Bookmarked The Tethered Economy (papers.ssrn.com)
As sellers blend hardware and software—as well as product and service—tethers yoke the consumer to a continuous post-transaction relationship with the seller. The consequences of that dynamic will be felt both at the level of individual consumer harms and on the scale of broader, economy-wide effects These consumer and market-level harms, while distinct, reinforce and amplify one another in troubling ways. Seller contracts have long sought to shape consumers’ legal rights. But in a tethered environment, these rights may become non-existent as legal processes are replaced with automated technological enforcement.

Bookmarked for reading (found in Neil Mather’s blog). Actual cases of ‘tethered’ economic transactions where a buyer is bound into an ongoing relationship with the seller with an uneven power balance, are already easy to find: John Deere suing farmers for tinkering with their tractors (with Deere claiming they never sold a tractor but a license to operate the software on one), insurance and credit companies remotely disabling a car upon a late payment, or Amazon removing books you bought from your Kindle (1984, actually, of all possible books!)

Outright ownership, the right to fix, the right to tinker, are all essential things, and key ingredients to keep your (networked) agency. While I understand the business model decision behind software subscriptions, it does make me increasingly uncomfortable because of the forced ‘eternal’ relationship with the seller.

5 reactions on “”

  1. It’s troubling too to think how this will encroach on more and more transactions, as so many things become are becoming so-called ‘smart’. As Paul says in his Info Civics article, “All authority is borrowed from the server, and so the users possess no authority of their own. As a result we must describe these services as authoritarian.” It’s provocative but I think the same could be applied here.
    We have an interview with one of the authors, Aaron Perzanowski, here – therestartproject.org/podcast/crisis-copyright/.

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