Press Exposure: It's War (1995)

The Press Exposure column from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

It's War

A few weeks ago the Times was abruptly transferred from the famously intimidative and influential Thunderer into a give-away newspaper. Anyone could go into a newsagent and pick up a copy for nothing. In fact they could go there and pick up all the copies and walk out with them—which, considering the price which old newspapers now command, might not have been a bad idea.

This was not the result of Rupert Murdoch doing his misguided bit towards introducing a system of free access to wealth. What actually happened on that unusual day was that the entire print-run of the Times—which, in expectation of a surge in demand had been doubled—was bought by the Microsoft computer firm who then gave them away. Well, not exactly gave because the operation was part of the huge, expensive publicity drive for Microsoft’s new Windows 95, which is going to make life so much easier for us as long as we don’t mind the continuance of a few minor problems like war and famine and poverty and homelessness . . .  It was also an episode in the circulation war which has been raging for the past two years between the newspapers, in which the Times and the other Murdoch papers are the most aggressive and the most successful.

"Giving away" the Times was an extreme example of the price-cutting which has been the weapon most often used in the circulation war. The Murdoch papers began this, two years ago, by straightforward reductions in the price of the Sun and the Times. Since then it has taken the more complex form of a discount on the price of a Sunday paper provided you buy its stablemate on a Saturday and fill in a coupon (which, unless you are careful, can also result in bringing you a shoal of junk mail as your name and address are passed on to numerous mailing lists). So anyone whose form-filling skills enable them to complete the coupon can get the Sunday Times and the Observer for 50p each and the Independent on Sunday and the Sunday Telegraph for 10p each. Of course they may not then be able to find time to read them all, nor to mention all that junk mail, but they will have done their bit for the circulation figures.

Attrition

At times the price-cutting has resembled the attrition of the First World War trenches; in fact to some observers it has been not far off mass suicide. The Murdoch papers, for example, may have lostaround £100 million over it and the total loss for all newspapers is estimated to be as much as £200 million. But, unlike what went on in the trenches, Murdoch can show some significant advances. Over the past two years the circulation of the Sun has gone up by 16 percent and of the Times by a staggering 94 percent. On other sectors of the front, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph (where the losses have been about £45 million) have crept forward by some 4 percent, while the Guardian and the Daily Express have both been forced into retreat. To put this into perspective: overall sales have increased by just over 3 percent and for the Sunday papers they have dropped since 1984 from about 18¼  million to 15½ million now. Which does not say much for the liberating and expansive results supposed to flow from what is known as free competition.

Price-cutting has been part of a pincer movement on newspaper finances, the other jaw of which has been the soaring cost of newsprint, now 50 percent higher than it was at the end of 1994. (Which is why it would have made good sense—the sort of initiative which Rupert Murdoch should approve—for some thick-skinned operator to snaffle all those "free" copies of the Times and flog them to the nearest scrap merchant)

It is not surprising that out the smoke and noise of battle the best chances of survival are with those who are wealthy and diversified enough to withstand temporary losses—or even to provoke them in order to damage the opposition. The two big groups now are Murdoch’s News International and the Mirror Group, which control 11 of the 21 better known national newspapers, commanding about 63 percent of the market. It is worth remembering now that the so-called Murdoch revolution which moved the newspaper works out to the bastions of Wapping, smashed the trades unions, sacked thousands of workers and tamed those who survived, was justified on the grounds that from it would emerge a freer industry in which smaller, independent newspapers would flourish.

Profits

In case anyone is any doubt about how big they are, in August News International announced a doubling of their profits to £778.7 million. A lot of this was due to the sale of the group’s stake in satellite TV but is was also helped by the £57.5 million higher revenue from newspapers (although this was cut by the increased cost of newsprint). Additional unease came from higher advertising rates—usually a reflection of confidence about circulation figures—which in the case of the Times and the Sunday Times are notably successful part of their operations.

So in all-in-all Murdoch’s group is in buoyant mood. This, after all, is what capitalism is all about—competing for markets, screwing the best deal possible in a disputed situation, treating human beings who are employed by you as figures on balance sheets. It is also about that most important function of the press— deceiving people in the mass that this is the best, historically the highest and most efficient, way to run society when in fact it is the most effective and ruthless way of exploiting people, of repressing them and when the time comes disposing of them.

Ivan

Windows on Capitalism (1995)

Software Review from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Windows 95 by
 Microsoft

August 24 was "Windows Day", chosen by giant software company Microsoft to launch its new operating system, Windows 95. Accompanied by vast amounts of ballyhoo, an advertising budget of £100 million, acres of free newspaper publicity and a song from the Rolling Stones, Windows 95 is predicted to sell at least 20 million copies worldwide by the end of the year, further increasing the coffers of owner Bill Gates, richest man in America and one of the richest in the world (out-ranked only by a handful of kings and sultans). Computer stores opened all night so they could break open the champagne and sell the first copies at midnight. To judge from all the hype. Windows 95 represents a great leap forward for computer users. But is it, and (more important) does it reveal the efficiency of capitalism in developing new technology?

Windows 95 is an operating system, a program that allows the user to run word processors and other applications (from games to high-powered publishing tools). It certainly represents an advance over earlier versions of Windows and the previous operating system. MS-DOS. also marketed by (guess who?) Microsoft. As a simple example. Windows 95 means files can now be given any name at all. rather than being confined to a maximum of eight letters. You might wonder why Microsoft could get away for years with selling a product with such a daft restriction—especially when you learn that many other operating systems don't have such a limit. And indeed compared with what has long been available on some other computing systems, Windows 95 offers hardly anything that is new. Its likely success (as far as profit-making is concerned) is due far more to marketing skills and Microsoft's dominant position in the computing industry than to any technical excellence.

