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Jeff Bezos wants to own all the robots
If he succeeds, we’re finished
by James Kaelan
In the salad days of infotech — the late 1980s/early 1990s, as the PC was becoming ubiquitous, but the internet was still something you accessed through a landline (if you logged on at all) — software wasn’t separable from its physical container. If you wanted a new program, you went to a store and bought a cardboard box that contained an actual disk. This disk was replete with information that was cheaply copyable. But the vector for the code was still tangible: a square of plastic and metal that you inserted into your beige, Intel-powered tower.
Once the internet got fast enough, though, and the quantity of data that could be stored on a hard drive increased exponentially, our relationship to software — to digital data of all sorts — began to change. In the late ‘90s, file-sharing started taking off. Suddenly you could go to Napster and download, for free, an album that cost $17 at Borders (R.I.P.). It felt sort of like stealing, but it definitely didn’t feel the same as walking into a store and shoplifting.
Why was that? Why did ripping an album off Napster feel way different than pocketing a CD at The Warehouse (R.I.P.)?
In his indispensable book, Postcapitalism, Paul Mason argues that this disjuncture —…
