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Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The iPad Luddites

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The iPad Luddites

Carr, on the iPad as “progress” and the negative response from people like Doctorow and Bray who have concerns about the openness of the platform:

I’m not under any illusion that progress gives a damn about what I want. While progress may be spurred by the hobbyist, it does not share the hobbyist’s ethic. One of the keynotes of technological advance is its tendency, as it refines a tool, to remove real human agency from the workings of that tool. In its place, we get an abstraction of human agency that represents the general desires of the masses as deciphered, or imposed, by the manufacturer and the marketer.

The whole essay is well worth reading.