--- title: Captive Supporters date: 2024-02-18T13:55:06-05:00 permalink: /captive-supporters/ tags: - reading --- More from Ursula Franklin: > The early phase of technology often occurs in a take-it-or-leave-it atmosphere. Users are involved and have a feeling of control that gives them the impression that they are entirely free to accept or reject a particular technology and its products. But when a technology, together with the supporting infrastructures, becomes institutionalized, users often become captive supporters of both the technology and the infrastructures. (95) The example she uses is the automobile: once upon a time, cars may have been optional, but in many locations they (and the roads that have been built to carry them) have become so much a given that doing without one imposes significant hardships -- not least as alternative infrastructures like rail have been eliminated. This is what makes me worry so much about cloud computing: now that we've moved so much large-scale web hosting to AWS (and, to a lesser extent, Azure and Google Cloud) and we've dismantled so many of the alternatives (such as campus-based hosting), we've become captive supporters of those major infrastructure providers. It's becoming harder and harder even to imagine alternatives.