But the point of Windows 95 is not just for Microsoft to sell lots of copies. It is also intended to increase sales of some of Microsoft’s other products, such as spreadsheets and presentation software, to go with the new operating system. In addition. many buyers will find that they need a new computer with more memory and a faster processor in order to get the best out of it. And most insidious of all, Windows 95 comes together with the software for accessing Microsoft's own on-line mail and information system, Microsoft Network. If things go according to plan, this will almost immediately have more users than other such systems, not because it is in any way better but just because of Microsoft’s size and marketing muscle. No wonder some competitors have tried to take Microsoft to court in the US on grounds of constituting a monopoly.

The main thing all this shows is that so much of what passes for innovation and technical progress under capitalism has far more to do with hype and clever advertising than it does with real benefits to consumers. All the resources put into developing and marketing Windows 95 (and many other products) in no way represent useful work: much of it duplicates what has already been done.and is concerned with doing down competitors rather than creating a better product. Production for profit is wasteful and inefficient, and does not achieve what its apologists claim.

Paul Bennett

Pathfinders: Fancy a chat, GPT? (2023)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

The current tech buzz is that an AI language module called Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer is threatening to turn global industries almost upside-down. OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, Microsoft announced a $10bn investment in January this year, and by February it was valued at $29bn. This prompted Google bosses to hit the panic button and reassign tech staff to the urgent task of developing an AI competitor, now hurriedly launched as Google Bard.

ChatGPT is causing a fuss, to put it mildly. Chinese universities have banned it, and the UK Guardian newspaper is calling for government regulation (bit.ly/3FmOSrs). It doesn’t just write plausible academic essays in seconds, it can write commercial copy, speeches, song lyrics, film scripts, poems, music, and computer programs. You name it, basically.

These chatbots don’t work like an ordinary search engine, which looks for exact matches to spit back at you. Instead they use statistical analysis to shape their output based on what and how (they think) people most commonly write, and by extension what they believe, rather than on objective accuracy. This could have implications for socialists. For example, if 90% of sampled text thinks ‘socialism’ means Hitler and Pol Pot, the chatbot will think so too. However, it seems that AIs can be surprisingly even-handed, and often show a liberal or left-wing rather than conservative bias (bit.ly/3Jl2Viw). But they can also get facts embarrassingly wrong, as Google Bard did recently (bit.ly/3YXa3aI). This is worrying when you consider that medical AI chatbots are in development (bit.ly/3FAfZiY). Mental health services have already been criticised for using them (bit.ly/3n584nt).

You can try ChatGPT yourself, by signing up at chat.openai.com/auth/login. You could ask it, say, to compose an ode to your lustfully intended in the style of Byron or Keats, make up a bedtime story for your kids, debug your computer code, or give you a cheat-sheet on dialectical materialism. Some intrepid socialists have already quizzed it on socialist theory, as they discuss on our Forum (bit.ly/3TdlWrN). They conclude that it’s not terrible, and actually gets quite a lot right, if not everything.

To give you a taste, further down this page is a ChatGPT-generated ‘poem’ about abolishing money, and a short essay in response to the request ‘write an article in the style of Pathfinders in the Socialist Standard’. As you’ll see, the poem is a somewhat McGonagall-esque paean to barter systems, while ‘Pathfinders’ is a waffly and generic exercise showing that when it doesn’t know something, it hedges its bets. But still, not terrible. Then the AI does something distinctly odd. It produces an alleged quote from the Socialist Standard which is almost certainly made up, before ending abruptly with a network failure, as if it’s developed a migraine.

In response to the question ‘Do you ever invent quotes?’ ChatGPT gives an interesting answer: 

As an AI language model, I do not have the capacity to invent quotes on my own. However, I can generate quotes based on patterns and combinations of words from my training data, which includes a vast collection of texts and speeches from various sources. However, it is important to note that these generated quotes are not necessarily attributed to any specific person or source, and they should not be taken as fact or used as a source of reliable information.

In other words, it does invent quotes, but because it has compiled the words from multiple sources, it does not consider the quote to be an ‘invention’. Moreover, it will mine these sources from anywhere, without bothering about attribution. This point is actually the cause of a huge global controversy. GPT doesn’t care who authored what, it’s all just ‘training data’. In short, it ignores intellectual property rights, a core concept that underpins capitalism.

ChatGPT slurps up vast volumes of information and serves it back up in spaghettified form with no regard for original sources, a process one incensed artist describes as ‘automated intellectual asset-stripping’ (bit.ly/3n2PlZH). Fine artists and graphic designers have good reason to be worried (as an example, see a set of AI paintings done in the style of Van Gogh here – bit.ly/3LzE3Gj). ChatGPT is a language module, so it doesn’t paint pictures, but instead appropriates the output of the entire news and creative media industry, including novelists, writers, bloggers and journalists. How comprehensively these assets are being stripped may be judged by the fact that AI chatbots are predicted to hit a ceiling in 2026 as they run out of training data (bit.ly/3yRE1lU).

