Does anyone else feel as if it's over when it comes to really owning your own things?
As of now:
- You don't have the option of having a phone with decent specs and replaceable parts
- You have to have really good knowledge in tech to have private services that are on par with what the big companies offer
- You have to put up with annoying compatibility issues if you install a custom ROM on your android phone
- You cannot escape apps preventing you from using them if you root your device
- Cars are becoming SaaS bullcrap
- Everything is going for a subscription model in general
And now Google is attempting to implement DRM on websites. If that goes through, Firefox is going to be relegated to privacy conscious websites (there aren't many of those). At this point, why even bother? Why do I go to great lengths at protecting my privacy if it means that I can't use most services I want?
It sucks because the obvious solution is for people to move away from these bullshit companies and show that they actually care about their privacy. Even more important is to actually PAY for services they like instead of relying on free stuff. I'm not optimistic not just because the non privacy conscious side is lazy, but because my side is greedy. I mean one of the most popular communities on lemmy is "piracy" which makes it all the more reasonable for companies not to listen to privacy conscious people.
I wouldn't say that this is the endgame but in this trajectory, privacy is gone before 2030.
The value in data is less in the medium than the actual information. Information is by very definition intangible. Data is therefore not physical.
Ah, but without a storage medium, information becomes extremely difficult to exchange. The entire corpus of human knowledge would be worthless and impossible to learn from were it not for storage mediums like books to records to hard drives. Societies without written languages only have oral histories, and oral histories are rife with mistakes and misrememberings.
Do you think you could effectively learn from a lecture that demanded that a teacher remember it all from memory and students weren't allowed to take notes?
Beyond that, technically, the human brain is also a storage medium for information, although an extremely imperfect one.
Sure, the information is by very definition intangible, which means it's effectively worthless without a medium in which to exist and be able to be parsed by other humans.
EDIT: Further, does information not cease to exist when it's storage medium is destroyed? If I drill through a hard drive, or burn a book, or see a person die.... the information in each one of those storage mediums goes bye bye. It goes from intangible to nonexistent.