[Infowarrior] - Doctorow: Why I won't buy an iPad

[Richard Forno]

(I agree 100% with his sentiment.  -rick)

Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either)
Cory Doctorow at 5:23 AM April 2, 2010

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either.html#more

I've spent ten years now on Boing Boing, finding cool things that  
people have done and made and writing about them. Most of the really  
exciting stuff hasn't come from big corporations with enormous  
budgets, it's come from experimentalist amateurs. These people were  
able to make stuff and put it in the public's eye and even sell it  
without having to submit to the whims of a single company that had  
declared itself gatekeeper for your phone and other personal technology.

Danny O'Brien does a very good job of explaining why I'm completely  
uninterested in buying an iPad -- it really feels like the second  
coming of the CD-ROM "revolution" in which "content" people proclaimed  
that they were going to remake media by producing expensive (to make  
and to buy) products. I was a CD-ROM programmer at the start of my  
tech career, and I felt that excitement, too, and lived through it to  
see how wrong I was, how open platforms and experimental amateurs  
would eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros.

I remember the early days of the web -- and the last days of CD ROM --  
when there was this mainstream consensus that the web and PCs were too  
durned geeky and difficult and unpredictable for "my mom" (it's  
amazing how many tech people have an incredibly low opinion of their  
mothers). If I had a share of AOL for every time someone told me that  
the web would die because AOL was so easy and the web was full of  
garbage, I'd have a lot of AOL shares.And they wouldn't be worth much.

Incumbents made bad revolutionaries

Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good  
strategy. They're apt to take all the stuff that makes their products  
great and try to use technology to charge you extra for it, or  
prohibit it altogether.

I mean, look at that Marvel app (just look at it). I was a comic-book  
kid, and I'm a comic-book grownup, and the thing that made comics for  
me was sharing them. If there was ever a medium that relied on kids  
swapping their purchases around to build an audience, it was comics.  
And the used market for comics! It was -- and is -- huge, and vital. I  
can't even count how many times I've gone spelunking in the used comic- 
bins at a great and musty store to find back issues that I'd missed,  
or sample new titles on the cheap. (It's part of a multigenerational  
tradition in my family -- my mom's father used to take her and her  
sibs down to Dragon Lady Comics on Queen Street in Toronto every  
weekend to swap their old comics for credit and get new ones).

So what does Marvel do to "enhance" its comics? They take away the  
right to give, sell or loan your comics. What an improvement. Way to  
take the joyous, marvellous sharing and bonding experience of comic  
reading and turn it into a passive, lonely undertaking that isolates,  
rather than unites. Nice one, Misney.

Infantalizing hardware

Then there's the device itself: clearly there's a lot of  
thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there's also  
a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe -- really believe -- in  
the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can't open it, you  
don't own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with  
schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of  
hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If  
you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and  
firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be  
rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple's model customer is that same  
stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as  
appears in a billion renditions of "that's too complicated for my  
mom" (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how  
long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something  
that isn't too complicated for their poor old mothers).

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a "consumer," what  
William Gibson memorably described as "something the size of a baby  
hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in  
the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered  
with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and  
makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express  
its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing  
the channels on a universal remote."

The way you improve your iPad isn't to figure out how it works and  
making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying  
an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization  
that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of  
telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something  
you have to leave to the professionals.

Dale Doherty's piece on Hypercard and its influence on a generation of  
young hackers is a must-read on this. I got my start as a Hypercard  
programmer, and it was Hypercard's gentle and intuitive introduction  
to the idea of remaking the world that made me consider a career in  
computers.

Wal-Martization of the software channel

And let's look at the iStore. For a company whose CEO professes a  
hatred of DRM, Apple sure has made DRM its alpha and omega. Having  
gotten into business with the two industries that most believe that  
you shouldn't be able to modify your hardware, load your own software  
on it, write software for it, override instructions given to it by the  
mothership (the entertainment industry and the phone companies), Apple  
has defined its business around these principles. It uses DRM to  
control what can run on your devices, which means that Apple's  
customers can't take their "iContent" with them to competing devices,  
and Apple developers can't sell on their own terms.

The iStore lock-in doesn't make life better for Apple's customers or  
Apple's developers. As an adult, I want to be able to choose whose  
stuff I buy and whom I trust to evaluate that stuff. I don't want my  
universe of apps constrained to the stuff that the Cupertino Politburo  
decides to allow for its platform. And as a copyright holder and  
creator, I don't want a single, Wal-Mart-like channel that controls  
access to my audience and dictates what is and is not acceptable  
material for me to create. The last time I posted about this, we got a  
string of apologies for Apple's abusive contractual terms for  
developers, but the best one was, "Did you think that access to a  
platform where you can make a fortune would come without strings  
attached?" I read it in Don Corleone's voice and it sounded just  
right. Of course I believe in a market where competition can take  
place without bending my knee to a company that has erected a  
drawbridge between me and my customers!

Journalism is looking for a daddy figure

I think that the press has been all over the iPad because Apple puts  
on a good show, and because everyone in journalism-land is looking for  
a daddy figure who'll promise them that their audience will go back to  
paying for their stuff. The reason people have stopped paying for a  
lot of "content" isn't just that they can get it for free, though:  
it's that they can get lots of competing stuff for free, too. The open  
platform has allowed for an explosion of new material, some of it  
rough-hewn, some of it slick as the pros, most of it targetted more  
narrowly than the old media ever managed. Rupert Murdoch can rattle  
his saber all he likes about taking his content out of Google, but I  
say do it, Rupert. We'll miss your fraction of a fraction of a  
fraction of a percent of the Web so little that we'll hardly notice  
it, and we'll have no trouble finding material to fill the void.

Just like the gadget press is full of devices that gadget bloggers  
need (and that no one else cares about), the mainstream press is full  
of stories that affirm the internal media consensus. Yesterday's  
empires do something sacred and vital and most of all grown up, and  
that other adults will eventually come along to move us all away from  
the kids' playground that is the wild web, with its amateur content  
and lack of proprietary channels where exclusive deals can be made.  
We'll move back into the walled gardens that best return shareholder  
value to the investors who haven't updated their portfolios since  
before eTrade came online.

But the real economics of iPad publishing tell a different story: even  
a stellar iPad sales performance isn't going to do much to staunch the  
bleeding from traditional publishing. Wishful thinking and a nostalgia  
for the good old days of lockdown won't bring customers back through  
the door.

Gadgets come and gadgets go

Gadgets come and gadgets go. The iPad you buy today will be e-waste in  
a year or two (less, if you decide not to pay to have the battery  
changed for you). The real issue isn't the capabilities of the piece  
of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social  
infrastructure that accompanies it.

If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool  
idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad  
isn't for you.

If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give  
away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn't for you.

If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that  
determines whether you're going to succeed with it is whether your  
audience loves it, the iPad isn't for you.