Computers, the mountain of excrement and the rabbids

My eyes widened at the 25% increase in the price of a kg of tomatoes when I went to the market. And a reflection, which I had made, came back to me in force. As I admired the curves of the tomato vendor trying to negotiate the price like Cicero facing the Romans, I realize that IT has been at an impasse for years and those who make it continue to dig the wall to sink further.

Computing had two opposite paths to take 20 years ago. The first was to go towards ever more performance, bling bling, headlong rush, but also towards ever more expensive IT. To lie to consumers, the industry invented the dollar for performance. The price of the component was not based on actual utility to the user, but its performance in imposed use and consumption.

It’s as if someone goes to a car dealer and the salesperson tells them that the only cars on the market are Ferraris, Lamborghinis or Maseratis. And by dint of propaganda, corrupt media, stupid reviewers, everyone has followed suit. But this mentality is performance computing in a fictitious world of infinite resources and infinitely low prices. In reality, it is a computer disaster that is increasingly reserved for an ultra-rich minority and that the others will have to be content with debris, collected in a landfill.

The second path would have been to aim for the lowest possible prices to equip everyone with basic computing. We would not have a cult of performance, but IT intended for all audiences and all budgets. We would have kept the same components over and over again and we would have technological homogeneity across the planet. Obviously, the computer industries, heavily capitalized and rotten by greed, have chosen the first option.

The shortages won’t stop, the prices won’t go down, anyone who tells you otherwise is either crooks or incompetent or both. A sector that views resources as infinite and therefore zero prices, can only end in large-scale shortages. But the industry is acting like nothing has happened, not realizing that people are literally praying for their old PC to last one more day, because it is their only working tool and they do not have not the means to buy it, even 10% of a new PC. He acts as if nothing had happened in front of people who burst into tears because IT has become so proprietary, but also essential in our societies that they no longer know what to do as soon as it does not work and that we imposed this tool on them, which they did not need at the base.

The sector from a to z is guilty, the manufacturers, the media, the reviewers, everyone is guilty. Because everyone has earned their tithe in the process and the only one who has paid the price is the consumer who has supported this computer disaster which is becoming exorbitant with each passing day. The perfect illustration of the class struggle before our eyes.

Who needs to buy the latest processor, to upgrade to DDR5, DDR6 or DDR7, who needs the latest graphics card, who needs 5TB hard drive? Nobody. This only concerns a small minority who like to jerk off in front of the big Benchmarks numbers. And let’s talk about the Benchmarks which all target ultra-specialized uses. As far as I know, there aren’t 7 billion video editors in the world, there aren’t 7 billion gamers in the world, there aren’t 7 billion 3D creators in the world. Fifteen years ago you still had magazines doing office benchmarks, today everyone would find it outdated and pointless and laugh at the test. Normal, they do not live in the same reality.

And this disaster capitalism dovetails perfectly with silly, wicked communism. Because the argument that you have a computer for everyone just isn’t true. Can you still buy a Pentium 4? No and yet it only came out in 2001, less than 20 years ago. The Sandy Bridge processors with the i3 series and the like came out in 2013, 8 years ago and they can’t be found too. Obviously, the new processors claim to offer the best performance at the same price as the old ones, but we also see that this is less and less true. And even if you can find old components, no system will work on them.

Find a Pentium 4 CPU and even the lightest Linux won’t work on it. But at no time were people asked for their opinion, they just follow the consumerist trend conveyed by the media and the whole industry. We are now entering a period of systematic inflation and shortages, for this is the final outcome of capitalism. Just as you can’t stuff yourself like a fat pig for 20 years without having obesity that will lead you to death, you can’t have infinite growth and performance capitalism in a finite world.

But this industry, completely corrupted by financialization, does not surprise me by its voracity and greed. But it’s the so-called media and reviewers that make me vomit. That is to say that after 20 years of deadlocks, mistakes and skyrocketing prices, excluding more and more people from technology, the media and tech reviewers, rather than admit their mistakes and put pressure for affordable computing, dig their grave even further by targeting an even smaller minority.