Google is currently in a spat with the Canadian government over the state’s insistence that AI-generated news stories should be paid for, to which Google has retaliated by censoring news outlets from Canadian search results (bit.ly/40gXuIj). More legal wrangling will undoubtedly ensue globally, but there’s no putting this genie back in the bottle. When disruptive technologies collide with capitalism’s own practices and priorities, it’s the disruptors that usually win. And this one is striking at the beating heart of the system, the sacred institution of private property.

One might be tempted to see this as a spanner that could wreck the machinery of the profit system, but capitalism is nothing if not adaptable. And besides, it’s worth asking whether a creative artist, even in socialism, would be comfortable seeing their own work hijacked, dismembered, and then served up piecemeal without their contribution ever being acknowledged. Democratic common ownership is far preferable to capitalism’s squalid property wars, but still, that surely doesn’t make plagiarism ok.

Correction

A new finding this month overturns what was stated in the March Pathfinders column. A re-examination of the study data reveals that the happiest people do in fact continue to get happier above an income level of $75,000, it’s only the most unhappy high-earners who don’t (bit.ly/40gQqLQ). You’ll certainly be relieved to know that the rich are having a good time after all.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Sorry, Page Cannot Be Displayed (2006)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sorry, Page Cannot Be Displayed

“Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace. I simply don’t understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night.” Tom Lantos of the US House International Relations subcommittee was pulling no punches when upbraiding representatives of Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Google for their supine acquiescence to the Chinese government’s insistence on strict censorship in their search engines. He further told them that they had accumulated great wealth and power, “but apparently very little social responsibility” (BBC Online, Feb 15). Google recently agreed to block politically ‘sensitive’ sites and even words, including the word ‘democracy’, while Yahoo has recently been accused by the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders of handing over information to the Chinese authorities that resulted in an 8 year prison sentence for the writer Li Zhi in 2003 and a 10 year stretch for another writer, Shi Tao, in April 2005.

But with an internet population of 111 million, the largest outside the US, China is hard to resist, and service providers who resist its charismatic charms, or who debate political ethics, are likely to end up in history as footnotes. This is globalisation, after all, and arguably it’s not all as bad as it sounds. Accusations that these companies are assisting China to suppress rebellion in return for market share is not entirely fair, since the world saw graphically how well China was able to suppress open rebellion entirely by its own efforts. Chinese capitalism is moving towards liberalisation because liberal capitalism is cheaper and easier to run than state repressive capitalism, and the entry of western IT into China is the thin end of the liberal wedge, bound even though it presently is by guards and restrictions. And unlike Yahoo, Google shows on its search results page which sites have been blocked, so that users in China do at least know that they are being censored. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we knew what information was being denied to us in the West?

PVI PDQ?

Hold the front page! Sex is good for you, says study! Acute stress is relieved by sex, according to new research from the University of Paisley, UK (New Scientist, Jan 28). If this sounds like one of those studies scientists frequently conduct simply to prove the galloping obvious, here’s the twist – it has to be penetrative vaginal sex, because other forms including masturbation don’t work as well, and abstinence doesn’t work at all. Of those studied when put in a high stress situation, those who had had exclusively penile-vaginal intercourse (PVI) recovered fastest, followed by those who had had non-coital sex or simply masturbated. Abstainers had the highest blood pressure and took longest to recover. The researcher, Stuart Brody, speculated that the result might be caused by a ‘pair-bonding’ hormone called oxytocin, released during penetrative sex.

What the study doesn’t show, of course, is the states of mind of those involved. It seems logical to Pathfinders at least that those having PVI are also most likely to be those enjoying another, more unquantifiable, phenomenon: love. So could it be love that takes the stress away, rather than the sex?

At any event, capitalism has done the same antisocial thing to sex that it has done to food, clothes, shelter, and all those other little needs of ours – it has commodified it, which means in practice that a very large proportion of the population have no access to it. It will be very interesting, once the brutal and human-hating engine of capitalist market culture has been switched off, to rerun these studies. Pathfinders suspects that there will be a lot more sex, and a lot less stress, all round.

Life Sentence

Further to our enquiry (Socialist Standard, Feb 2006) concerning the dubious benefit of living longer in capitalism, apparently we can already look forward to the even more dubious appeal of 75 year mortgages and a retirement age of 85 (BBC Online, Feb 17).

Shripad Tuljapurkar, a biologist from Stanford University, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in St Louis that anti-ageing advances could raise life expectancy by a year each year over the next two decades. This was, he thought, going to put a strain on social security and medical care, unless the retirement age was raised. Translated, what this means is that the capitalist class is damned if it’s going to pay for workers to have a long holiday from hard labour when they could be nose to the grindstone for another twenty years, or until they drop dead.

The biologist did add that the trend towards longevity would create a “permanent underclass” in poor countries that didn’t have the same resources. Sadly, this underclass already exists, and living to the age of 45 would be an achievement for many members of it.

‘Fiasco’ in Chad.

Imagine giving a mugger your wallet on condition that he only used the money to look after homeless kittens. This is pretty much what the World Bank did when, in collaboration with Exxon Mobil, it invested $4.2 bn to develop oilfields in southern Chad and then build a pipeline to pump all this lovely oil through neighbouring Cameroon to the coast.

Now as everyone knows, Chad is a corrupt dictatorship with no record of respecting human rights or giving two hoots about its own poverty-stricken population, but the government was surprisingly keen to agree to use the profits from all this oil development to invest in social healthcare programmes, a condition the pious World Bank insisted on. Now that the work has been done and the pipeline in place, the Chad government has – shock, horror! – reneged on the deal and used the first profits for what it euphemistically calls ‘internal security’, ie. suppress poverty-inspired revolts and also, probably, start another war with Sudan (New Scientist, Feb 11).

