A new project by Teehan+Lax, the Toronto-based design firm that helped created Ev Williams’ Medium publishing platform, builds on its previous work with Hyperlapse to provide a way to navigate Google Street View with just a wave of your hand. The experiment uses the same engine as Hyperlapse, and takes advantage of an early developer version Leap Motion controller unit to give a user a very cool way to navigate Google Street View.

It looks a little like how some of us might have imagined we’d be navigating the Internet in general by now, asked to picture what computing would be like in 15 years time back in 1998, but actually much more intuitive and natural-looking than anything we likely would’ve conceived of back then. The Leap Motion looks to be an extremely accurate tool in terms of controlling speed with up and down positioning of the hand, and in detecting subtle planar shifts as the tester tilts his hand side-to-side.

I was already excited about getting my hands on my own Leap Motion pre-order, but the potential of using something like this to virtually drive something like the Atlantic Road in Norway or the Iroha-zaka in Japan make its arrival even more anticipated.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Medium, the content creation platform started by Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone, has acquired Matter, the science and technology journalism startup cofounded by former long-time Guardian technology correspondent and GigaOm writer Bobbie Johnson last year, for an undisclosed sum. This is Medium’s first acquisition.

The innovative Matter was initially backed by a Kickstarter campaign, raising $140,000 and attracting Williams as one of its 2,566 backers. It publishes long form journalism articles (over 5,000 words) and sells them on subscription for $0.99 per month. As an example it recently published Amputees & Wannabes.

The company will remain a standalone company post acquisition but Johnson and cofounder, Jim Giles, will work with Medium’s editorial team.

In a blog post Johnson and Giles explained there are no plans to stop publishing or to change the business model: “One of the things that made it easy to join Medium was the knowledge that the company believes in great storytelling as much as we do, and is prepared to support what we do.”

Medium – still in closed beta – lets users write, annotate, read and recommend content in a simple magazine like interface.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As we reported on Tuesday, publishing platform Medium added some new collaboration tools, allowing your friends to add notes to your pre- and post-published articles. It’s a nice way of getting feedback when you want it, especially if it would have been helpful before sharing your thoughts with the world.

One thing that the company left out, though, was that since you can invite any friend to collaborate on your posts via a link, once they actually post a note, they’ll be able to use Medium, too. This was confirmed in an email sent out by Ev Williams and company today to its members:

Also, here’s something: They will then have access to write on Medium, as well. So, for the first time, you can invite people to Medium. (They just have to help you first.)

This is interesting for two reasons: it’s a clear incentive for your friends to participate in the writing and refining of your posts and it’s a perfect onboarding experience for new users to add notes before they ever write a post of their own. Killing two birds with one stone is smart, and it’s a way for the team to get more people using the service in a controlled way.

Since there hasn’t been an answer to “how can I join Medium?” until now, other than being invited by the team or being a Twitter employee, this now serves that purpose.

Start writing.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

At the Launch Conference in San Francisco today, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams took the stage to talk to conference founder Jason Calacanis about everything from his experience at Twitter and the rise of Vine to sharing his take on Google and Facebook as well as the latest from Medium, his latest effort to shape the future of digital publishing.

For those unfamiliar, a serial entrepreneur, Williams has played a key role in helping to shape the way we create and share content on the Web, as the co-founder of Pyra Labs, which produced Blogger — and was bought by Google in 2003. In doing so, Williams is often credited with coining the term “blogger” and helping to popularize both the term “blog” and the medium itself. After leaving Google, Williams went on to co-found Odeo and “idea incubator” Obvious, which produced both Twitter and, most recently, Medium (among others).

Through his experience at Obvious, Williams said that he learned two important things about himself. After departing from Twitter, he found himself stuck in a rut, so he, Biz Stone and other early Twitter employees revived Obvious, but thereafter he found himself “stuck in a rut,” he told Calacanis. In helping to incubate (and finance) startups like Medium, Branch and Lift, he came to realize that he wanted to focus on building a company and a product — not simply to play the role of investor and advisor.

