Semantici.st

Apple launched the iPad and it was pretty much exactly what everyone was expecting. Depending on what model you buy it’s either a giant iPod touch or a giant iPhone, and I agree with Fraser Speirs – it’s the future of general-purpose computing devices.

And that makes me so sad.

I touched on the reason why in my article about ‘open sourcery‘ – I want to see a world where understanding the machines we use every day is common rather than extraordinary. I want to see a future where people – ordinary people, not computer geeks – can create their own tools for whatever purpose they have.

The iPad future promises general purpose computing devices that are much easier to use, but which are completely impenetrable. At the moment you still need a ‘normal’ computer to use an iPad, but that won’t be the case for very long. Once people buy iPad-like devices instead of a traditional desktop or laptop computer you’ll have a class of computer users who can never learn to make their own tools, even if they wanted to.

We exist in a world full of machines, mechanisms, and devices that almost all of us do not understand. We can barely grasp the basic principles of how these things function, let alone the details of any specific implementation. Do you know how common-rail fuel injection in a diesel car works? I don’t. I don’t even know how beer works. Most people have a terrible understanding of simple mechanical principles. I only learned about the Geneva wheel the other day, and I was struck by how elegant a design it was. It’s used in film projectors and mechanical watches – more things that I don’t really know how they work. Until I read about the Geneva wheel I’d never even thought about the need for a frame of film to stay still for a fraction of a second while running through the projector.

There’s a ‘hardware hacking’ movement that’s trying to encourage people to void their warranties and open up closed devices to learn how they work. Working on hardware is difficult, and there’s always the risk that you could permanently destroy some expensive piece of hardware. I can understand why no one knows how common-rail fuel injection works – who wants to poke around in their car? It’s all dirty, and if you poke the wrong thing you’re going to have to call the AA to tow you to a garage to get it fixed. Hardware hacking is inevitably going to be a niche. I can accept that.

Software hacking is much simpler. It’s much harder to do permanent damage to something. It’s much more accessible – you can do it indoors, you don’t need to risk setting the curtains on fire with a soldering iron, you don’t even need to buy anything – if your computer doesn’t come with a programming language you can download all sorts of things for free that will get you started.

Writing software tools is hugely accessible. In the ‘open sourcery’ article I point to the Organisation for Transformative Works and their Archive of Our Own project, and I think this is a brilliant example of how a community of non-computer-geeks (albeit a community of generally well-educated non-computer-geeks) can create tools which empower their community. There’s plenty of existing software and websites they could have used, but they wanted to create something which was designed specifically to suit their community. They wanted to make it themselves, and because of the astounding quality of the open source tools available they were able to do it.

They’ve turned a bunch of writers into software hackers, letting them take control over the computer in a way that will be impossible in the future promised by the iPad. A future that makes software hacking as hard as hardware hacking. A future where to write your own tools you need to buy a computer capable of running development tools. That will be a device restricted to professionals and hard-core hobbyists only, like the tools you find in a garage.

In the iPad future owning what we call a computer today would be like having your own welding kit. Yeah, some people do, but not normal people. Normal people would just burn their arm off if they tried to use it. Normal people leave that to trained professionals.

The idea of ‘software’ – a complex tool that doesn’t exist in a physical form – is still very new. It’s completely different to the kind of tools we’re used to, this is why so much software pretends to be hardware – you have a ‘trash’, ‘paintbrushes’, little pictures of film reels and photo frames all over the place. The visual metaphors which have been used to make this entirely new concept accessible have tricked everyone into thinking that software is in any way like hardware. It’s not.

There is (essentially) no cost to copying software, to making small iterative changes. There’s no materials cost to trying out a new way of making a tool. If you want to take an existing tool and reshape it to do something different you don’t have to lose the existing tool. The cost of entry is extraordinarily low – a simple tutorial and a couple of downloads and you can make a simple tool. You’re not limited in the same way that physical objects are. Except in the iPad future.

In the iPad future software is just like hardware – it’s restricted and difficult to work with. You need to buy a bunch of weird stuff just to get started, and you can’t share what you’ve made with anyone unless it gets approved or you make a web application (and then you need a server and have to learn a thousand fiddly sysadmin tasks to get going – the cost of entry isn’t any lower there). It takes away, forever, the unique ability of software that can enable communities and individuals to create something of their own.

If someone released an iPad-clone with, say, Ruby on it, a decent text editor, a terminal application, and access to the filesystem it would pretty much eliminate my concerns. It could be used to create all manner of custom tools and it would be awesome. Except that it would also break the core changes that makes the iPad the future of general purpose computing: the control and simplicity. The single-application simplicity would make writing tools very difficult; the restriction on background processes – which is essential to keeping the system functioning at a ‘it just works’ level – would be horribly broken; the application restrictions that eliminate most malware risks would be lost; the whole system would fall apart and it would just be a very pretty old-style computer.

The iPad future doesn’t stop the normal person from creating new tools as a side-effect, it’s an intrinsic part of the entire concept. It forces software to behave like hardware because not even Apple have been able to find a way to make computers reliable without also making them unalterable black boxes.

As a device I think that iPad looks ace, as a concept I think it’s going to push the iPhone revolution into the mainstream computer space. I think that the people saying that this might change the world are absolutely correct and because that means the end of this brief period where software could enable and empower normal people, it makes me very, very sad.