It’s pretty easy to spend a lot of money for computer parts right now, and I was really lucky to get an SD card for my Nintendo Switch for a reasonable price. This brought me to a thought that I wrote down on Mastodon.
If technology will be expensive in the future, we will either have less of it, or we will get around this hurdle by managing the access in a “smart way,” like in this post about the refusal of the current way the market has turned into:
Nothing ever breaks because nothing is yours, nothing is repairable because nothing is physical, and nothing is private because everything runs somewhere else, on someone else’s computer. The quiet moral, felt when the network briefly stutters and the world freezes, is that keeping old hardware alive was never nostalgia or paranoia, but a small, stubborn act of digital self-defense; A refusal to accept that the future must be rented, permissioned, and revocable at any moment.
Hold on to Your Hardware
But what if there is already an option that we nearly forgot about?
Back in the day, a computer was something so special and expensive that you only had one, and it was set up in a way that everyone had access to it. But how is a computer managing multiple people, you ask?
Disclaimer: I call it „Family PC,“ but of course a family is what you make out of it and is not defined by blood. You can call it „Household PC“ if you like.
Actually, there is a special feature hidden in every computer. It’s called a „User Account.“ You can set up an account for every person that wants to access it with its own password. The best part is that everything is safely stored, and the other people who also have an account on the same computer can’t see your stuff.
History Time
I am not an expert on computer history, but I think the user interface with accounts and all that is coming from time-sharing from the 1960s.
By allowing many users to interact concurrently with a single computer, time-sharing dramatically lowered the cost of providing computing capability, made it possible for individuals and organizations to use a computer without owning one
Wikipedia
If you think about it, cloud server and virtual servers have the same paradigm in common. If you want to learn more about these ancient days, I recommend the book The Dream Machine.
But how will this save us from exorbitant prices and a vanishing consumer market? Computers will stay expensive in the future!
My proposal is simple: Hold on to your electronic devices. If you need something, buy it smart and try to solve your computer needs at home. I reused a Raspberry Pi as a Home Assistant server, and now I do not depend on any kind of subscription service or manufacturer who is trying to lock me into their ecosystem. I can mix IKEA, Hue, and Eve products in my setup, and everything is working together. Our over 10-year-old washing machine is sending a notification when it’s done.
And if there are multiple people in your household, why not set up one of these family PCs? I heard you can even share Android smartphones because they have a user management system, but I never saw anyone doing it.
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