privilege

I am a little dismayed that whatever fervor Silicon Valley had for copyright and patent reform has long since been replaced with ire towards other industries and entrenched monopolies. Fifteen years ago, or very close to that, we were seeing startups getting threatened by the music industry and taken down for infringing actions. The technology industry had a clear existential threat in the music and movie industries, and every corner of the industry hated it. We wanted things to be fixed. But that's gone now.

So what happened?

About a week ago I downloaded a mobile application called Flappy Bird. Now, I normally don't touch cellphone games, but this one was different. Why? Because it had no in-app purchases. This alone struck me as odd; but the lack of microtransactions alone was enough to sucker me in. The result was a quite difficult tapping game with a name that sounds like a certain Rovio game and pipes that look like a certain Nintendo game. But it was very challenging and engaging, so I kept it on my phone.

Aphorisms are short sayings intended to imbue deeper meaning through it's interpretation, designed to be easily memorizable and easily shared. In a way, they're the 1700s equivalent of some of the more slightly thoughtful forms of modern Internet picture captions. I guess this metaphor also makes Benjamin Franklin, a guy who really really liked aphorisms (and espousing their supposed moral truths, especially to French prostitutes, usually during coitus) the 1700s equivalent of your typical Reddit user.