Cory Doctorow Warns of a Coming War on General-Purpose Computing
The Coming War on General Computation (2011)
In a 2011 speech, Cory Doctorow argues that the fight over copyright is just the opening battle in a larger war over general-purpose computers. He traces how DRM failed technically and commercially, leading to laws like the WIPO Copyright Treaty that made it illegal to inspect or modify your own devices. Doctorow warns that these regulations, which ignore how computers actually work, will inevitably expand to control all computation, threatening freedom and innovation.
Here, 2011, this is as hard as copying will get! Your grandchildren will turn to you around the Christmas table and say 'Tell me again, Grandpa, tell me again, Grandma, about when it was hard to copy things in 2011...'
- Ambolia
All the crypto stuff already felt like it was doing a big push to move computing power away from general consumers, though may have been unintended.
Another thing is the general impoverishment and decline of productive power that can be papered over by centralizing the output of that production to hide the general decline. I don't think anybody is buying that we are richer than 20 years ago anymore.
- foobarbecue
Video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
- matheusmoreira
It looks like we're nearing the end of the personal computing era. Looks like they will get their way. Whether we're regulated out or priced out, it doesn't matter, the result is the same.
Profoundly sad.
- pdonis
My take on this is the same as when an article by Doc Searls that references this speech by Doctorow came up on HN in 2019:
- binary132
Don’t forget “computers that can do everything but run scary unregulated LLMs”