When the war on drugs will inevitably be over in US, within a decade or so (the trend towards it is growing), by then there will already be two new wars started to "replace" the war on drug for anyone who benefitted from it (such as the police, private prisons [1], etc): the War on Pirates, and the War on Child Porn. If not both, they'll just use whichever works best. The real agenda behind it will be the same either way.<p>Then you can start expecting SWAT teams raiding people's homes for downloading songs illegitimately (and yes, you'll even see more dogs and even innocent people shot in the process - just like in that "parody" video where the SWAT team shoots the kid who was downloading songs in the head at the end, which I can't find right now).<p>Some of these are not felonies yet, but they're working hard [2] to "fix" that "problem". Current and future surveillance technologies, used by either NSA, FBI, DHS, or even the police will make that ever easier and more "tempting" to do.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.republicreport.org/2012/marijuana-lobby-illegal/" rel="nofollow">http://www.republicreport.org/2012/marijuana-lobby-illegal/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/07/unauthorized-streaming-felony_n_3720479.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/07/unauthorized-stream...</a>
Links to the actual upstream posts by Doctorow:<p><a href="http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html" rel="nofollow">http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-p...</a><p><a href="http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html" rel="nofollow">http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html</a><p><a href="http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html" rel="nofollow">http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html</a>
We live in a world where anyone with $25 can purchase a rasberry Pi and hook it up to a television/monitor. General purpose computing is more accessible than ever before. And if people want a locked down device why shouldn't they have a device that actually meets their needs?Unless the need for programs dried up and ran away, we will always need(and have) general purpose computation.<p>I'm sure a lot of people here constantly fix the computers for their friends and family. Tablets and smartphones help decrease the amount of help they need. isn't that a good thing? Or is Doctrow scared of becoming irrelevant when hackers are no longer needed as techno-priests?
And in the 2 years since this was published, this has turned out to be completely spot-on...OH WAIT. it hasn't at all.<p>Modern political discourse: Everything is a war on something.<p>This kind of language radicalizes people from the outset, and prevents a discussion from actually happening.<p>How about instead of calling it the "War on General Purpose Computing," "the War on Christmas," the "War on Women," the "War on Guns", heck, even the "War on Drugs," and the "War on Terror" - we take a step back, take a breather, and talk reasonably and calmly about the actual issues here?<p>Because that wouldn't grab headlines.
I remember when the iPad first came out and I (along with many others) were concerned that it was a device for consumption and not creation: the first step in the "war" on general-purpose computation. However, with the continual improvements in web browsers and JavaScript runtimes (as well as things like Emscriptrn) I'm far less concerned. Nowadays even a locked down phone can run any JavaScript, which may provide the user with an IDE or a secure messaging system. I still think there's a war but I think it's more at the network level rather than device level.
While I think there are certainly reasons to be concerned with the phenomena Doctorow is describing, I find his reasoning unpersuasive.As a general observation, he is making an argument that certain trends are bad because they could lead to possible bad outcomes in the future. This style of reasoning seems to me to be common in political arguments. The reality is is that there are trade offs from policy choice in the present, which are hard enough to quantify. Then there are going to be future trade offs, which become harder and harder to predict the further out they are, and the more complex the problem domain is.<p>The core of his argument is that special andpurpose computers open the potential for surveillance. This seems myopic in the sense that the only effective controls on government surveillance are political. General purpose computers or not, the government has no shortage of means to spy.<p>So far, the adoption of special purpose computers is being driven by market forces. They simply work better for most tasks than general purpose computers. There is a huge benefit to the human population from these devices, just as there is a huge benefit from having a rather leaky worldwide
network easily accessible to "civilians."<p>So society has to struggle already with how to manage control of information. The availability of general purpose computers seems largely peripheral to this dilemma.<p>As far as the availability of general purpose computers to technical people, the harm he posits is almost entirely hypothetical. Not only are they still being produced in large numbers, there are fantastic numbers of existing computers that will continue to function for years to come.<p>A far more likely impediment to accessibility to powerful, modern general purpose computers will be that market forces will shift so that they are no longer commodity items, and the cost to access the latest and greatest will rise. This is a problem of market structure, and legislative attempts to address this type of pricing problem have proven to be futile.<p>If we were seeing calls by industry or politicians to legally limit the use of open source operating systems, then I think a call of alarm would ring louder (at least to me).
sadly people will always be ready to sell snake oil that promises the impossble.<p>great example i saw floating around here the other day: <a href="http://privatecore.com/" rel="nofollow">http://privatecore.com/</a>