SSS
September 7, 2012 by Melajara
Kindle Fire HD (credit: Amazon)
No, this is not about WWII SS, although it’s about another form of evil, maybe.
This is mostly a reaction to the sales pitch from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, presenting the new Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Fire HD at a much touted press conference yesterday.
I’m not talking about a new phenomenon, nor mere $$$, but with Bezos orchestration, which is just a perfectly rational answer to the forces shaping current consumer electronics, this is just too much IMHO.
The Santa Monica presentation to the press was scheduled about 10 days ago. 6 days ago, the first images of a “Paperwhite” device surfaced from a website called TheVerge. About 10 hours before the presentation, a 1 minute 20 ad was broadcast along the first NFL game of the season.
About one hour before the presentation, CNET, a web site specialized in gadgetry evaluation, proposed a special talk show where two knowledgeable people filled the void by speculating on the specs and target market of the new Kindle models.
Alongside, journalists were gathering in the conference room, each one with a laptop or some instantaneous reporting device to transcribe Bezos’ holy talk to the rest of the planet, me included.
And the true stars were announced. I won’t go into the specs here, you can find them from Amazon.
So, what’s the fuss, aren’t those lovely gadgets with a lot of bang for the buck?
Welcome to the silo
Sure, but let’s go now to the evil part, the SSS part.
When you are buying a Kindle, you are not buying yet another Android eReader or tablet; you are entering an ecosystem. Each Kindle sale is a peculiar sale; I’m calling it SSS, for Single Silo Sale.
The first thing you are supposed to do after having unpacked the item, plugged in the charger and powered on the device, is to ACTIVATE it. This means binding the Kindle to a specific Amazon account for access to the growing galaxy of Amazon services. First and foremost, all content, books, music, movies should be acquired through Amazon.
You will be enticed to join the Amazon Prime club for rebates on books, limited sharing capabilities on your library, remote storage of your stuff on the Amazon cloud and so on.
Besides reading, watching TV or movies on your shiny tablet, maybe you would like to play. No problem, Amazon has its own approved lot of games on its App store alongside other Android apps. But yet again, the offer is a subset of the full Android market, subsidized by Amazon through the target device, this devilish lovely Kindle.
Amazon is pushing hard to entice you to buy, buy and buy again. For example, watching a movie delivered by Amazon, you can stop it, be introduced to the list of characters, when they are appearing in the movie (for further reference) and be presented a list of other movies where your fetish actor/actress is playing too. This service is a synergy with IMDB, a giant movie database acquired by Amazon. Of course, all those other movies are just one click away for buying with immediate Amazon delivery.
Now take a book, you read the 20 first pages on the living room, yet another 15 pages, light off, in your bed with the glowing Paperwhite screen. Next day, when commuting, you can start again your reading but synchronized with an audio version. So, say you’re in traffic jam, your book will be spoken to you from page 35. This will not be the mechanical voice from the bundled text to speech transcriber but a true audio version spoken by a professional actor. Of course, you’ll have to buy both book versions for that service, hopefully at a bundle price.
And what about kids? Bezos has 4 children, and he said he knows, for access to the screen, that it’s all about negotiation with the kids. So now you have parental control with individualized user’s profile and timed access (e.g. 30 minutes video, 1 hour on comics reading but unlimited reading time on textbooks) and that’s it.
Command and control
This ought to be a formidable platform for education, but no, it will be yet another dumbing-down device milking the consumer.
SSS, or this trick to lock you in a silo of possible purchases from the seminal acquisition of the device, has been pioneered by Apple with the Macintosh strict GUI guidelines and its specific market place, but at that time it was a more open process, as Apple didn’t control the entire market. Individual software brands could thrive without special ties with Apple.
Then, the model has been emphasized by the big Telcos with their subscription plans, where they made no money on the (smart)phone itself but on the services. Now, it’s epitomized by Amazon and its Kindle brand. But with the ever expanding capabilities of consumer electronics, the trend is going from bad to worse, now that the device is constantly spying on you, reporting your habits, location, reading patterns (e.g. from monitoring page shuffling, the new Kindle will present you at the bottom of the screen an estimated time before chapter completion!).
In our soft Orwellian world, dominated not by an all-powerful state but by a cartel of mega corporations dictating their vision of “progress,” the way to push technology is not through collective empowerment anymore.
Instead, in an unabated promotion of individualism, people are lured to technology by teasing of their lower instincts.
