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https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaking-felony-contempt-of-business-model-1464231071e>
"(*Also Wheeelchairs, Tractors, iPhones, Toasters and Printers)
On the origin of anti-features
They’re called “anti-features”: artificial limitations built onto the products
we buy. These are limitations no customer asked for — and indeed, they’re
limitations customers would pay to remove — if only they could.
The first anti-features were “DRM” (Digital Rights Management), like the
“region-locks” on DVD players that stopped you from using a player you bought
in one country to play back a disc you bought somewhere else.
No DVD owner ever woke up and said, “You know what, I wish that my DVD player
would block my ability to play back my lawfully acquired DVDs.”
There was no
market for this product. Anyone who bought a DVD player did so
because they didn’t know about this restriction, or because they were
indifferent to it. No showroom, no advertisement, no press-release bragged
about region-locking.
Quite the contrary! A proliferation of small electronics manufacturers in the
Pacific Rim began to manufacture DVD players that had no region locks, or where
the region locking could be easily disabled (say, by keying a secret sequence
into the remote). This
was advertised, because while customers didn’t value
region-locking,
they were hungry for its absence. That’s what made it an
anti-feature: people wouldn’t pay extra to get region-locking, but they’d
actively seek out models that lacked it."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