Pathfinders would like to offer its services to the World Bank as consultant (at appropriate fees) the next time it plans to make a deal with a despotic bunch of crooks. Predicting this cock-up would have been easy money. But the suspicion is that the World Bank is not really as naïve as it looks, and that in among the hand-wringing a satisfactory deal has been done. Exxon Mobil, for one, must be crying all the way to the bank.

Paddy Shannon

Pieces Together: Tough at the Top? (2008)

The Pieces Together column from the March 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Tough at the Top?

“A study by the Bow Group, a centre-right think-tank, found that 27 per cent of FTSE 100 chief executives have contracts that continue to pay bonuses if profits rise by as little as 1 per cent above inflation. Nearly one in ten firms will still pay bonuses if profits fail to beat inflation.” (Times, 4 February)



Smile, damn you Smile

“Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence. ... The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure.” (Times, 16 January)

Words of Wisdom

David Attenborough in an interview said: “Every society that’s ever existed has felt it necessary to have creation myths. Why should I believe one? People write to me and say: `You show us birds and orchids and wonderful, beautiful things - don’t you feel you should give credit to He who created those things? My reply says: what about a parasitic worm that’s boring through the eye of a four-year-old child on the bank of an African river? It confuses me that I should believe in a god who cares individually for each and every one of us and could allow that to happen” (Observer Magazine, 20 January)

This is Progress?

“Josette Sheeran, the head of the World Food Programme (WFP) in Rome, said: ‘We’re seeing more people hungry, and in greater numbers than before. We’re seeing many people being priced out of the food market for the first time. We’re seeing less crop production in many places; shorter harvest times.’ ... According to the UN world food index, prices rose by 40 per cent last year. Ms Sheeran said oil prices were driving up costs because oil was used for planting, fertiliser and delivering food.” (Times, 13 February)

Labour’s Sorry Record

“Poverty affects 3.8 million children in the UK, making ours one of the worst rates in the industrialised world. Children living in poverty are likely to have lower self-esteem, poorer health, and lower aspirations and educational achievements than their peers. Poverty also shortens lives. A boy in Manchester can expect to live seven years less than a boy in Barnet, North London.” (Times,  February)

A Brave New World?

“Here’s a vision of the not-so-distant future: Microchips with antennas will be embedded in virtually everything you buy, wear, drive and read, allowing retailers and law enforcement to track consumer items — and, by extension, consumers — wherever they go, from a distance. A seamless, global network of electronic ‘sniffers’ will scan radio tags in myriad public settings, identifying people and their tastes instantly so that customized ads, ‘live spam,’ may be beamed at them. In ‘Smart Homes,’ sensors built into walls, floors and appliances will inventory possessions, record eating habits, monitor medicine cabinets — all the while, silently reporting data to marketers eager for a peek into the occupants’ private lives.” (Yahoo News, 26 January)

Pieces Together: Religious Nonsense (2010)

The Pieces Together column from the June 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Religious Nonsense

“Women who wear immodest clothing and are promiscuous are to blame for earthquakes, an Iranian cleric said. The explanation for tremors in one of the most earthquake-prone countries came after President Ahmadinejad predicted a quake and suggested that many of Tehran’s 12 million residents should move. Hojatoleslam Kasem Sedighi was quoted by Iranian media as saying that adultery increased quakes and the only solution was to take refuge in religion” (Times, 20 April).

Right-Wing Nonsense

“The demonstration was marked by the same rhetoric that has galvanised the Tea Party movement and which crowds hear from Sarah Palin on an almost daily basis: disgust with Mr Obama’s agenda, rage at his health reform legislation, Government bailouts, accusations of a socialist White House and an unconstitutional takeover of American life by Washington. ‘We are in a war,’ said Larry Pratt, president of Gunowners of America. ‘The other side knows they are at war because they started it. They’re coming for our freedom, for our money, for our kids, for our property. They’re coming for everything because they are socialists’” (Times, 20 April).

"Lazy" Workers (1)

“The image Microsoft doesn’t want you to see: Too tired to stay awake, the Chinese workers earning just 34p an hour. Showing Chinese sweatshop workers slumped over their desks with exhaustion, it is an image that Microsoft won’t want the world to see. Employed for gruelling 15-hour shifts, in appalling conditions and 86F heat, many fall asleep on their stations during their meagre ten-minute breaks. For as little as 34p an hour, the men and women work six or seven days a week, making computer mice and web cams for the American multinational computer company” (Daily Mail, 18 April).

"Lazy" Workers (2)

“A study of 6,000 British civil servants found that those who regularly worked 10 or 11-hour days were up to 60 per cent more likely to suffer heart disease or die younger than those who worked shorter hours. The research, published online in the European Heart Journal, found that people who worked three or more hours longer than a seven-hour day put their health at risk, possibly as a result of being more stressed and having less time to unwind” (Times, 12 May).

From Handicraft to the Cloud: Part 1 of 2 (2012)

From the March 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

As in the industrial revolution, progress in the computer revolution comes at a price.

