Interview with Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School professor and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where he talks about what happens when technology becomes “appliancized”:
As we move to an appliance model of computing, something like a TiVo [digital video recorder] can become the place to store one’s digital data—rather than a PC, which from a consumer point of view gets sick with viruses all the time, is in an inconvenient location in the house and is constantly going obsolete. As we go to an appliance model, it’s much, much easier to control users’ behaviors. I think we may look back and see the PC as an anomaly—how strange to run anything ending in “.exe.” You don’t normally get to write your own software for your coffeemaker or for your refrigerator or your lamp or your television or your VCR. So as we go to an appliance model that gives people more stability and predictability and longevity, I think we’re going to lose the anarchic quality currently associated with PCs and the Internet.
He’s got a point. The entertainment companies would love to have all of their digital content delivered on black boxes that we couldn’t tinker with or write new software applications for. It’d mean the end of file-sharing for one thing, but it’d also mean the end of all of the unpredictable innovations and experiments that keep the tech industry moving forward.
