Cory Doctorow

Speaking as someone who's made a lot of terrible mistakes in his life, that is not a plan.

Sure.

Yeah.

So, you know, in the other parts of the discipline story, there are parts that are distinct to tech, like the fact that we have this interoperability we talked about before, where you can kind of fix things that have shipped from the factory broken just by changing how they work.

And it's much easier in a digital platform than it is an analog because like,

If I write the software that disincentivize your printer, I can just like send you a copy.

You don't have to do it.

Whereas like if your KitchenAid mixer only takes KitchenAid accessories and they're charging a fortune for them, you know, I can't like machine a thing that allows you to put a Miela accessory in your KitchenAid and then like email you the file.

Right.

I've got to like I've got to like ship you a physical thing at a bare minimum.

Right.

Or you've got to find a machine shop or something.

So software has got this like uniquely disidentificatory aspect.

It also had a workforce that was quite powerful and often really cared about users because they were scarce and very valuable.

And so it was really hard for companies to disregard their input.

Of course, now we have lost that power and they didn't unionize the supplies caught up with demand.

They've lost that power in the same way that interoperability has gone away because IP laws expanded to basically ban most of that reverse engineering.

So those are distinct to technology, right?

Those are not characteristics of the NFL.

They're not characteristics of McDonald's, but I am on the one hand, totally fine with people using the word colloquially.