Despite all the technological innovation, computing is all too often a frustrating and limiting experience. Is this because Google, Apple, Facebook or Microsoft are evil and lock down hardware, platforms, software and content? NO! Is this because we should all avoid proprietary software, even freeware in favour of mutual co-operative open-source projects such as Linux? Well this is barely half the story as can be seen when free open-source software is not immune to industry trends such as cloud computing, bloat, eye-candy, new version fetishisation and app stores. The elephant in the room is the broad historical trends in the industry which affect free software somewhat less than proprietary software and mirror the industrial revolution and tend to disempower, limit and alienate (in the Marxist sense) the end user. Software and personal computing suffers from class divisions.

2011 was another year of hype for cloud computing. In June 2011 Google launched the Chromebook and Apple announced iCloud. The Google Chromebook is no ordinary laptop, it relies on storing software and your data on Google servers. This is called cloud computing and has been considered the next big thing in IT by market experts for some years. The term ‘cloud’ is appropriate since its benefits are nebulous and it may also represent dark clouds on the horizon for personal computing.

The history of personal computing is almost as old as the first manned moon landing in 1969, and in technological terms, the personal computers of today are certainly more advanced. Why on earth is personal computing then, a frustrating and limiting experience? By 1965, Gordon E. Moore had predicted the rate of advancement in computer hardware (doubling every 18 months), which has proved largely accurate. By 1973, the first mouse-driven graphical user interface had been produced.  Niklaus Wirth observed that ‘software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster’. This parallels Stanley Jevon’s observation over a century earlier that ‘advances in efficiency tend to increase resource consumption’. To find out why this is the case we have to look at the history of personal computing and its potential downfall.

‘A computer in every home’
The first million selling computer book was the Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth in 1968. Although it was an incredibly technical book, Knuth liked to stress the art aspect of the title, and it was certainly in stark contrast to the industry that it is today. In other respects, sentiments among computing enthusiasts would be familiar (especially to socialists) throughout history. In particular, The Hacker Ethic (Steven Levy, 1984, Hackers) which included such noble statements as ‘all information should be free’ and ‘access to computers should be unlimited and total’. This was not unusual for the time. Popular computing literature including magazines and books such as 101 Basic Computer Games (David H. Ahl, 1973) printed lines of code and encouraged users (especially children) to input the code to produce games. Most personal computers offered a command-line interface (even those with an additional graphical user interface) and were bundled with some form of the BASIC programming language, so named because of its ease of use and suitability for learning. The learning curve for using home computers was steep when compared with today but popular computing literature at the time helped make the curve somewhat more graduated. Despite its significance, very few writers have lamented the disappearance of BASIC, perhaps the most well-known article is titled ‘Why Johnny Can’t Code’ (David Brin, 2006).

As Neal Stephenson put it, in the beginning there was the command-line and Microsoft had the odd idea of selling operating systems. It was Apple Macintosh however, who introduced the first commercially successful graphical user interface with drag and drop capabilities and WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers) interface in 1984. Just a year later, the Commodore Amiga 1000 made colour, animation, sound and multi-tasking affordable to home users. Although the desktop metaphor for graphical user interfaces was used by rivals, the Amiga offered an indicator of the ethos of the time. It used the metaphor of a deeply-customisable workbench for its operating system. The desktop metaphor prevailed partly because home computers in the West evolved out of the office at a time when industrial capital was on the decline.  But also, the desktop prevailed over the workbench metaphor, because empowering users to control the means of production was gradually becoming an alien notion.

No single business seemed to be able to establish a hardware monopoly, let alone a software monopoly, that was unchallenged by rivals. In January 1986 PC Magazine reviewed fifty-seven different programs for word-processing. Even the most popular application software such as WordStar, AmiPro and WordPerfect was largely produced by small teams and in some cases individuals. The spirit of the age was described as the era of the bedroom programmer, although this is possibly a little exaggerated. Sharing software was widespread, computing magazines distributed cover disks with public domain and shareware software and users exchanged software in classifieds advertisements. Software developers might not have liked it, but magazines were an important channel for distribution. Acceptable software costs to users were generally regarded as the cost of the disk and this was the attitude in businesses as well as at home. The limitations of the hardware of the time meant also that developers were expected to optimize code to be as fast as possible.

Windows 95
The personal computer industry grew rapidly over subsequent years. By 1992, Amigas had fallen by the wayside. Ataris were cheaper and in 1993 could boast multi-tasking but by then it was too late. A monopoly position had already been established by IBM-PC compatible hardware and Microsoft consolidated their monopoly in software with a $300m launch of Windows 95. Although users may have been reluctant to embrace planned obsolescence, this was a time when the vision of ‘a computer in every home’ still involved selling hardware to first-time buyers.

The truth behind the hype was a little different, RoughlyDrafted.com (5 February 2007) comments:

 ‘From the mid 80s to the mid 90s, Microsoft amassed fortunes as an application developer for the Mac. Even in 1996, Microsoft reported making more money from Office–$4.56bn–than it did from all of its Windows sales combined–$4.11bn. Tying sales of Windows 95 to Office helped to boost sales of both. Microsoft pushed the new version of Office as a reason to buy Windows 95, and Windows 95 helped kill sales of rival applications, including the then standard WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, neither of which were available or optimized for Windows 95 at its launch. By the release of Windows XP in 2001, Microsoft had swallowed up 98 percent of the OS market’

Innovation, but not for the masses

Although Windows 95 firmly established the desktop metaphor over rivals, this was the limit of its innovation and other enhancements were criticised as merely cosmetic. The successful introduction of encyclopedia software called Encarta on CD-Rom was regarded as cutting edge use of technology for encyclopedic content. That encyclopedias might not be traditionally editorially controlled and might instead be participatory by the next major Windows release was not anticipated by Bill Gates in his published book The Road Ahead in 1995 or its heavily revised 1996 reprint.

