On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:53:30 -0700 (PDT) Jonathan Wilkes <janc...@yahoo.com> wrote:

This is what I mean by anti-economics. Like when EU trade agreements meant that farmers burned food surplus 1000 miles away from famine. Like the legendary E.T. landfill where Atari dumped millions of game cartridges in an act of vanity.

The principle of destroying wealth to create profit is disgusting. It is less damaging at the global level to just print money. It is one man digging a hole and another filling it in, to create employment. And it is predicated on the fallacy of infinite resources.

DRM, region lockouts, deliberate (and maintained) incompatibilities, are all part of the "defective by design" rationale, a deliberate anti-choice approach that must be carefully distinguished from plurality and competition.

Fully working generic units are shipped from China. Then we break them. Sometimes we employ as many people to limit the functionality of devices as to design and create them. This ensures they end up in landfills sooner than necessary. If people understood its impact, phone locking would be illegal on purely environmental grounds.

These paradoxes of instrumental reason that Nash and Marcuse visited in different ways, through game theory and critique aren't inevitable or intrinsic problems. They require short-sighted stupidity to come alive.

The necessary conditions for short term thinking are not just crisis, but traits like vanity, duplicity and deception that go with marketing dominated companies where image is valued over impact and form over function. The distance between the Apple "1984" television advert and current corporate stance is breathtaking.