Abiding to this trend, yesterday, Amazon didn’t present devices for empowerment, but yet another means of aiming at narcissistic entertainment fulfillment for dumbed-down consumers.
As usual, clever people will shrug, smile and say so what? Take the shiny device at dumped price, jailbreak it and throw everything at the little devil for free, including millions of DRM stripped copyrighted material!
Yes you can, but isn’t it all too bad for you to have to take the runaway road to feel free, sailing the world without any “buy this, try that, don’t miss those…” ubiquitous solicitations?
There was a time when society really strived for empowerment of the people by technological advances, fostering education to achieve a proud sense of collective progress. This time is lost.
Now it’s time for control and profit, period.
Comments (52)
by Jim Mooney
Ugh, Apple’s Walled Garden on steroids. This certainly decided me against a Kindle. But I’m not getting an iPod since Apple worked to destroy Flash (which I took effort to learn) and Google (which fought for us against SOPA while Apple hid out) and is trying to wreck the patent system with absurd litigation ( http://twitpic.com/a957p0 ). I guess it’s Android for me. For one thing, I get a lot of video and reading material from the web that are Not from Amazon or in their formats.
by VictorH
Witch tablet would you recomend then? I was thinking about buying the Kindle Fire but now I don’t want it anymore, now I’m thinking about the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, but I’m not sure… any sugestions?
by Mr.X
Re: “No, this is not about WWII SS, although it’s about another form of evil, maybe.”
Wow, I thought this article is about the US-military.
by Michael Conti
I really wish you hadn’t posted about Ayn Rand earlier. I love this newsletter, but now I’m getting irritated just trying to forget that I saw the post.
by Editor
Michael, we encourage dissent. Question authority. :)
by Bri
Has anyone seen my missing bonobo? I can’t seem to find him.
by SpottedMarley
all of these devices are for people who belong in a silo. anybody with half a brain and a sprinkle of technological dexterity can so very easily read any book on the planet absolutely free and on any device they want. kindle might as well be an apple product. they all pander to rich people who have no clue how to deal with technology
by Jim Mooney
Apple Fanboiz will be the first beneficiaries of Kurzweil’s AI. But instead of supplementing their brains, they’ll install one ;’)
by Ian Clarke
With the amount of info available, we’re all able to make informed choices about any new product. There is no hoodwinking here; we can all see the strings. Did you seriously think that we couldn’t? Do you see yourself on some sort of moral crusade, hoping to stop us hapless lemmings from jumping?
Or did you just fancy a bit of a rant? Be honest now. :)
by snake0
You provide the answer yourself unknowingly. If everyone buys one and roots it Amazon would see the folly of their ways and make it a more open platform. Or not. Either way I get a cool reader with free books ;-) No point being negative about it.
by Editor
Amazon confirms: All new Kindle Fires stuck with ads (no opt-out options)
by Lord Penguin
That article now says that Amazon offered an opt-out for ads after the bad publicity, but it costs $15…
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-3126_7-57508986/amazon-backtracks-will-offer-$15-opt-out-for-ads-on-kindle-fire-tablets/
by Editor
Ha, ha, give them a few more days, with melajara types sniping at their heels, and the opt-out will be free and they’ll be issuing refunds of the $15 and “what were we thinking?” statements…. :)
by WhoMe
“Now take a book, you read the 20 first pages on the living room, yet another 15 pages, light off, in your bed with the glowing Paperwhite screen. Next day, when commuting, you can start again your reading but synchronized with an audio version. So, say you’re in traffic jam, your book will be spoken to you from page 35. This will not be the mechanical voice from the bundled text to speech transcriber but a true audio version spoken by a professional actor.”
Are you speculating about the future here? My understanding is that Paperwhite abandons audio, so can’t do Audible books. Seems dumb, but there you are.
by melajara
True, you can’t do this from a Paperwhite Kindle ONLY. But from Paperwhite specs sheet:
“Our Whispersync technology synchronizes your last page location, bookmarks, and annotations across all your devices so you can pick up exactly where you left off reading.”
So, you should (has to be tested) be able to do this if you have a second Kindle supporting audio, maybe even from your “old” 3g Kindle if the feature is implemented as e.g. meta tag alignment from last saved and recovered reading profile from your Amazon account.
by Peter Kinnon
Commerce, along with warfare, has always been a major driver of technological progress. We are seriously mistaken in our usual anthropocentric (and antiquated) belief that it is all some how for the betterment of mankind”. Sure, we do enjoy some spin-off, but the evolution of technology, if we are fully honest and objective, is clearly seen to be an autonomous process which takes place in the collective imagination of our particular species.