Many innovations after the achievement of software monopoly never reached the masses or if they did, many years later than when they first appeared. IBM OS/2 never replaced Windows 95, though some considered it more advanced. By 1997, an operating system called BeOS had been introduced with instant-on boot, 64-bit, journaling, indexing and metadata tags, but this too never reached the masses. The first 32-bit internet web browser, with FTP client, usenet group reader and internet relay chat (IRC) client was not from Microsoft but from Cyberjack in 1995. But by embedding Internet Explorer into Windows just as the internet was taking off, Microsoft was able to delay tabbed web browsing as standard (until 2006) which already existed in the relatively popular Netscape Navigator. Internet Explorer became so popular for about 5 years after 2001 that it felt no need to introduce a new version. By then it could no longer ignore the threat of Mozilla Firefox (loosely descended from Netscape) which was rapidly gaining market share.

At least, the marketing for new versions of Windows did claim to offer usability improvements and fix the many problems identified in previous versions rather than just eye-candy. What became clear beyond any doubt was that software was getting inflated at a rate roughly in proportion to each passing year (faster than Moore’s Law). Benchmarking tests are one way to test this, and are sometimes used in the independent computing press.

Bill Gates commented: ‘I’m saying we don’t do a new version to fix bugs […] We’d never be able to sell a release on that basis’ (Focus Magazine 23 October 1995).

The vision of ‘a computer in every home’ began to look dated. Instead, focus shifted to encouraging existing computer users to upgrade software. It suited hardware manufacturers that software updates should make older computers slower. Whereas the earlier trend was for first-time hardware sales to come packaged with software, now software sales (with artificial barriers)  would drive the need to buy new hardware.

Games also played a big part in driving early hardware sales of the first personal computers in the home. Games revenue eventually overtook the movie and music industry and games were even described as the leading artform of the era. The latest ‘Call of Duty’ game was the biggest entertainment launch ever in revenue terms. Games helped drive the industry upgrades but many users’ reluctance to upgrade persisted, and Windows sales through retail channels continued to decline. Planned obsolescence needed introducing more forcefully, and subscriber-computing and the internet was about to offer the opportunity to do it.

The emergence of viruses and malware on the burgeoning internet helped the software update industry. The idea of software spying on the user or otherwise compromising privacy, was something malware and viruses did, not legitimate software. Users owned their software and anything else was an alien concept. As one user on MSFN.org put it:

  ‘I will never understand why users tolerate or accept this. If an individual or company demanded that you prove that you did not steal your home or car, you’d eventually file some kind of complaint or harassment charges against them. If the same standards that are used for applications were applied to operating systems, XP and newer systems would be classified as spyware. Windows has been going in the opposite direction for some time, with each new version giving the user less control over what it does and less access to the data it stores.’

This comfortable position of around 90 percent market share could not be threatened by any rivals. Journalists of the computing press might have been tempted to describe the hardware and software monopolies as the end of home personal computing history. But to do so, would have been as foolish as Francis Fukuyama’s claim to have reached ‘The End of History’ a decade earlier.

DJW

Link to Part 2

From Handicraft to the Cloud: Part 2 of 2 – The 21st Century (2012)

From the April 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1

The Internet versus the iPod

The first year of the 21st Century was a remarkable one for mass personal computing in many respects including the launches of Windows XP, the iPod and Wikipedia. In 2001, XP was introduced for both home and office users – for over a decade, these had been separate. For home users it was the first version of Windows that required activation (Microsoft Office soon followed suit). Installation CDs were not included with new XP computers which discouraged experimenting with alternative systems. Various legal and illegal projects took the XP operating system and stripped it down for performance gains, proving it could still be functional with less bloatware. Windows Media Player was ‘bundled’ (included in the installation) but was still unpopular, being bloated with eye-candy, and many users replaced it. XP also removed the command-line interface option, a key route out for power users.

The Scratchware Manifesto (at the Home of the Underdogs website) sums up the state of games development but the comment equally applies to software generally.

  “An industry that was once the most innovative and exciting artistic field on the planet has become a morass of drudgery and imitation. A project that costs millions must have a development team to match; ten people, twenty, thirty, more. It must take years from project start to completion. It must involve so many talents, and so much labour, that no single creative vision can survive. … You need thirty talents to develop a game? Bullshit. Richard Garriott programmed Ultima by himself in a matter of weeks. Chris Crawford developed Balance of Power sitting by himself at his Mac. Chris Sawyer created RollerCoaster Tycoon – last year’s number 1 best-selling game – almost entirely on his own. What do you need to create a game? Two people and a copy of Code Warrior. You need millions in funding to create a great game? Garbage! As recently as 1991, the typical computer game cost less than $200,000 to develop. NetHack, still one of the best computer games ever created, was developed for nothing, by a development team working as a labour of love, in their spare time.”