Seeing a market opportunity, a problem that “mattered” and leveraging his experience at Twitter and Blogger, he took a more active role at Medium, because “having an impact is at the top of my list of criteria” when deciding where and how to invest his time, he said. There was also the fact that Medium is a publishing tool, allowing people to create collections of content around a particular theme and/or subject, while inviting others to add their own contributions to those collections, as Drew wrote in November.

The startup focuses on ideas and concepts he had while at Blogger all the way back in 2000, features that he’d even built for the platform but never got around to implementing, he said. The idea with Medium, and what captured his attention — a problem that he says he feels like he has to solve, an idea most entrepreneurs are familiar with — was the opportunity to create a better Twitter for long-form content, a space that’s currently owned by Tumblr.

In a sense, he says, it’s along the same lines as what Twitter has been able to do with Vine, its popular video sharing app (where Williams sits on the board). It’s “still early, and I can’t take any credit for it, but I like it because it captures the essence of Twitter, for video … it’s becoming one of the first platforms to not just duplicate what came before it — the process for every new medium or platform — but create an experience, feel and interface that is unique to the format.

All of his ventures are either directly or indirectly attempting to address the long-standing problems that still exist in online media today, the Twitter co-founder says, particularly in the fact that, as the Web has succeeded in lowering the cost of content distribution, it’s created a flood of new content and information. The new economic model around publishing today incentivizes and rewards frequency, volume and keeping costs low when it comes to content creation, which, in turn, disincentivizes investment in a particular piece of content — and long-form content. It prioritizes lower quality content and burying higher quality content.

While Twitter and Blogger have both played a role in creating and instituting this new model, the first generation of digital publishing has focused on metrics like unique visitors and page views, which, while it’s a good start, he says, the way we measure the engagement around and value of content needs to evolve.

Medium, Williams says, is focused on understanding whether or not people have read the content, whether they read all the way to the end, whether they engaged, shared and commented — whether they actually got something from that content. “We’ve done speed and quick release in publishing, now let’s focus on the other things,” he told the crowd.

When asked how Medium involves and what his product development process is like, Williams said that, for him, “usage is like oxygen for ideas,” and that he tries to focus on what people are doing on the platform, how they’re interacting with it — not doing data analysis or stressing over user feedback. That way, he says, you are able to get a more organic understanding of what’s important (and of what users care about) in realtime, as the product moves forward. Then you can nudge development in that direction.

As it relates to Medium, Williams said that he wants to create a platform that can give context to the content that people create, eventually leading to a system where the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. The idea is to allow people to build a cohort of like-minded ideas and, to measure the value of its content, Medium is recording a rough heuristic for “reads,” Williams said in an attempt to discover whether or not people are reading the content, did they stick with it and get all the way through the post, etc.

That being said, Williams continued, he realizes that there’s more friction for Medium as a publishing tool than there is for, say, Twitter. “It’s not like a tweet, it’s not as easy, and we don’t expect the ratio of creators to consumers to be the same for Twitter and Instagram, for example; the point, instead, is not to lower the barrier to get everyone creating, but to get the maximum audience for the really good stuff.”

It would be great to get back to a system in which accuracy matters, and maybe it’s naive to think that quality can (and will) get more attention, he says, but it’s possible to use the network and great design to build a system that creates a better product — and thus creates more attention. “Most of the web is ugly, and the system is broken, it’s terrible for consumption,” he says. “By giving quality more attention and by creating a better system to create better content, we can solve that problem.” And, naturally, better design is part of that.

While the economics of journalism “is a very tough problem,” Williams says, building an economic model that supports journalism “is a worthy goal” and something Medium is
“definitely going to experiment with,” he concluded. The economics are different building a content platform than it is for a publication, any time you build a content platform, you will have commercial usage, and if it’s sizable than there’s money to be made, which is different than the problem The New York Times faces, for example. The idea is to create a bunch of people who are motivated to create content not because they’re getting paid, but because they want to create.

