You vote with your dollar/yuan/euro. No one puts a gun to your head to buy.
No, but they do everything they damn well can to
talk you into buying.
Some people are stupid and slow and retarded and unable of abstract thought.
Provided we're not talking about actual mental handicaps, I'm going to have to say that's bullshÃt. People can be less apt at something than most, don't get me wrong, and they can certainly never have developed their ability for something, but they are
not inherently cattle.
Not everyone is Picasso or even have the capacity to be if only we could reach them somehow, and to suggest otherwise is sweet, but untrue.
Don't mistake me: I'm
not saying that natural talent doesn't exist and everybody is capable of being as good as everybody else at everything. All I'm saying is that this idea that the masses are just
inherently incapable of complex thought or even
the fundamental human creative urge is a crock.
Spend some time in the Army and your youthful naivete concerning the goodness of all will be permanently fixed.
Goodness? Who said anything about goodness? I was talking about creative drive, not
morality.The mistake is equating being in the middle or tail end of the bell curve with societal worth.
I'm glad to hear that that's not where you're coming from; certainly it isn't what I was implying. But all the same, there's an awfully uncomfortable egoist bent to a lot of these arguments; and even when they're made in sincere benevolence, they're
still predicated on the false assumption that "the masses" are lacking in the fundamental capacity to be more than the lowest common denominator, or even to
want to.
but that your argument is actually the one bordering on elitist by suggesting that the tablet apps are for morons
Well what am I
supposed to think? Everything I'm told by tablet advocates says that "it's not
meant for productivity, it's meant for passively consuming content!" and "it's dumbed down because normal people just can't
understand computers!" and "the most important thing is to protect users from themselves!" Is it or
isn't it designed on the assumption that users are stupid?
not some illuminati conspiracy.
Don't get me wrong: I don't think that Dr. Claw is sitting in a darkened room somewhere and stroking his cat as he plans the destruction of general-purpose computing. I
do, however, see this as the industry quite transparently pushing models that put overall financial gain ahead of a healthy mutually-beneficial relationship with customers, and then justifying it by telling them, via billions of dollars' worth of marketing, that they probably don't really
need or
want what's being taken away, and wouldn't they rather just sit around on sites where their communications are dredged for advertising potential like good little consumers? Honestly I'd
prefer a Legion of Doom behind this, because then people might be less unwisely trusting and unquestioning of the motives behind this.