Dopey Monocultures

  I am quite patient with updates, and down times of sites. But do you still remember the heart attacks of many years prior when our homepages were down, sometimes for hours on end? Today, these outages have become much more rare but at the same time reliance on increasingly centralized web services has increased. The impact of Del.icio.us or Google Calendar having a bad day is huge. People who trust Google with their daily schedule may be seriously impacted if Google shuts down. "Cross your fingers and check back..." may not be quiet the spirit with which people will respond when they don't know which appointment to go to next because all their data are inaccessible. That's one reason why centralization is a bad idea. We become much too reliant on one or two web services or software packages. This monoculture will hurt us. It makes us dependent on the companies that we trust with our attention and data. Should they decide to profit of our loyality in a way that goes against our interests, it'll be hard to withdraw our cooperation. Itunes is another good example. The hardware compliance that Itunes offers is not matched by many programs. Thus, with new updates we find ourselves more locked down to the directionn in which Apple wants to take us instead of being able to follow our own intentions and desires.