You may have noticed that we are increasingly, in a sense, “enslaved” by our PCs, mobile phones, their apps and many other trappings of the net. We are already largely dependent upon it for our commerce and industry and there is no turning back. What we perceive as a tool is well on its way to becoming an agent.
We need to face up to the fact that, except in the most trivial everyday sense, there are no true inventors or designers.
It can be argued, with strong evidential support, that we do not, invent or create artifacts of systems but that , rather, these are more properly viewed as having evolved within the collective imagination of our species.
To quickly put this counter-intuitive view into focus, would you not agree that the following statement has a sound basis?
We would have geometry without Euclid, calculus without Newton or Liebnitz, the camera without Johann Zahn, the cathode ray tube without JJ Thomson, relativity (and quantum mechanics) without Einstein, the digital computer without Turin, the Internet without Vinton Cerf.
The list can. of course be extended indefinitely.
Rather, it is time to recognize that the technological development is part of an evolutionary continuum that can be traced from the formation of the chemical elements in stars and supernovae. And projected forward to the next phase of the”life” process which is at present in gestation in wnat we now call the Internet.
This mode is informally outlined in l”The Goldilocks Effect: What Has Serendipity Ever Done For Us?” , a free download in e-book formats from the “Unusual Perspectives” website
by Jon
I disagree. If such inventions are to be expected, why has not every culture invented them? Instead we see that many cultures never invented any of the ‘modern’ tools, from radio to electricity, chemistry, mechanics or any such thing. Even something as basic as the wheel was never invented by some American civilizations.
This is also one of my gripes with intelligent life on other planets: They can have human level intelligence, yet never invent the radio. We have no idea what the chances of an intelligence to develop our current technological society are.
The situation our race currently finds itself in is more likely the result of many complex happenings, interactions, and strokes of luck (and bad luck).
The world as a whole does show increasing complexity, I’m not arguing that, nor the exponential nature of it. And specific people definitely aren’t the only ones who could have made certain discoveries. But complete cultures, with the resources, insights and pressures that they have, are.
Technological development is the next step in our evolutionary continuum, but I’d dare say that we have no reason to assume it’s an inevitable result of life. It’s more likely we’re the product of a lot more randomness and chance than we’re comfortable with.
by Mr.X
Concerning the wheel: It would not be of much use in muddy jungles, would it? You have to take into account that people, because of massive slave manpower, thought in terms of manpower, not machines.
Why should god chosen king xy care wheter the work of slave xy is hard, or takes time.Just send more slaves, and punish them if they won’t work hard enough.
Higher technology was almost never invented solely by a single culture.
by Jim Mooney
So, rather than being carriers of Selfish Genes, a la Dawkins, we are carriers of Selfish Tech. Wotta concept.
by Logic
I hate reviews like this, and find the editorial opinions peppered throughout the article to be completely inappropriate for the explicit goals, objectives, and principles of KurzweilAI.net.
A tech offering by a corporation is a push to the future, regardless of its viability, its competitive essence, or its motivation. This site should be reporting the offerings and innovations, not editorializing them; leave that for the comments section.
“Evil” is a subjective label, and reduces intelligent discourse to name-calling. It completely undermines the author’s point, which, ironically, is proportedly pro-scientific and pro-education. There is nothing “evil” or even offensive about the product reported here, merely the author’s personal distaste for it. I realize that it was filed under the more op-ed style “blog” section, but it represents a fundamental disregard for the very engine that drives the acceleration of technology.
by Chris
This article makes valid points. E-book readers aren’t inherently evil. Nor do I mind a razor-and-blades revenue model, as long as the costs are transparent to the consumer. But DRM is a scam that exploits people’s limited technical knowledge, and hiding it behind the Android brand is an unethical move.
by GAUSS
Mark: Right on.
by daveb
This is the kind of “scary corporation” drum that I used to see beaten to death read in my students’ college essays. As an individual who works in the IT industry, I have seen the “ecosystem” concept for consumer as well as Enterprise computing services developing naturally over the last decade or two. People have grown tired of hodgepodge collections of apps and services — cobbling together “best-of-breed” solutions has proved too cumbersome and expensive, and didn’t ever deliver the promise of inter-operability, nor did it deliver the promise of a happy user experience. Ecosystems of hardware, apps and services make sense in many mundane areas, such as reducing tedious logins, security authentications, and yes, payments. It turns out many people will pay a significant amount of $ to gain simplicity. The provider that gives people what they demand. The consumer is the one driving here, and Apple was first to drive the user experience, and is profiting as a result.