When asked what advice he would give to aspiring entrepreneurs, Williams said that they should focus on building something that they want to exist in the world and to “focus on it entirely.” Something good will come out of it. Of course, as we get older, he continued, that focus becomes much more difficult to maintain, because there are more opportunities — and distractions. “The only way I can manage that is if I say ‘no’ tons of times every single day.” The only way you can really do your best work, he says, if you learn how to say “no,” something that’s easier said than done.

Calacanis also asked Williams what his impressions were of the biggest Silicon Valley tech companies, like Google, Apple and Facebook. Of Google, Williams said that he’s “still a huge fan” and that most people who have worked their maintain a soft spot for the company. “Their values are real,” he continued, “and I love that Larry [Page] is making big bets. I think they’re going to continue to take over the world.”

As to Apple, Williams said that he, strangely enough, doesn’t know the company very well. “It’s funny that Apple is in Silicon Valley, employs tens of thousands of people, yet I don’t seem to know any of them. That’s strange to me.” The big issue for both Google and Apple is that it’s really hard for a company to create real value and be successful in different markets. The thinking is, he says, that Apple has all these smart people, it has all the money, so they should rule the next big thing. But, generally speaking, that’s not the way it happens.

At Google, Williams said, he realized why these big companies — in spite of all their success, all the buzz and giant market caps — create a landscape in which there will always be opportunities for entrepreneurs. In any field a founder chooses, traditionally the conversation has always been one in which VCs will ask, “but what if Google got into this? What would happen to your company then?” While the Google “danger” has always loomed for entrepreneurs, when he got to Google, he realized that it’s hard to innovate and build internally. In fact, most of Google’s most popular products (like YouTube, Android and Maps) were a result of acquisitions.

I realized there’s plenty of room for startups, not because of inefficiency or incompetence at these companies, but they’re just not focused on creating the best value for nimble companies, flexibility and innovation. So that’s the best part of this system, all of these companies eventually fall, or mature, or slow down, he says, and that means that we get to create new things.

You can watch the whole interview here.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’ve told you a bit about the latest writing and blogging platform from Ev Williams’ new product, Medium, and the team has been incrementally adding things, and talent, to the service to make it a full-featured interactive service. It’s been fun watching it evolve, albeit in private, read-only beta, and you can start to see a fuller picture of what it can be.

In an email to Medium users last night, the team shared some new functionality that will allow writers and readers to dive a bit deeper into the content that they see in front of them. The really interesting thing is that Medium discusses its thoughts on “commenting”, which I think you’ll find refreshing:

Stats: As of this afternoon, you can see what kind of attention your posts are getting and how people are reacting to them. The goal of Medium is to enable and support quality, rather than just popularity, so our philosophy around stats is that we need to provide meaningful metrics. Medium stats provide feedback that normal web analytics don’t give you.

Reader Interaction: One thing you may have noticed about Medium is its lack of comments at the bottom of pages—which seems to have become an unfortunately ubiquitous feature of the web. We believe that normal web comments don’t add a lot of value on average (at least of the type we’re looking to create). However, we do think there is value to be had in reader feedback and interactivity. So, we’re working on a way of allowing reader participation (on an optional basis) that offers something new and different that comments don’t. We hope to have it on the site (at least to test out) by mid-January.

As far as stats go, the Medium dashboard is pretty simple and what you’d expect. Until now, as a writer, you’d only be notified if your post was added to a “Collection,” a way of someone re-sharing your piece. This gives you more of an idea of how many people actually read your story:

But wait, there’s a stat called “reads,” which is different than “views.” This means that the team is working on a way to figure out how many people actually made it through your story and didn’t just click and glance. That’s huge for writers, and, at the end of the day, readers. Knowing what you’ve really read, or even close to it, is an amazing statistic to try and crack. The dashboard also shows “recommendations,” which of course is the action you can take on a piece you’ve enjoyed, which pushes it up to being featured on the site.

