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.
Techno-feudalism, ladies and gentlemen.
That’s Nvidia’s whole game plan. Subscription to use their hardware. Limits on hours of gaming. Pay to play more hours.
It’s not at all surprising that fatcats looks at the juicy profits that Apple makes with their iOS closed garden and think “I want me some of that” - wanting to be a monopolist with captive customers makes the most business sense and is the most natural thing in a Capitalist Economic and Political environment.
Most of the economic activity around Technology nowadays is rent-seeking and only the part which isn’t at all about money - open source - isn’t about corraling people into closed spaces, removing their choices and then extracting the most money possible from people who now have no other option.
It’s kinda like 20 or 30 years ago when Banks looked at cash payments and thought that they should find a way to get comissions on those, same as they got with card payments, so already back they they were pushing things like electronic wallets (back then those were basically a special kind of card) and keep pushing it for decades (often with the support of governments, since 100% electronic payments are great for civil society surveillance), and nowadays in some countries there are pretty much no cash payments so that relentless push for controlling and getting a cut of every single trade has worked in those countries (and people in those places, such as Sweden, having traded a small hidden increase in price - due to banks now getting comissions in everything - and huge loss of privacy for a tiny bit of convenience genuinelly think they’re better of).
So yeah, these software fatcats will totally try and get together with hardware makers with a dominant market position to slowly close down PC technology - for example the whole point of TPM is to take control away from the owners of the hardware and the “trusted” in “trusted platform” (aka TPM) isn’t about it being trusted by the owner of the hardware, it’s about it being trusted by the business selling the OS, who in turn can sell access to the thus gatekept environment to software making businesses.
I believe the whole requirement for TPM 2.0 in Windows 11 even though it doesn’t actually need it is just a step in a broader strategy to turn PCs into a closed platform controlled by Microsoft, whilst as we see here other companies are trying to created closed platforms by having everything run in their servers, like Google tried almost a decade ago for games with Stadia and was also tried 2 or 3 decades ago by the likes of Sun Microsystems with the push for Thin Clients.
Ok so the tactic is to drain the corporations of their money.
- piracy
- dis-enshittification
- jailbreaking devices
- opensource hardware
- decentralization
I’m doing my part by replacing the aging PCs of my close family with Mini PCs running Linux.
But they’re businesses and they need to make money!
Won’t someone think of the people taking us for a ride?
Money has never bought brains
TBH I don’t think he’s wrong, especially in HIS position.
Namely I think having the flexibility of the cloud is amazing… but NOT at the cost of losing sovereignty.
So when Bezos uses AWS he is actually smart because he remains sovereign. When anybody else though does rely on another system that they do not own for critical tasks then then lose sovereignty and thus agency.
TL;DR: cloud or not, maintain your agency.
Salesman shills product, nothing new. Besides, there is too much commodity hardware floating around for this to be plausible.
For now. The hobbyist space is under attack, with Qualcomm buying Arduino, and RAM prices through the roof.
If you price out hobbyists from consumer hardware, and offer a slightly cheaper alternative in the cloud, what will consumers do
I’m hanging onto every bit of consumer hardware for this very reason. Hobbysts should get more into recycling and refurbishing existing hardware, especially mobile phone boards instead of buying doohickies.
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
He so damn trash
Over my dead body.
First they came for our neighbors and I didn’t say anything.
Then they came for family members and I didn’t say anything.
Then they took my chicken tendies and I was mad but didn’t say anything.
BUT…when they take my PC I will REEEEEEEEEEE
Better yet, over Jeff Bezos’ dead body.
The means of information are the new means of production
Information has generally always been power
If you want to be financially free, have no debt. Pay off any loans, dont have subscriptions. Make your monthly costs to be as low as possible.
That is freedom but its the opposite of what is advertised.
i will never in my life get any subscription to anything, that doesnt have to be a subscription.
so far i’m fine with:
internet connection and my phone number
Yeah… actually how the fuck are we still paying a subscription for our phone number? That’s frick’n bull-crap!
utilities?
That’s more a bill for what you used.
fair. though I’ve seen electricity flatrates before.
Thats not a subscription IMO
Neither is rent or food
Fuck you, Bezos. And fuck Amazon. I’d go full Luddite before giving you a single cent.
Going full luddite is counter-productive
A historical context Luddite would probably be destroying datacentres presently, we might have a thing or two to learn from them.
Wonder if all the AI shit has actually been a way to inflate the price of computer hardware to the point where something like this is the only way some people will be able to afford to use computers at all.