by Jim Mooney
I’m not willing to pay any $ since I’m a Knowledge Pirate ;’)
by John S. Boles
Interesting article and comments for a site that generally enlightens regarding the march toward transhumanism. We have decisions to make as we connect, have connected, to anything.
by Editor
“March” is an interesting word. suggesting military mind entrainment and groupthink. Do you think some aspects of transhumanism and the Internet may be leading in that direction?
by Bri
Oh boy! Is that a rhetorical question or what!!!! Everything tends to cluster. Attracted by almost a force of gravity. Take the school system in America as a good example. It’s all “public” schools. It’s supposed to have the same curricula but there are vast differences between each one. This is caused by the community dynamics. The quality of teachers, the administration, resources available, etc. So there is no way to completely indoctrinate each student identically. It really is impossible unless everybody lead exactly the same lives. Think of it as genetic diversity from one individual to another. As we interact it’s an intercourse. New ideas new seeds are planted. Some flourish, some fade depending on how viable they are in our daily paradigms.( all those dayglo freaks who used to paint thier face, they joined the human race, somethings will never change) . We are a whole. All the nations of the world affect each other. Eventually countries like North Korea and Iran will join the human race because thier constituents will be drawn by a gravity like pull to be apart of the new paradigm. Just like the Arab spring is trying to do. The Internet is a nervous system of the human race. So structures like tablets, IPads, Apple,etc are temporary clusters that will survive if they function well for society. They will cross polinate and breed with the intercourse of commerce, forming temporary marriages( it’s not just between men and women) and eventual separations. Fascism could never work. We aren’t ants or bees. This will be even more diverse once robots really enter the scene. We tend to diversify. Each of us an individual unto themselves.
by Jim Mooney
The paragraph is your friend.
by Editor
LOL
by Dennis R.
Jumping in here, but perhaps the writer was merely suggesting that transhumanism is inevitable. Although I suppose that will sound sinister to some people.
I think most people assume that everyone in the transhumanist movement will share similar opinions on most issues. Abortion, guns, taxes, recreational drugs. Maybe assisted suicide (wink-wink)? I believe that shared mindset is unlikely in the near term. And I don’t know how long the “near term” will last.
Technological progress will probably keep moving at an ever more accelerated rate and many of us– perhaps even the commentators on these boards– will have a tough time keeping up. In the meantime, we’re all still human and that means we have potential for good or evil. And some of us can be easily manipulated.
by Bob
You basically described every tablet out there. Google’s goal is to get you to buy from Google Play, that’s why with many of the higher-end Android devices Google throws in some amount of Google Play credit, so you will dangle your feet in it and hopefully buy all your books, movies, and apps from Google Play. Amazon does it differently, marking down the prices of the hardware to entice you to buy and then when you’re in the Amazon ecosystem you buy all your books, movies, and apps from Amazon.
This whole rant just sounds like the confused ramblings of an occupier railing against “mega corporations”.
As for me, I was already deep in Amazon services, including Prime, Instant Video, and Kindle. I passed on the first Kindle Fire, but with the screen and price of the HD version, I think I’ll dumb myself down and get one.
by Bri
I thought capitalism was soooooo good! Free is a term for the markets. We are just sheep to be fleeced. Is this that different from Microsquish(soft)?????
by Cantankerous
I stopped reading after the author called Amazon’s CEO “Jim” Bezos instead of Jeff.
by Dave Leonard
First reaction to this posting: you need a spelling and grammar checker, my friend. Isn’t anybody editing this before you put it out for the world to see?
Second reaction: Amazon and B&N are both playing the SSS game, and it will be interesting to see how it all plays out, but I think it is a real stretch to declare that society is no longer “empowered by technological advances”. At the very least, you have two competitors who will be forced to keep offering more to the public, and that is a good thing.
by Editor
Apologies for the rough text, which was my fault. I received the post right before newsletter publication and wanted to include it for its timeliness. Updated.
by Bri
Now me no fel so bad. At least it’s not in ancient Egyptian. They had no punctuation, no paragraphs and no vowels. You had to figure it all out yrslf!
by melajara
I’m assuming the sole responsibility for bad spelling. It was indeed a rushed out piece of (bad) writing.
