The “PC is dying” and “Web is dying” tropes that have been bouncing around the meme-o-sphere express a real transformation in the world of computing/media/life. But they express it through the warped retinae of the techno-nostalgist, the high-tech Luddite. The PC and the Web aren’t dying. As cultural forces, they’re more powerful, more inescapable than ever. What the PC and the Web are doing is maturing, the former exploding into a welter of slick consumer appliances, the latter contracting into a corporate-controlled menu of slick services. They’re both assuming what promise to be their stable forms. The high-tech Luddite, or HTL, confuses maturing with dying, because what’s being lost in the maturation process is the thing which the HTL most values, most yearns to protect. Like all Luddites, the HTL is what Kirkpatrick Sale termed a rebel against the future. He wants to arrest progress in order to maintain what he sees as the ideal state of computing, to continue in perpetuity that brief Homebrew interregnum between Mainframe Dominance and Media Dominance. The High-Tech Luddite still thinks Woz will win.
In a new Slashdot essay, the poster known as Unknown Lamer presents the rebel Luddite case under the stirring and quixotic headline “The Greatest Battle of the Personal Computing Revolution Lies Ahead.” He might have called it “Tilting at Clouds.” Unknown Lamer wants to go back — and thinks we can go back — to an idealized “pre-PC” time of truly personal computing, a world in which the user controls the workings of both hardware and software:
You control the data, you control the software; the Personal Computer is a uniquely personal artifact that the user adapts to his own working style. One consequence of this is that creating is as easy (perhaps easier) as consuming content. Another nice side effect is that your data remains private by virtue of local storage.
This is a photoshopped image of the Eden that existed, or almost existed, before Apple started welding its cases shut, before the cloud arrived and started sucking personal data into its vast corporate matrix, before the Wild Web was homogenized, pasteurized and packaged as Facebook, before the return of the dread Terminal. It’s the Eden that would exist again if hobbyist culture suddenly displaced consumer culture as mainstream culture, if everyone suddenly armed themselves with a set of torx screwdrivers.
Unknown Lamer is not blind to reality: “We are staring at a bleak future, and living in a bleak present in some ways.” Yet he still sees the light of the past flickering at the end of the tunnel of the future: “But there is hope for the battle to be won by the Personal Computer instead of the Terminal.” All we need to do, says Unknown Lamer, is to rise up together and overthrow the current cloud paradigm, the current OS paradigm, and the current hardware paradigm. We can bring computing back to human scale by running our own portable virtual servers, replacing corporate OSes with open OSes, regaining local control over our data, overthrowing the systems of The Man. It’s the old Luddite dream, transposed from the early Industrial Era to the early Digital Era. The original Luddites, as Sale explained,
were, like Robin’s Merry Men, victims of progress, or what was held to be progress. Having for centuries worked out of their cottages and small village shops on machines that, though far from simple, could be managed by a single person, assisted perhaps by children, they suddenly saw new, complex, large-scale machines coming into their settled trades, or threatening to, usually housed in the huge multistory buildings rising in their ancient valleys. Worse still, they saw their ordered society of craft and custom and community begin to give way to an intruding industrial society and its new technologies and systems, new principles of merchandise and markets … beyond their ken or control. … They were rebels of a unique kind, rebels against the future that was being assigned to them by the new political economy then taking hold …
Because the Luddites were wrangling over the means of production, they had the people with them, at least for a time. Because the High-Tech Luddites are wrangling over the means of entertainment, they are battling against not only the corporate tide but the populist tide. “Where will we be in ten years?” asks Unknown Lamer. “If Google, Amazon, Apple, and Old Media get their way, in a new dark age of computing. Certainly, you’ll have a fancy tablet and access to infinite entertainment. But you will own nothing.” But a fancy tablet and access to infinite entertainment seem to be exactly what the people want. Ownership, after all, is a nuisance.
My heart’s with you, Unknown Lamer, but history isn’t.