As far as reader interaction, as mentioned, something will be coming in “mid-January”, which is definitely something to watch out for.

It’s nice to see Williams with team Obvious try to tackle publishing on the web, as they’ve done before with Blogger, and of course Twitter. There are still things to try out, test and learn from how people write and consume content. It’s a smart bet to watch what this team does because of its experience, but also because they are in a mode of taking their time and seeing what works.

Whenever you see a well-established team, much like Path, taking its time to make beautiful things, you simply have to take notice. They are the most dangerous when it comes to disruption.

Says Ev Williams and the Medium team:

Our goal is to make Medium the best place for you to write. We haven’t reached that aspiration quite yet.

Time will tell, and Medium has a lot of time. They’re not the only ones working on building publishing platforms, as we’ve found that Quora might be doing the same.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We told you a bit about Ev Williams and his vision for the future of publishing with his new product, Medium, the other day. I mentioned in that piece that his company, Obvious, was hiring a variety of interesting positions. Today, Williams announced a new addition, a Director of Content.

The new hire, Kate Lee, is a former literary agent at International Creative Management (ICM).

Here’s what Williams had to say about Lee’s hiring today, which comes after a short hiatus for her:

We’re glad she’s done reading books for pleasure and will now spend time reading Medium posts (also pleasurable!).

I was introduced to Kate this fall, via Obvious’s East Coast compatriots, Josh Miller and Jason Goldman. (Apparently, once you’re in New York, you meet everyone else there. Something about the density.) I thought she would be a great person to pioneer our content development efforts, given her editorially honed mind, business savvy, and demonstrated tenacity at finding diamonds in the rough.

What Williams describes here is a person who has an eye for really amazing content, something that his service, Medium, is working on bubbling up. Medium is still in private beta, but you can create content in different themed collections, allowing others to add to them. It’s a really amazing collaborative experience, because you can come up with a theme, which can then kickstart someone to write the content.

On why Medium felt it needed to hire a Director of Content, Williams had this to say:

Truth be told, there’s only so far that content can be “directed” on a platform like Medium, which will be an open marketplace of ideas, where everyone can participate and publish. After all, great ideas can come from anywhere, and part of our mission is to level the playing field. Also, we expect the world (users of Medium) will play a much bigger role in determining what thrives on the system than we will.

Once again, Williams and his team are setting out to blaze a new path for publishing. He did it once with Blogger, once again with Twitter and now Obvious is taking a full-on swing at the fences with Medium. The difference is that the company will now be more involved with content, clearly creating and curating some itself. Williams states that Lee will be reaching out to talented individuals, be it professors, authors or people with something to say, to bring their content to the Medium community.

Medium answers the problem that has plagued potential writers for a lifetime: “I have nothing to say. Nothing to write about. I have no ideas.” The prompting nature of Medium is extremely innovative when it comes to solving that problem. This is something that the service Plinky tried to work on, which was acquired by Automattic to help WordPress bloggers come up with fresh content.

It’s a gorgeous and inviting platform to write on, and I’m enjoying myself thoroughly thus far. The visual treatment for images on the platform is equally impressive. The best part is, there is both a free-form nature in the community, as well as a very focused mentality, when it comes to collections and themes of pieces. Lee will be based in New York City, and will be building out a team of her own.

It will be interesting to see which pieces Williams adds to the puzzle next.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You might have heard a few things about Ev Williams and crew’s new product, Medium. To some, it seems like “just another blogging platform,” but if you think about where Ev and Biz Stone come from, these folks are pretty hip to next-level publishing.

I don’t have to remind you that Williams’ company Pyra Labs sold a little product called Blogger to Google, which basically helped revolutionize and democratize publishing on the Internet. Then, Williams teamed up with Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone on a little product called Twitter. You’ve probably used it a few times; I know I have.

