For those of you who are new to the world of Brutally Honest
ramblings and rants, understand that this commentator has been involved with
computers long before many of you were even born. My generation was introduced to computers
back when the Internet was still a government-funded experiment called the
Arpanet. While Matthew Broderick was
playing a hacker in “War Games”, I was writing primitive text-only computer
games using a program called BASIC on a small Digital mainframe system that my
high school had, and that was only because the Apple IIe computers were
reserved for the computer science class.
Yes, I lived in a world before HTML and i-named
products. I learned to type on an actual
typewriter. My first newspaper articles
were on a word processor, which was a hybrid of a computer and typewriter. A mouse back then was just a rodent. I spent many a quarter playing the original
Pong and Donkey Kong and Pac-Man. I
still have my original Atari and Sega and Nintendo game systems and all of the
games that you would have to physically insert in order to play. Social networking back then were digital
bulletin boards that you would have use a modem to connect to and share
information with. And, yes, even then
they were talking about the dangers of online predators.
That lets you know just how far we’ve gotten over the
decades. And you will not find a better
and more diehard supporter for technological freedom and advancement than yours
truly. Bill Gates may be a close second.
And yet, at the same time, I’m not happy with how we’ve been
going. Back in my day, the tech leaders
had noble ideas for technology and how it should be used. Gates used to write books about his vision of
the future and even did multimedia presentations to see how that vision could
come about.
Today, however, I don’t see any of our current tech leaders
showing any kind of interest in the future other than to make mountains of
money. And that myopia can be seen in what
we are focusing on... specifically cellphones.
Correction: they’re supposedly called “smart” phones, but there’s
nothing really “smart” about them.
Today, Apple has invented a season called the “iPhone Upgrade
Season”, where their obsessive iSheep fanatics wait in line for what they
believe will be the “newest” version of the iPhone. Except, what is really “new” about this phone
other than the nearly $1000 price tag?
What is not getting too much mention is the fact that more
and more of the iPhone is becoming so 100% proprietary that they’re eliminating
third-party peripherals. We first saw
this with the removal of the earphone jack so as to rely on Apple’s exclusive
wireless earbuds. That means that all of
those companies that could make earphones for hearing and for communicating won’t
be able to use them on iPhones. Apple
would control which companies would be “allowed” to create peripherals that
would work on their devices.
Now this is nothing new for Apple. They were doing this back when the name of
the game was the personal computer. Their
monitors, their keyboards, their mice, their speakers, and their software. And that was fine because at the time there
was more than enough competition for them to be so picky. But today, Apple’s iPhone is the
standard-bearer. A very expensive
standard-bearer.
And the competition?
Well, there are other cellphone makers, but they all run under one
operating system: Android. Microsoft
used to have a stake in the game, but this is not the same company that Bill
Gates ran. Now they’re out of the
cellphone business, putting their own stake in netbooks and their Xbox game
system.
Android is owned by Google, aka Alphabet, and, like
Microsoft, they set up a universal operating system for cellphones and tablets
and even some netbooks. That, in and of
itself, is a good thing. That allows
competition. That provides a common
platform for developers to design and perfect peripherals and applications that
are not bound to just one company or one provider or one phone. This is what originally helped to make
Microsoft the king of the computer operating systems.
But Google is not Microsoft, because Google has decided to
do to Android what Microsoft did not want to do with Windows until recent years,
and that is to whore their users out to advertisers.
Do you like Google’s weather app? Well get used to seeing it more and more and
get more and more annoying, because now Google is doing everything they can to
put ads in it and also to have its own lock screen in addition to your own lock
screen, all so you can see more and more ads.
Swipe to clear their lock screen, then again to clear the phone’s lock
screen, and make certain you don’t swipe across an ad, or else you’ll be forced
to visit it. Cha-ching for Google!
Google’s file manager app is the same way. No debate, no notice or announcement, they
just upgraded to a new service that says “contains ads” on it and then hits you
with ads with every use. You open the
app, you get an ad. You try to navigate
to your folder, you get an ad. You close
an application, you get an ad.
