Greetings, Future Tensers,
If you’ve ever clicked Amazon’s “Buy Now” button to start watching a film or listening to an album, you might be surprised to learn that you probably didn’t actually buy anything. As Aaron Perzanowski writes in a contribution to our Futurography course on ownership, “Words like own and buy prime consumers to rely on … familiar concepts of personal property to understand their rights in digital purchases.” Perzanowski’s own research suggests that most of us don’t really understand how limited our rights are when we pay for digital commodities, but he has some helpful suggestions to better educate us about what we’re actually getting.
One thing you definitely won’t be able to own? A car from Apple. Reports suggest that the tech company has abandoned its long-simmering vehicle project, a decision that was—Will Oremus argues—probably the right move. Meanwhile, research on self-driving cars is still proceeding apace elsewhere in the tech sector. But as Frank Pasquale suggests in an article exploring the limits of the trolley problem, we should be thinking more about how we’ll integrate those vehicles into our broader civic infrastructure.
Here are some of the other stories we read while waiting for Google to distinguish truth from lie:
- Social media: Could a tweet ever be considered assault? An attempt to trigger a journalist’s epilepsy suggests that the answer may be yes, but the law is still fuzzy at this point.
- Accessibility: The latest iOS update just made iPhones a little more usable for lefties, but there’s still a long way to go.
- Education: Classroom technology can actually encourage interaction and conversation among students when it’s developed with the right priorities in mind.
Events:
- Why own anything when you can access everything? Join Future Tense on Tuesday, Oct. 25, in Washington, D.C., to consider how technology is transforming the concept of ownership. For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website.
Updating,
Jacob Brogan
for Future Tense