This latest product, Medium, allows people to create collections of content based on a theme or subject, and then invites others to add pieces to those collections. It’s truly collaborative, and after using it for the past week, it actually excites me to write a personal “blog” again. But it doesn’t feel like a blog, it’s something new altogether.

Many have wondered how that is, but today, Ev Williams put it into words in a post on Medium.

The part that sticks out to me about Medium is the editing interface; it’s unlike other services out there in that you don’t have to click tons of buttons, open up different views and windows and other nonsense. Williams explained this approach:

As I’m writing this, I see not just a WYSIWYG editor, I see the page I’m going to publish, which looks just like the version you’re reading. In fact, it is the version you’re reading. There’s no layer of abstraction. This is a simple (and old) concept, but I haven’t seen it in any other publishing tool—unless you count Google Docs and the like, where you’re basically always in editing mode (versus always in viewing mode). And it makes a big difference. Having to go back and forth between your creation tool and your creation is like sculpting by talking.

There are those who would argue that when you’re writing, you’re creating the words—the story—not the presentation. Certainly, professional writers tend to be comfortable with that (perhaps because they know there’s a production process that will make their work look good). And there’s a good argument that content should be able to flow to many forms and presentations. I agree with that, but I still like writing in at least one of the many possible nice presentations.

The editing functionality in-line is gorgeous. Simply hover over selected text for options:

Williams mentions removing “abstraction” from publishing, and that’s something that Twitter accomplished as well. In 140 characters, you were moments away from connecting with millions upon millions of people all over the world. It feels like Medium could be that for longer-form content. If you think about its name, it even situates the service right between a full-length blogging software and a short tweet. It’s just…Medium.

On Medium, there are no widgets, no share buttons, no comments and no annoyances — it gets out the way of itself. Like a great product does. There’s also a budding community of writers popping up on the service as it lets more people in every day. The topics are anything from technology to more personal matters like relationships. There are no limits and you can collaborate with someone’s collection if they choose to make it public. It’s like sitting down next to someone at a lunch table and starting up a conversation with them sheeply.

Once you post, people can “recommend” what you’ve written, pushing it up to the featured area of the site. But it’s not about getting featured or seen, it’s about getting your words out of your head, somewhere. And that somewhere could be Medium for many.

On what’s coming next, Williams had this to say:

We have a bunch more ideas on how to make this editor even better—allowing people to let their brilliance and creativity flow smoothly onto the screen. We will evolve the editor to add power and flexibility without adding complexity or distraction.

Already, Medium has already become my favorite place to write. (I may be slightly biased.) I hope it will soon be yours too.

Medium is about storytelling, something I’m very fond of. In fact, the company is hiring for a role called “Storyteller.“

I’ll put my publishing trust in the Obvious team, because they know how it’s done. Some of Williams’ old crew is joining him, too, including long-time Twitter employee Luke Esterkyn. The company is also hiring more than just storytellers, so keep an eye out for even more talent to flock to Medium. In fact, Medium was just opened up to all Twitter employees. Maybe for reasons.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Obvious Corp has just unlocked Medium.com, revealing that its a publishing platform that collects submitted text and images into themed collections so you don’t need a following to be heard. Anyone can read and give feedback on Medium entries starting today, with publishing access to roll out from friends and family to more people soon.

Backed by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone plus the rest of the Obvious crew, Medium could democratize content distribution. The way Twitter’s retweets gave anyone with 140 characters of brilliance a way to spread across the web, Medium could do the same for longer thoughts.

To truly understand the ethos behind Medium, you should read Williams’ full introduction, but here’s the gist of how it works.

Posting on Medium (not yet open to everyone) is elegant and easy, and you can do so without the burden of becoming a blogger or worrying about developing an audience. All posts are organized into “collections,” which are defined by a theme and a template. (For example, this post is in the About Medium collection with a simple article template.)

