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kleinbl00  ·  2149 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Tech’s Two Philosophies

Fuck the bicycle of the mind.

You walk regularly from home to work. Microsoft and Apple will tell you that the route you take sucks and that you should use their toll road. Facebook and Google will throw up a barricade and waylay you on the way. When you gripe to Microsoft or Apple, Facebook and Google will cut them in on a share and Microsoft and Apple will tell you that the highwayman fee is a value add.

Fuck all these people. Google isn't going to schedule me a goddamn haircut; Google took four fucking whacks at bat this afternoon through a microphone eight inches from my face over five bars of LTE in an idling German luxury coupe to transform the spoken word "parking" into the texted word "parking" (going through "walking" "talking" and "barking" along the way). Facebook isn't trying to bring us closer together, it's attempting to monetize a wholly synthetic envy I might have of a dude I last spoke to in High School. Microsoft isn't concerned about the responsibility of technology, they're trying to get me to hand over my face, my fingerprint, my credit card and my broadband connection for $20 a month to do shit I didn't ask it to do and Apple isn't trying to increase my speed of locomotion, it's trying to make me feel grateful to get stuck with a U2 album I didn't ask for despite the fact that it wants to suck all my music into a proprietary format that's stored on its servers (and only its servers) for a monthly fee.

These aren't philosophers. They're fucking highwaymen. The overwhelming majority of technology demand is synthetic at this point and the only thing any of them can do is shake us down for shit we don't need.