. So maybe Hotmail isn't the
best example

~~~
yellowapple
My Yahoo account did the same, though that was around 2010 I think.

------
draw_down
The author doesn't make the connection explicit, but tools like Figma reduce
the need for files as a means of conveying information between parties.
Instead, you collaborate directly in the tool, freeing the designer from
having to constantly export and send around documents, and freeing engineers
from having to chase down exports. Figma also has a feature where you can
"shoulder surf" another person as they work. The ability to see what others
are doing in the document leads to some interesting interactions. (You see my
cursor moving in a way that indicates I'm counting the number of rows in a
design; you message me and tell me it's 15.)