As for your second reaction, actually Both Amazon and B&N are chasing the big elephant: Apple, the iPad and the App store.
IMHO, Apple really pioneered this SSS marketing model with iTunes.
And you know what? The end result is that Apple has the highest market cap in history, 50% more than Exxon or more than Google and IBM combined!
by Jim Mooney
Clash of the Walled Gardens! I can see a bad movie in this.
by TFProleteriat
Read the book NOIR by K.W. Jeter, and pay attention to the sales and advertisement models used by corporations in the book. They will sound familiar.
by e.s. gravois
Oh whoopee. I don’t know about you but if I don’t want to buy something, I don’t. I own a Kindle and I find the ability to buy directly from Amazon quite handy. Sure it suggests stuff for me, but I dont have to buy it, or even look at it. I have the choice. Save the outrage for those instances where you *don’t* have a choice – like when the government forces you to do something. Like buy health insurance.
by Mark Harrison
I’m confused.
Amazon’s ecosystem is ‘the evil part.’
Strange that another company that locks down its devices in a similar way doesn’t obviously get mentioned as ‘evil’ by, oh, let’s see,
http://www.kurzweilai.net/apple-granted-patent-for-head-mounted-display
http://www.kurzweilai.net/ipad-helps-5-year-old-find-his-voice
http://www.kurzweilai.net/stanfords-free-online-iphone-ipad-course-is-baaack-with-peer-to-peer-help
My experience (as a niche publisher) is that Amazon is just as easy to deal with, if not more so, than Apple…
by melajara
Quite right. As I mentioned in another comment, it’s Apple who pioneered this SSS marketing model and perfected it with iTunes and with stellar performance.
I didn’t write on Apple because yesterday was Amazon time. For an appropriate Apple treatment, wait for their iPhone 5 and iPad mini (if any) press conference ;-)
by Gare
+1.
And the new Google Nexus 7 is putting Google in this same or a very similar camp as Amazon, Apple, B&N.
by melajara
The ultimate punishment is to buy one or a gazillon but don’t buy content from Amazon or at the very least not ONLY from Amazon.
Besides, those Kindle are so cute ;-)
by Bernard Denis
I beg to differ,
I believe that at all times since the enlightment corporations have tried to wow us with pictures and publicity. Merchants always fought to seem the better more trustworthy of the bunch. Only difference today they have become experts, but individuals do have some choice. And using those “evil” tools we are becoming a more lucid society.
The global brain movement is alive and moving forward, Tim O’Reilly does make a fair point of it in his Long Now speech. We need a world of literate people to achieve a global conciousness, and the Orwellian BIG Brother image will be one of people changing government for the better. Those government will put up a fight, undoubtably, but to no avail.
All these new gadgets are without knowing it, liberating us by giving us a starting point to equalize knowledge through the world. Since the Get one Give one foundation’s start, humanity as a whole as moved forward in knowledge. Today kids in remote locations in Africa are teaching their parents to read and write, so goes the saying! If you ask Neil Turok, the next Einstein will be found in those lands and that is perfect.
So lets not be to harsh on those trying to bring us all they can, I do not believe Jeff Bezos has plans of being master of the universe and enslaving humans to its Kindle. He most probably thinks that if he could get all the good producer to join him, in the end they could offer the world a much better and cheaper product. The result may be different, but it comes from a good intention.
With all that said, lets embark on the road to the future with open eyes and a free will to choose accordingly as we move on that road.
by melajara
“If you ask Neil Turok, the next Einstein will be found in those lands and that is perfect.”
YES, I did often think about this. A self taught genius from a remote country, and preferably a girl!
by Ken Peterson
I recently met a female lawyer. I can’t get over the fact she is a one-generation Vietnamese Central Highlands Montagnard! This group of people were so isolated we could hardly communicate because they had no technology: no compass, no radio, no education, no geography,… what we didn’t know was that intelligence is not a product of complex technology but of complexity in any form. Try naming all the plants in the jungle.
by Jim Mooney
A fat, black, female midget with an IQ of 500 is what we need. That will certainly clash with the American Ideel of towering, undernourished Nordics with pale skin ;’)
by Mark Petereit
Ah, but you have the ultimate power: don’t buy one!
by Gorden Russell
There ya go, Mark! I’ll just keep on doing what I’ve been doing. The public library already has more books than I can read.
by Jim Mooney
Entertainment is expensive, but learning is cheap.
by Mr.X
Cheap?Time is one of the things money can’t buy.