It wasn’t that Microsoft was incapable of innovation, nor was it a company uniquely bad for users’ needs. Windows XP actually introduced decent multi-user accounts albeit some 10 years after Linux. But Microsoft has held back many features that might have made life easier for users. In Windows Neptune, Microsoft experimented with task-orientated interfaces (allowing users to focus specifically on relevant tasks without unnecessary screen clutter) pre-empting by about a decade those of the Chromebook and Ubuntu Linux Unity. Unlike XP however, Windows Neptune was never released. Driven by short-term commercial and compatibility considerations, the standard desktop metaphor of files and folders remained for the mass of users while no-one got to hear about alternatives. Microsoft even tried to incorporate the desktop metaphor into the Windows phone, which finally proved its uselessness beyond all doubt. Windows 8, predicted for release at the end of this year, finally drops the desktop metaphor to some extent. Eventually perhaps Microsoft will provide features long in existence such as live CD/USBs from which you can run an operating system, bespoke installations rather than bloated generic ones, unattended installations you don’t have to babysit, and installation direct from USB.

The internet had effects on the industry in ways which both benefitted and hindered users. At the turn of the millennium, the hacker ethic of sharing was dramatically revived, Napster popularised peer-to-peer sharing of information, principally music. It was tremendously popular and free access but it was also illegal. After Napster’s demise at the hands of the industry, Apple launched iTunes Store in 2003 which was only accessed through iTunes software and could only update iPods. Such artificial software ‘lock-ins’ were a way to stimulate hardware sales in the post “computer in every home” heyday.

The sharing ethic was also channelled into legal collaborative efforts. Many innovations came from the Free and Open Source Software movements. Linux had become a workable operating system for ordinary home users and Knoppix introduced the first popular live-CD environment. Puppy Linux stripped down bloated operating systems without harming functionality and proved modern software can run on old systems. Debian Linux was software with an ethical sharing philosophy. Wikipedia dwarfed all of these innovations, becoming one of the biggest encyclopedias in human history. Several CD-Rom based encyclopedias that had been considered so innovative only a few years before promptly went bust.

Analysing the trend

Criticism of the industry is varied and to some extent constrained by the industry press reliance on advertising revenue from the targets of their criticism. Some criticism is little more than vendor tribalism, but some goes deeper, exploring the mode of production itself. In one popular article, commentator Joel Spolsky in December 2003 claimed somewhat idealistically that making software is not a production process, as if design is not part of production.  Some, like Eric S. Raymond, came up with a novel critique. He makes much of the open source aspect, but little of the free access part. In a 2008 essay he says “More precisely, I hate the proprietary software system of production. Not at the artisan level; I’ve defended the right of programmers to issue work under proprietary licenses because I think that if a programmer wants to write a program and sell it, it’s neither my business nor anyone else’s but his customer’s what the terms of sale are.” This is similar to those who complain that software encloses content in “walled gardens” and want to tear down the walls, but are still content to let the produce of these gardens be exploited by private interests.

The most radical voices tend to come from the free software movement who add free access (an aspect of freeware) to their open source critique of walled gardens. Even among these advocates it is becoming clear that the free access and open source software is not enough. Founder of Linux, Linus Torvalds complained of the “users are idiots mentality” on 12 December 2005.

  “This “users are idiots, and are confused by functionality” mentality … is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don’t use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn’t do what I need it to do.”

The present

This leads us to the present where the industry has resorted to practices blatantly not in the interest of users such as the Microsoft policy to “extend, embrace, extinguish open standards”. Software aims for complete simplicity for the mass of home users while at the same time being increasingly difficult for power users to work with. App stores are characterised by software or content as a commodity with ultimate control by the store owner, which is a far cry from the hacker ethic. Even free software supporters talk approvingly of creating app stores. Maybe they would even support remotely bricking (disabling) iPhones if they are jailbroken (hacked) in order to update their applications.

Some primitivists seek solace in retro-computing and oldversion.com has the slogan “because newer is not always better”. Meanwhile Microsoft markets new versions of Windows with gimmicks including a 3D desktop, better voice recognition, touchscreen and Office with a ribbon interface. These gimmicks extend to using bogus version numbers. Windows 7 was actually revealed to be marketing hype and known internally as Windows 6.1, meaning that it was a lot less different than it pretended. Microsoft is working on artificially locking new hardware to only work with Microsoft operating systems, no doubt calling this better ‘security’. Windows 8 invites users to hand over the ability to wipe clean their computer data to remote Microsoft servers, supposedly for greater ease of use. Then there is ‘shovelware’. Sales of new hardware are driven by low prices subsidised by advertisers who ‘shovel’ in pre-installed low-value software as advertising filler.

Conclusion

The personal computer revolution bears comparison to the Industrial Revolution, only the personal computer revolution has happened more quickly. The sum of all human knowledge will soon be available at our fingertips. The tools to create any recordable media such as film, music and books will be too. ‘Infosocialists’ such as Anonymous and HackBloc (whose motto is ‘Exploit code not people’), the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman all support the free software movement and co-operative enterprises such as GNU/Linux. There are also Lawrence Lessig and the Electronic Frontier Foundation who approvingly argue that ‘free culture helps free markets’, clearly only seeing part of the solution from a socialist perspective. History and industry trends show that all code should be the common treasury of all and developers should be encouraged to develop passive consumers into empowered knowledgeable end users. Although Marx wrote some notebooks on the history of technology they are now lost, so perhaps the last word should go to Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain’s predictions of the end of personal computing.

  “The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.” (Jonathan Zittrain, 2011)

DJW 

Further reading

Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics (1983) by Nathan Rosenberg (particularly Chapter 2).

Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society (1994, 2004) by Nick Dyer-Witheford, Treason pamphlet

Cyber-Marx (1999) by Nick Dyer-Witheford.

