GET OVER IT

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 254/11 September 2015 11:39

If you reach my advanced age you'll discover that there are some irritants it's best to learn to live with because they're too much trouble to fix. For me two such irritants are Facebook and Microsoft Windows. What high hopes we had for Facebook when it first launched in the UK: we hoped it would replace the increasingly cranky Cix as the place where we Real Worlders could meet and exchange copy, but it hasn't worked out that way. (To be sure we do maintain a group on FB, but it's mostly confined to simple announcements and no copy gets posted there).

Facebook turned out to be less like a senior common room and more like a bustling, screeching market-square that drowns out all serious intent. It has the almost magical property of instantly turning everyone who enters into a moraliser or preener rather than an information provider: "look how well I'm doing", "I defy you not to weep over this baby dolphin/kitten/meerkat", "how dare you <blah> this <blah>", "how many <blahs> have *you* <blahed>?"). A conduit for outrage and opinion rather than fact, as you can see for yourself by contrasting the tone of FB comments with those on any proper tech forum: the Greek philosophers would have said it's all about doxa (belief) rather than episteme (knowledge).

Many's the time over the past years that my finger hovered over the "Delete account" button, but that impulse passed once I discovered how to switch people's feeds off without offending them by defriending (despite FB constantly changing the way you do it, as a deterrent). I now have friends running into three figures but see only two figures-worth of posts. And recently I realised that FB makes a great "doxometer": post some nascent column idea and see how much flak it attracts (the more the better). When I recently mentioned that my Windows 8.1 indexing service had run wild and filled up my entire 500GB hard disk, I received mostly Harry Enfield style "that's not how you do it" point-scoring (having already fixed the problem using real advice gleaned from tech forums). Ditto when I posted, ironically, that what I'm hearing about the Windows 10 upgrade process is turning me into an IT "anti-vaxer". And so on to the second irritant I've learned to live with, Windows 8.1.

To look at my desktop now you'd never even guess I'm running it. The tiles are gone along with all those hooky apps. My desktop is plastered with (highly-deprecated) icons, some pointing to folders full of vital utilities, while the tools I use most are all on the taskbar, Mac style. Neither you nor I would ever know this isn't Windows 7, and it works well enough to forget about (until a minor hiccup like that full disk). Automatic updates are turned off and I pick which ones to install manually from time to time, so haven't yet had 10 stuffed onto me. Will I eventually upgrade to 10? Haven't decided. Anti-vaxer jokes aside, I worry my Lenovo is old enough (2013) to be in the danger-zone for driver SNAFUs, but also a recent article on The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/31/rising_and_ongoing_cost_of_windows/) makes me wonder whether Windows 10 is intended to tie us into an Adobe-style monthly subscription, software-as-service model whereby I lose control over future upgrades.

If that does prove to be the case I'll definitely defect, not to a Mac as so often recommended by kind friends on Facebook, but to some variety of Linux. You see, I've also come to understand that I actually *enjoy* wrestling with operating systems: it's a far more fun way to keep my mental muscles exercised than solving word puzzles on a Nintendo Gameboy, in a Pringle cardigan, on the sofa. I don't object to paying for software per se - I paid for Windows 8.1 in the original cost of my Lenovo - but what I do oppose is the ongoing campaign by big software vendors to extend their monopoly status by extracting a rental, rather than sale, price from their customers. This tendency toward rent-seeking runs a counter to an opposite tendency of networked digital technologies to make software ever cheaper, even free, and thereby reduce profits (which are needed to pay for R&D, not only to distribute to shareholders). We're getting into quite profound questions here, recently the subject of Paul Mason's intriguing book "Postcapitalism" which I'm currently reading. Mason believes, as do I, that the fact that digital products can be copied effectively for free tends to undermine the ability to set rational prices which lies at the heart of current market economics. But that, illuminated by the madness that is MadBid, are a subject for next month's column...