Collections give people context and structure to publish their own stories, photos, and ideas. By default, the highest-rated posts show up at the top, helping people get the most out of their time in this world of infinite information.

To start there are four collections:

Been There. Loved That. - Beautiful and absurd photos, sometimes with short captions

Look What I Made - Image and descriptions of homegrown creations from cool hairstyles to colored snow men

The Writer’s Room - “Tools And Strategies For A Writing Life”

The Obvious Collection - Briefs on some projects Obvious is backing.

Medium could be a huge help to young or fledgling thought-leaders who haven’t amassed enormous Twitter follower counts or gained spots writing for popular blogs. Instead of putting the emphasis on who the writer is, the spotlight shines on the content. Something great will bubble up within a collection and be seen based on its own merit. And that’s kind of what the Internet is supposed to be about.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When Evan Williams and a bunch of other Obvious Corp teammates suddenly follow a snazzy, un-launched product called Medium, you know something big’s about to happen. For now, Medium.com is a website that lets you easily drag in or upload a photo and annotate it with overlaid text, but we hear there are bigger ambitions for the product.

Medium’s Twitter account describes it as “The new thing”, and its only tweet is “Getting antsy”, which was posted last night and seems to foreshadow an imminent launch. We couldn’t find other details, but Medium’s placeholder product lets anyone combine an image and quote to quickly get a point across. That doesn’t seem world-changing enough for Obvious, though, so expect it to reveal something much grander.

Incubated, advised, or perhaps even built by the Obvious team responsible for that little blue bird, its no surprise Medium offers a Twitter login system. However, for now authentication doesn’t go through, and instead dumps you at this “we’re not launched” message.

As of today, Medium  lets you take any photo, slap it in, and one-click a text box to overlay your thoughts. There’s a blur button to give your background image a soft focus. If this was the final product, Medium could help you make a picture worth a lot more than 140 characters.

Once it launches, though, Medium could reveal itself as something much more ambitious, and the photo thing is apparently just a front. One thing’s for sure, the whole site feels very classy and well designed, indicating it was spawned by a seasoned team.

Along with Ev and The Obvious Corporation’s CTO Don Neufeld, some of Medium’s other 39 followers who might be involved include Typekit co-founder Bryan Mason, and Mixbook director of design / UX Mike Gowen – all who could have contributed to Medium’s polished look as developers, advisors, or just testers.

We’ll be watching for when it launches.

[note: This article was significantly updated after we learned more about the true purpose of Medium]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Magic, they call it. And indeed we may add an appendix to that old saw: any sufficiently advanced, or sufficiently obscure, technology is indistinguishable from magic.

You must know the story of the Mechanical Turk. How princes and tradesmen were amazed by this ingenious device’s ability to play chess intelligently. In an age of steam and brass hinges! Yet at the time thousands were fooled. Had they known a bit more about machines, they might have realized it was not just improbable, but impossible.

The Mechanical Turks of our day aren’t designed for entertainment, but to be bought and used, yet a similar goes into preventing the secrets of their operation from being questioned. In fact, we are already at a time where it is more or less impossible for one person to understand or question them. Apple may be ahead of the curve on this trend, but while it appears they’ve been leading the industry by the nose, they in turn are being led by the inexorable forward motion of technology. Open hardware advocates fight the good fight, and they fight it valiantly, but defeat is inevitable.

And what would victory be, exactly? A laptop you can repair in the comfort of your home? Sounds good, to be sure — but how deep does that capability really go? If your hard drive breaks or your RAM is corrupted, will you pull out a magnifying glass and correct the faulty sectors with your electron drill? Adjust the drive head in your billion-dollar repair toolshop out back? No, you’ll order a new drive, new RAM, a new screen.