Since the beginning of 2020, the Tech channels are going in hell. Channels with 3 million subscribers have less than 100,000 views, or less than 5% of their potential audience. In 2020, people had other priorities, like scouring the trash for food rather than buying the latest graphics card for $ 2,000. In 2021, the shortage means that Tech channels present products that no one can buy. The absurdity of Sovietism and capitalism in one sentence, I didn’t think I would have seen in my lifetime.

And these Tech channels are not like my own Youtube channel. Where I use a $ 10 webcam for a rotten picture with no light at all and hope my wobbly PC with Parkinson’s hold up while I render a 3 minute video in 480P because hey, this is what it takes when you have a data plan and the optical fiber and unlimited connection, that only exists in fairy tales compared to the reality of my wallet. No, these Tech channels are businesses. In the case of Linus Tech Tips, it’s a real empire with around $ 30 million in sales. These channels have teams, studios, “expert” reviewers who are more rabbids than anything else. They cannot afford to lose audience or they will go bankrupt.

But their mentality, their aesthetics, their way of doing things is for the rich by the rich. Every product they promote costs hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. So they are unable to do a challenge that would allow them to reach a broader, but fundamentally broke audience which poses a problem for them to buy a CPU that is equivalent to 3 months of their salary. And what do they do instead, they target an even more exclusive minority by offering even more detailed and technical videos …

It’s as if in the age of electricity you have people who keep promoting kerosene lamps by thoroughly detailing how they work, not because they think the kerosene lamp is cheaper than a light bulb, but because their check at the end of the month depends on it.

Linus Tech Tips has announced that it will create a whole team that will take care of even more advanced benchmarks on PSU, coolers, cases and that they will even invest in industrial review machines to offer “the better information ”. JayzTwoCents, who refused to go into detail before precisely because he wanted his videos to be accessible to everyone, just announced something similar. Gamers Nexus has been doing this for years now, but I don’t blame the latter as it was a choice on his part from the very beginning. In the case of LTT and JayzTwoCents, they believe that by providing videos to detail all the functionality of a motherboard, they will attract more readers. In a world where a Tik Tok hopping in place video gets 4 million views in 4 hours? It’s a joke ??

It can’t work, just because NOBODY CARES ABOUT THIS KIND OF REVIEW. All the magazines and sites that used to do this kind of detailed testing have closed their doors for lack of readers. What the fuck about the capacity of a VRM on a motherboard or that my god, the glue on that graphics card is not well put? People have neither the time nor the money to take an interest in it. Also, people like me who read this type of test avidly 20 years ago have other things to do. Like, can I pay my rent next month? Won’t the kids get sick? And especially since at the time, computing was in its infancy, so it was relevant to delve deep into each component, because all we had to give a shit about reading test magazines.

Today, with millions of sites available where the only thing the reader is interested in is if this processor costs $ 150 and the other costs $ 100, where can I find the $ 100 one. As long as he walks more or less well, the guy will be happy, because again, he doesn’t really care. The younger generation has a fun and utter ignorance of technology. Kids will read more phone tests, because it allows them to experience glory on Tik Tok.

The people of my generation, who liked to take apart a PC from start to finish, are less and less numerous. We get older, we work, we move on. But consumers are not renewing themselves for the PC sector. New sectors, which can bring new consumers, such as streaming, are in the minority. As a result, the sectors that need high-end PCs, which are always more efficient and more expensive, are gradually disappearing. The logic of releasing new components on a regular basis just doesn’t make sense anymore, because people don’t need nearly 80% of the power of today’s processors.

 

And yet, the sector and “its specialists” continue to take the path of the increasingly elitist minority, to do more and more for the few pecks who are interested in this kind of thing. Computing has failed in its ambition of emancipation, it has failed to improve people’s lives, it has failed in all areas. In fact, today computing is back in the 1980s where computers manufactured by IBM were rented year round with operating systems and components that made planned obsolescence as their manufacturing standard. And any person or media that follows this standard is doomed to disappear by the same logic.