The Anarchist in the Library (2004) by Siva Vaidhyanathan.

Free Culture (2004) Lawrence Lessig.

Free culture, P2P networks, alternative economic models, and why some people do not want freedom (2005) by Jorge Cortell

Critical Information Studies: A Bibliographic Manifesto (2006) by Siva Vaidhyanathan.

Why I Hate Proprietary Software (2008) by Eric S. Raymond.

Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation (2009) by Amy E. Wendling.

Free Software, Free Society (2010) by Richard Stallman.

The World in your hand (1995)

CD-Rom Review from the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Encarta '95 CD-ROM - The Complete Interactive Multimedia Encyclopedia (Microsoft £85.)

Technology — don't you just love it? Whatever, this is the baby that’s currently putting thousands of encyclopedia salesmen out of a job. A compact disc packed with 26,000 articles, it may not look as glorious as those bound volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, but it’s a damn sight easier to use — providing. that is, that you have access to a CD-ROM facility on a PC. It also has the advantage of colour pictures, video film and stereo sound. It will talk and sing to you if provoked.

Without doubt, it is a quite excellent reference guide with some stunning features, and even gives you the facility to print out text and pictures. The sections on social science, history and philosophy are voluminous, although the quality of the information varies according to the contributors. Even so. it is nice to see a reference under the term “socialism" to the fact that this word was initially used as a synonym for communism, a society of social or common ownership of wealth. This may be considered surprising as the entry was partly written by the late Norman Thomas, former leader of the reformist US Socialist Party.

The entries on Marx. Engels, Kautsky, Luxemburg et al are generally well written and informative and there is relatively little to complain about. As befits a US publication, the references to Daniel De Leon and Eugene Debs are also good, although the statement that De Leon was an “authoritarian socialist" will annoy some.

Much of the usual mumbo-jumbo is regurgitated in the economics section, though not more so than in other encyclopedias. In fact there is a reasonable outline of most bourgeois economic theories, and there is also a small section on Marxian economics, which is a definite advance.

Microsoft originally designed this product mainly for the US market, and this often shows, with truly huge sections on American history, politics and geography, but for 1996 a version specifically for use in Britain is promised. If such a tiny, insignificant groups as the American Labor Party can rate an entry in the US version, we can hopefully assume that a distinctive organisation like the Socialist Party of Great Britain should be assured a place on merit for the version over here.

Dave Perrin

American nightmare (2004)

From the October 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

The much heralded ‘American Dream’, whereby everybody can start off poor, but by hard work and application rise to the top is often summed up in a political way as “Log Cabin to White House”. We are usually offered the example of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president, as an example of this transformation. Lincoln’s career from shopkeeper to surveyor to lawyer to politician is indeed remarkable, but hardly typical of the 19th century in America and certainly nothing like the America of today; where the vast accumulated wealth of the capitalist class is mostly inherited.
 
Another aspect of this dream that we are supposed to swallow is that the humblest of Americans can topple the government if they so desire. That anyone can run for office and attack the bastions of wealth and privilege is one of the cornerstones of this American delusion. The reality is somewhat different, as recent figures for the financing of the electoral efforts for the November elections of the Democratic and Republican Parties show.
 
An organisation called the Center for Responsive Politics showed how the recent Federal Election Commission’s laws enacted to stop the lavishing of funds on political parties are being circumvented. Here are some examples how the capitalist class get around such legislation. New campaign funding laws outlawing unregulated contributions to political parties are avoided by individual executives of corporations  donating and for the firms to donate lavishly to fund convention events.
 
That such gifts are huge is shown by the example quoted in the Observer  (1 August):

 “The biggest corporate donors in this years American presidential election are executives of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank. For the first time, the Wall Street firm has become the US’s top corporate funder, contributing a total of nearly $4 million to both George W. Bush’s and John Kerry’s campaigns . . . Steven Weiss of the Centre for Responsive Politics said: ‘Goldman Sachs is involved in the political process and knows how to play the game. Money plays a huge role in politics. It sends a message that you will get access and influence. If you don’t contribute, you’re on the sidelines`”

An example of how important it is to US corporations to donate large amounts of cash to political parties is given in another article in the same issue of that newspaper:

   “What’s more interesting is the way Microsoft has made the transition from a company which essentially ignored politics to one which has become adept at channelling its money through political conduits to further its corporate interests. In 1995, the budget for Microsoft’s Political Action Committee (PAC) was a paltry $16,000. By 2000 it was $1.6 million. And total donations by Microsoft and its employees to political parties, candidates and PACs in the 2000 election cycle came to more than $6.1m, according to Edward Roeder, a long-time observer of corporate political donations.”

What brought about this change of policy at Microsoft? Microsoft’s ruthless destruction of Netscape in the mid-1990s and its contravention of the US anti-trust laws led to a series of anti-trust prosecutions that threatened their dominant position. The corporation realised it needed friends in the administration and set about reversing its previous politically aloof position.
 
The reality behind the American Dream is the sordid money-grubbing, back-stabbing rat race of capitalism; where politicians are merely the message boys of the rich and powerful and where the poor and exploited are left behind. The American Dream is a horrendous nightmare.
 
As socialists we are not pessimistic about the future. We believe that the class that produces all the wealth of the world will wake from this capitalist nightmare and bring about a society based on production solely for use. After all, as old Abe once said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

Richard Donnelly