So the President had a paragraph in a stump speech a couple of days ago where he discussed the interconnectedness of society, how we had to collectively build the road or run the power grid or educate the employees, and that nobody builds a business all by themselves. Naturally, the Romney campaign sliced a big chunk out of the middle and made an ad out of the deceptively-edited speech, which Fox proceeded to flog relentlessly…honestly, at this point, I’m out of patience. Make all the excuses you like, but if you’re voting GOP, the fact is you are objectively voting in favor of the United States of Alabama and you need to own it. But I digress.
I think about this in terms of the current state of phones and tablets and the ongoing insistence that Android is somehow morally superior because it is “open.” Setting aside the fact that hardware makers slap on their own GUI and carriers lock the boot loader out and updates are released by Google only to make it to devices…eventually, if ever – ignore all that for the moment. Say Android was, in fact, truly open and olly-olly-oxen-free.
So what?
For 90% of the people who buy these things, open avails them very little. Remember our old friend Ed Earl Brown? Ed Earl is not interested in writing his own apps, or drivers, or kernel, or what have you. He’s not going to hack the operating system. More to the point, he’s not going to write his own operating system. And when he does, he’s not going to set up his own weather station wired to a GSM modem feeding back to his own server to monitor the weather, he’s not going to put together his own mail server and write his own implementation of sendmail and do his own push to his Android phone…which, in fairness, he didn’t build himself.
The question becomes, how open do you have to be? Where is the bright line that separates the real true hacker technolibertarian from the Apple-dependent sheep-man? Is it a question of writing your own apps? If you can do that, aren’t you still at the mercy of the OS developer’s APIs? How much of that code are you willing to re-write yourself for the sake of not being dependent on somebody else?
And really, it goes beyond that. This blog depends almost entirely on the tender mercies of somebody else: my brother-in-law who hosts it, WordPress for the underlying blog engine and iPad client, MarsEdit for the laptop client where I’m typing right now. Hell, if I were typing this out, I wouldn’t be pressing my own paper from pulp and weaving my own typewriter ribbon inked with a concoction of berries and ground coal.
So what if, for you, the iPad (for instance) is just a big screwdriver? A big complicated screwdriver, obviously, more along the lines of a power-drill with a Phillips bit, but at root just a tool? Ultimately, I think that’s what Steve Jobs had in mind with the iPad (which we now know was in development as early as 2002) – a computer where the computing aspect of it just goes away, leaving you with whatever you’re doing. Browser, email, weather, book, whatever – it’s there without any mucking about with file systems, contextual menus, none of that. Just reach out with your finger and pick out what you want. Hell, in some cases, it’s the Kramer Moviephone. “Why don’t you just tell me who you’d like to telephone today?”
In the end, ultimately, I think we lose a lot by wanking about the tool rather than what we do with it. Sure, survivalists might want to be able to cast their own ammunition, and the guys that write the operating system should know how to do that, but for the vast majority of people – we’re going to be sitting on a lot of other people’s shoulders to do everything and anything we do. That’s called society, it’s called civilization, and it’s not something we need to apologize for relying on. Because the alternative is subsistence hunting-gathering and sheltering under rocks.
Which is something the privileged heir of George Romney should think long and hard about before deciding he’s the epitome of the self-made man.