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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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).