It’s all very well having the cloud as your editor. But what happens when it all stops working, bit by bit?
I’ve been writing a review of David Ulansey’s Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries this afternoon. I’d done two chapters of it. I’d chosen to use WordPress to edit the article, here in this blog.
I closed up the editor and went off to make a call. When I came back, I opened it up again to find … most of my work had vanished. Somehow it hadn’t been saved. I’d saved it … but the connection had not processed the save.
I am so angry! I don’t particularly want to dissect Ulansey’s work; but to do it, to do all that work, and all of it in vain … it is utterly infuriating.
I’ve had erratic results from IE for a day or so now. I’ve just turned off Kaspersky anti-virus, and firewall, and suddenly everything works again. I wonder if that is the problem?
Why can’t we have reliable technology?
“Why can’t we have reliable technology?”
That’s called capitalism and free market. Imagine a good word processor, like WordPerfect used to be. So, Mr WordPerfect makes a lot of money. Now, Mr MicroSoft decides to start making another wordprocessor, MS Word. So we have now two wordprocessors, and profits must be shared by two companies. If a third company enters the fight, the three companies receive each one third of the profits.
In a perfect world, companies would enter the wordprocessor market until the profits are lower than the investment. At least, that’s what Adam Smith believed and what advocates of the free market still believe.
But this is not how it works. You can expand your share with all kind of tricks. For example, MicroSoft offers its wordprocessor with Windows. What happens, is that the playing field becomes uneven. This is only logical. The technical term is friction. There’s demand, there’s supply; but if the suppliers want to make money in the real world, they need a lot of friction.
So, the entrepreneur can only make money if the system is unstable and if there’s friction between supply and demand. Making unreliable technology is a perfect way to improve friction.
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This being a comment on a post, I have to write a short account. What I am describing, is the Theory of Business Enterprise of T.B. Veblen, published more than a century ago. I think he is right. You don’t have to be a member of Occupy Wall Street to see recognize the faults of the capitalist system. Unfortunately, reasonable criticism is labeled “communism” and never taken seriously. That’s how we got into the present mess. Amen.
I think we all remember the technology of socialism, tho: it’s called a Trabant!
It’s a mistake to call this “capitalism”, I think: what we’re dealing with here is human nature in action.
Without getting into the capitalism v. socialism debate (I find the “occupy this and occupy that” movement a little bit over the top, though), this has happened to me a few times – losing valuable work after I had spent so many hours doing it. Very distressful always. The good side of it is that you often end up by redoing the work, and it is always better than first time round. So Providence may be working on your side even as you shouted in frustration! 🙂
I am delighted that your work is better the second time around. Mine is generally better first time, I find, which makes it all the more annoying!