RAM used to be pieces too, you know. In an excellent (so far) book about the origins of the computer, Turing’s Cathedral, the mechanical nature of early computing machines is presented for your humble contemplation. ENIAC, for instance, had 17,468 vacuum tubes, 1500 relays, and 500,000 hand-soldered joints. Operation was complicated, but mechanical: if you weren’t careful, you might get your finger caught in the RAM. If something broke, you needed a wrench. Now a stored bit takes up so little space that if it gets much smaller it will cease to be governed by Newtonian physics.

This is the real problem. Technology actually is approaching the magic point. You want to know how your laptop works. You can’t know. Even the people who made it don’t know. Apple has to call up LG or Sharp when it wants a high-density display. LG has to call Samsung when they want MLC flash storage. Samsung has to call NVIDIA when they want graphics cores. NVIDIA has to call ARM to make SoC architecture. Vertical integration is a thing of the past because no company can do it all. It took Intel five years and billions of dollars to develop just the processor your laptop runs today. The whole system is the culmination of a century of work by geniuses and specialists. Control over your hardware is the flimsiest of illusions. You only understand the snow frosting the top of the iceberg, and even then all you can do to fix it is pay for more.

But that’s a bit of an academic (and existential) appraisal of the subject. Realistically speaking, there are better and poorer ways of creating a laptop, ways that enable such a device to last for five years instead of two, or to enable upgrades that cost a few hundred rather than a thousand dollars. The new Macs are, by some standards, the worst yet made.

Even this is on its way out, though. Integration and portability are the word now, not modularity, at least for the vast majority of users. Mobiles and tablets use SoC architecture that unifies logic, graphics, sound, and other functions all under the same chip for reasons of compatibility and power savings. I’ve assembled my own PCs for years, and I expect I’ll probably assemble one or two more, but even now it’s anachronistic, at least at the consumer level. Modular and open hardware (such as it is) will continue to exist, but as before they will only funnel into more usable, closed systems.

We’ve made this surrender many times. We surrendered control of our government to representatives because it’s better to have a few (ostensibly) informed individuals whose (nominal) duty it is to govern on our behalf. We surrendered control over our cars decades ago with electronically controlled fuel injection and timings, with parts we couldn’t fix or even reach, because it improves mileage and reliability. We surrendered control over the way we interact when we decided we’d use Facebook and text messages, because it’s convenient and fun. Each time we make a little bargain: we control less and we get more. Is anyone surprised it’s happening again?

We should certainly be able to do what we want after the fact. We can impeach our representatives, tweak our timings, and use Facebook to organize anti-Facebook rallies. And we can and should run our own programs, our own operating systems, do what we will with the platform we’ve bought.

The biggest threat is not to hardware, which has in truth been beyond the comprehension of users for decades, but to what we are allowed to do with it. Apple can solder their RAM and seal it with custom screws all they want. They are only creating the medium and in this case, the medium is not the message. Their computers are more locked down than others, but we mustn’t underestimate how locked down the others already were.

More troubling is the deeper marriage we are seeing between hardware and software. How many OS X and iOS-specific functions do you think lie beneath the placid mask of the A5 processor? How long before locked bootloaders and UEFI and intelligent cables prevent you from installing a new OS or streaming from non-approved sources?

For that matter, with virtualization of services and externalization of storage, how many steps are we adding between ourselves and the things we use? Running the software we want, even if it was on hardware we don’t understand, was one of our last strongholds. And now “our” software is running on other people’s hardware, people who give it to you for free and in return we… what, exactly? We don’t question that nearly enough.

The fight is not to control the hardware. The hardware has been out of our control for a long time. Despite that, hardware today, more complex and inaccessible than ever before, is more enabling and powerful than ever before. If you want a fight, don’t fight against technological progress, which constantly moves these things ever further out of your grasp. Whether you or Apple has to replace the drive or screen in your new MacBook Pro is immaterial. Whether Apple, or Amazon, or the MPAA, can stop you from using it the way you like is not. Forget the soldered RAM; there are those who would solder you down given a chance. They are the ones to fear, and therefore the ones to fight.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch