This is not what the future was supposed to be about. The future was supposed to bring us infinite possibilities through the means of technology. It was meant to be awesome.
It was not meant to be artificially limited through the means of technology which could have been used to make our lives better instead.
Where did we go wrong?
That’s probably the real reason they don’t use money on Star Trek. Not so much because they eliminated scarcity (which they obviously did, with numerous planets to choose from) but because giving everyone the basic means to sustain themselves was such a small fraction of the economy that it became dehumanizing to force people to work so much when society could provide for all within the percentage of a rounding error.
This concept’s relevance for coffee makers: what’s a coffee maker without coffee? Anyone can brew coffee by pouring hot water through a sock (as it’s done in much of the developing world) and I can say from experience that it’s both more convenient and can even make a better cup. So the key is the coffee, not the machine. It’s not really surprising that Keurig wants to cement itself as a middleman, and since coffee is everywhere, it was probably inevitable that they’d turn to a DRM solution.
Hydroponics, fabless photovoltaics and big data medicine are going to be what take us into the future, not some kitchen gismo. In fact, the more I witness “progress” in my lifetime, the more I see that the really revolutionary stuff like the internet is generally free and shared by all. Otherwise it just makes some guy rich. I want to be rich too, but I’ve spent half my life chasing a goal that wouldn’t even be necessary if I was off the grid and could just get left the heck alone.
Ehhh. I guess that's basically true, but people would probably read the wrong idea into it if you phrase it this way.
An economist would rather phrase it as "a dollar spent on something is a vote for there to be one dollar more of something." But it can be flipped around to your line of thinking as "a dollar spent is a representation of one dollar's worth of dissatisfaction or unmet need that someone has." If everyone has exactly what they want, then market velocity goes to zero. Money doesn't cease to exist; it just ceases to be moved around. (Inflation is, partly, a disincentive for ever letting this happen.)
Either way, even in a post-scarce utopia, capitalism would still survive; it has useful emergent information-redistribution properties beyond its use in plain survival. For example, an "everyone gets a basic income and spends it in a market" system thoroughly beats a central-allocation system when it comes to figuring out what crops need to be grown, what factories need to be built, etc.
It's not about efficiency or inefficiency. You can't alone create everything. Food, water, power, maybe. But what about designing something great and complex?
You could argue people would do this for free, but that's not right. A designer isn't an emoting artist seeking to express some particular vision. A designer solves humanity's problems. There's usually lots of things we want to express, but we don't have time to express them all. The way we select the problem to solve is by evaluating the economic potential of it.
In other words, money makes people solve problems other people care about. It's the fitness function of technological evolution.
"Because money" is sufficient justification for actions in business that would otherwise be classified as sociopathic. This is fairly light in the grand scheme of things.
We first must fix the problem of authority.
If Keurig coffee was somehow astoundingly good out of their machine, with their pods, would we have less of a problem with what they are doing?
What Keurig is doing also doesn't prevent another manufacturer from competing with an unencumbered alternative. Shouldn't we expect such a system to compete in the marketplace on its merits?
Not sure if this fits the definition of irony, but Keurig is the company that came up with the unencumbered 1.0 coffee pod standard. The original DRM was the idea that a scoop of ground coffee beans was incompatible with the pod brewer. 2.0 is exactly the same, but with the RFID (I'm assuming. I haven't cared to look into it) "protection". I'd imagine 3.0 will have some kind of boolean logic much like inkjet cartridges have these days that will make the thing complain that the pod has already been used.
Though, I entirely agree with you. This DRM is only present because Keurig wants to protect it's brand. It came up with the pod brewer concept, much like Apple came up with the iPhone and it's app store. Rejecting what it deems to be inferior or competitive to it's goals is it's objective. I'd wish everything was more open and available for interoperability, but it's their product up until I purchase it, so the design is out of my control.
Fantastic line of discussion! Glad you're bringing it up.
We went wrong when we said, "We can have infinite possibilities, but only through >ME<."
And then we cemented the deal when we went along with the "guy" who said, "You can only have infinite possibilities through >ME<."
And we let it get worse when we rationalize the Keurig with bullshit like "Having a pot of coffee around is unsafe because of the burner, etc."
Technology is a stand-in for relationships - what you would do for someone if you were there, but conveniently you've duplicated yourself via machine. We went wrong when we said, "Well, if I was there, I would prevent you from having coffee from a convenient machine." In reality you wouldn't - you would share as much as possible. However, when we replace ourselves with machines designed by greedy committees, we write ourselves out of the equation.
Plus Keurig tastes like a cup of monkey-poo. French press is the way to go (or iced coffee).
It's almost as convenient for a single cup as Keurig, much cheaper, and if you've got a local coffee roaster, much, much better.
Seriously: analogue for analogue things folks.
I mean people pay over $1 for a Christmas card and the justification for that is "someone has to come up with the designs!"
Had unreasonable expectations?