If you were to check out Google’s website, they’ll tell you
that some ads are “necessary” to supposedly pay for the “free service”. Now that may be true when it comes to their
browser and online search engine, but keep in mind we’re talking about apps on
your phone that you cannot remove! You cannot
remove Google’s Weather app. You cannot
remove Google’s File Manager app. You can
only neuter these apps by uninstalling it to its original version, shutting off
all other updates for it, and then installing another app that hopefully won’t
have the intrusive ads, or at least not be as intrusive. But the original apps are still there, still
taking up space on your phone’s memory.
Oh, and let’s not forget that Android isn’t free to the
cellphone makers! They have to pay for a
license to have Android on their phones.
That’s part of the price that you paid for that phone, so you’ve already
paid for that not-really “free service”.
Those ads, then, are nothing more than Google whoring you out to get
more money for themselves.
One more thing to consider when it comes to these in-app
ads: they are downloaded through your phone’s connection, which includes your phone
provider’s data service. So if you don’t
have unlimited data service for your phone, those ads take bites out of your
monthly allotment. Then again, I don’t
think anyone should be surprised about that, because the people who come up
with ads don’t care what the recipients have to go through any more than a
McDonald’s executive cares about what the cow thinks about becoming hamburger
meat.
Speaking of ads, I am getting really tired of seeing
websites like the Huffington Post bitch at me for using ad-blocking
software. Hey ad whores: did it ever
occur to you that the reason why people are turning to blocking software is
because those ads are getting intrusive and annoying? Did it ever occur to you that maybe we are
going to your site to actually read your articles, not to be bombarded by
advertisements? Here’s something to chew
on: how much money do you think you’d make if you didn’t have anyone visiting your
site because of your ads?
The media of late has been focusing on how extensive Russia infiltrated
and influenced political activity here in America through social media. It wasn’t just the 2016 Presidential Farce
either. Pretty much every political
subject has been an opportunity for the Russian troll farm to instigate
and aggravate. If it can further
polarize and divide Americans, the Russian trolls did it. It didn’t matter if it was about Donald Trump
or NFL protests or Black Lives Matter or some local issue, if they heard about
it and it could be exploited, they exploited it.
And now we expect Facebook and Instagram and the other
social media services to somehow “fix” this problem. Why?
Keep in mind that we are not the customers to social media. As I’ve pointed out three
years ago, we are the product to them.
The Russian trolls are really the customers to social media. So why should Facebook and Instagram and the
other services do something that would affect their real customers? They’re McDonald’s and we are the cows ready
to become hamburger meat.
Understand that social media services like Facebook and Instagram
and Snapchat are really not in the business to provide a service for us, the
great unwashed online. Their real business
is information brokerage. They use social
media as the method to lure us in and share our lives, where they take all of
that sharing and find ways to market the information from that sharing with
other businesses like advertisers.
Never thought about it that way, did you? Maybe we all should.
But let’s get brutally honest here... how much of the “new
technology” is actually helping us? And
how much of it is just there to suck information and make a boatload of money?
There are advances that do help us. Look at the auto industry and some of their
new features. Things like accident
avoidance and parking assistance and syncing with smartphones so you have
hands-free calls and hear and send texts by voice. Those are advances that certainly help us a
whole lot more than Snapchat, or the people that come up with selfie-sticks and
phone clips for your car so you can post videos of yourself talking while
driving.
Listen, the more we are encouraged to share our lives with
others online, the more we give up our personal sense of privacy. Technology itself is not “smart” enough to
know the difference between right and wrong.
It’s still a tool that can be used in many ways. Yes, it’s nice to know that hundreds of
people (or, in my case, dozens) know who
you are and like what you’re wearing or what you’re thinking. But that is information about your life that
you put out there freely, and once it is out there, you have no control over
how other people use it. How would you
like to know that someone else is making money off something you put out there
for free?
Maybe what we need are more dreamers and visionaries in the
tech world instead of money-grubbing profiteers, people who can look five or
ten years into the future and see where we are headed. Because there is no future for us all when
the furthest into the future that we are interested in is the next fiscal
quarter.
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