I have been enjoying Tech Won’t Save Us. It mainly focuses on the politics and unethical behavior of Big Tech/Silicon Valley. It has been an eye opener.
kayazere
joined 1 year ago
In capitalism everyone has to exploit their skills/strengths for money. Whether that is your body doing manual labor, sex work, or your mind doing knowledge work, it is at the base the same activity.
Now, the Initiative for a New Social Market Economy (INSM), a market-liberal lobbying organization, has created a pop-up museum designed to turn up the heat on the German government
While funny, the group behind it certainly sounds scary. We don’t need more neo-liberal policies.
I mentioned game consoles as an example of consumer electronics that function without having yearly updates. This is largely due to giving game devs a performance tagtet to hit, but it shows you don’t need marginal updates every year. Mobile app software could probably benefit from not having better hardware every year, forcing devs to write better software.
From a software standpoint, iPhones are locked down like gaming consoles, focused on consumption and not general computing devices. Apple controls what software runs on their devices just like Nintendo.
I think yearly car updates are also wasteful and the car industry has adopted a fashion style model where the changes are mostly atheistic and they try to make people’s cars feel outdated/obsolete and for them to buy a new model. Cars are viewed as a status symbol, so this works.
Apple has been applying the same play book as the auto industry, though they can actually obsolete hardware through their software.
Maybe they can finally stop releasing new phones every year. We don’t have yearly game console releases.
No one says you have to buy a new phone, used iPhones are usually a lot cheaper.
Anyone try it out yet?
The point of the 4day workweek is to reduce your working hours, not do 4x10 hours.
I’d suggest getting rid of client side rendering and JavaScript. At some point web developers decided to try to emulate desktop app UIs and cram it into the browser. Websites used to be rendered on the server and the HTML was just sent to the client, which had to just parse and displayed natively. Is was really fast and efficient. This would also be a massive win for privacy and it would automatically eliminate all the spyware/adware client side JavaScript code.
Even if companies were replacing existing hardware, the existing hardware uses less power. So whether it is additional hardware or not, there will be an increase in energy demand, which is bad for climate change.