Archived entries for Tools + Humans
Tools as Institutions Pt.1
From an issue of Popular Science, January 1979. This article is so prophetic. You really only need to read up to the first bullet point but I’ll transcribe the first paragraph here:
Plugging into Bell
It’s a new gadgety world when you own your own phoneLast month, a PS editor moved into a new Manhattan apartment. He equipped it with three new phones—none of them, however, from the telephone company. He bought them from a local store and simply plugged them into jacks supplied by Ma Bell.
Our editor is one of a growing number of people who are buying their own phones instead of leasing equipment from their phone companies. Here’s why:
• It’s now legal
• You can save money
• You can get more technologically advanced equipment, with more features, than Bell presently supplies.
…
It’s not LEGAL?! In hindsight it seems insane that we weren’t allowed to own our own home phone but it sounds familiar doesn’t it? I know that I have a certain “i-product” in my pocket right now that is definitely treated in the same proprietary manner as our old land-line homes phones were. But this is what happens when our tools are not used to our benefit but to the benefit of the institution. When our tools become institutionalized. The home telephone, like the internet and like cell phones, democratize communication and allow for greater connections between people and should be open and available to anyone who wants to use it in whatever way they need it. The first page of this article also states clearly the immediate benefit to phones now becoming “open-source”, you get better stuff! We need our tools to reach their greatest potential by releasing them from the hands of the institutions who’s greater interest is capital gain, and put them in the hands of many. Control by many vs control by few. DRM, copyright, DMCA and cable bandwidth caps are all current technological symptoms of the same problem that you see below. Maybe as time passes and technology advances all tools will pass through this process and someday become open but it’s much more likely, given the money and the power that these institutions have and require to keep functioning, that it will continue to move in the opposite direction if we don’t do something about it.
How To Copy and Paste
I think this is so fascinating. While looking for Cut&Paste I stumbled across this random page, How To Copy and Paste. I don’t mean to highlight this page to point and laugh at it (although I did when I first found it) because it’s actually a fairly thorough walk-through of how to copy and paste. But what’s interesting to me is that this function is now such a part of our cultural experience that it IS laughable to some that anyone doesn’t know how to do this. We’re so tied to the computer now as a basic everyday tool that a fairly advanced function like key commands is considered pedestrian. But thankfully someone out there thought that they could help the greater good and make this page. Lucky for them and the helpless user, it comes up pretty high in a google search.