If you've ever had to knock on a lot of doors - maybe you're a postie, or, like me, have done a stint or two of political canvassing - you'll be familiar with video doorbells, like Ring. Actually, it'll probably be Ring, and it's slightly off-key, trying-too-hard-to-be-cheery chime.
You may also have noticed how many internet-linked smart doorbells have become dumb to the point of dead, lacking even the functionality of a knocker unless torn from the wall and banged against the door. With Ring, I assume the on-going subscription costs - we're all too strapped for cash these days - are driving people away, although I see a lack of love for the product, too.
I'm not here to discuss Ring's financial well-being - there's plenty written about that already - nor Ring in particular. We've recently stripped out our Vuebell, a cheap, subscription-free Ring-imitation that never worked brilliantly - it would chime several minutes after the caller had given up, but at least captured a photo of who we'd missed - when our upgraded internet hub proved incompatible. My point is a more general one about technological advances - and regressions.
Because technological advances are like the tide coming in - there's an overall move forward, but moment to moment, waves still wash back and forth. Subscriptions seem to be one of the drivers for a half-step backwards. I don't recall ever having to pay a hire charge for a stereo or camera or other piece of hardware I bought, other than in the sense of renewing the batteries every so often
Software used to be a product, and you relied on Microsoft to recoup their fixed costs by pricing it appropriately. But now I have to subscribe to Office, the assumption being that in two years time I'll somehow hate the version of Word or Excel that perfectly meets my needs now. Presumably their desire to tweak outweighs our real desire to buy their improved versions. You can stop now, Gates. Oh no, you can't...
And don't get me started on my printer. I've recently discovered that if I cancel my printer cartridge subscription, my printer will stop working. I kid you not. There's a similar business model with electric vehicles, requiring you to pay extra to progressively unlock software - not add software, note; unlock functionality the car already has. As one Redditer (is that a noun? it is now) so aptly puts it, "Charging extra to "unlock" it later is just ransoming parts of your own vehicle back to you".
We'll get over this moment in history. The tide will keep moving forward but, at this precise moment, I can't help feeling we're surfing a technological wave receding backwards.
My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms
Meet a man mistaken for a robot, a robot which learns the meaning of irony the hard way, a Frankenstein’s monster with a future in tailoring, a talking cat, a talking car, several time travellers, and a host of other characters.
Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).
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