[jwr]

I have been thinking about this recently. The people building those hobby computers at the time were spending huge amounts of money on building devices that were arguably not useful at all for anything practical. It was pure exploration of new ideas.

I have a feeling that we live in times of over-commercialization. Today, if you build something, the first criticism you'll hear is, "I can get something cheaper that is mass-produced in China." The second thing you'll hear is, "How do you monetize this?".

I think this puts a huge damper on innovation, especially among hobbyists.

[PaulRobinson]

You touch on two interesting, intertwined topics that don't seem connected at first, but they just connected for me.

I'm not sure it's all necessarily about over-commercialization, but it might be over-globalization.

We're obviously going through a timeline of the US trying to roll back globalized supply chains, and we don't know how that will end, but the one benefit it gave Americans cheap stuff at a cost of that production happening in the US. The benefit of cheap stuff will slowly be eradicated in the name of providing more job security in the US (at least, that's the plan - many are not convinced it makes much economic sense).

Everyone has benefited in some way from globalization (cheaper stuff means more economic utility), but we've also faced economic peril: off-shoring work means there is less work available near by. This is obviously true of blue collar work, but I think most people in the tech industry are familiar with Indian, Eastern European and Philippine companies taking work too.

In most of the West, there seems to have been an assumption that the West would become dominated by "knowledge workers" - all work would move to white collar professional office-bound, screen-based work - while the dirty and hard work of turning base materials into useful products, the blue collar stuff, would move off-shore. Within white collar work, the West would become more "managerial", more strategic, less productive in a tactical sense.

This idea isn't entirely new. Slavery and multiple empires were predicated on similar ideas, and while off-shoring isn't exactly modern slavery, the idea of paying poor people very little money so we can benefit does feel philosophically aligned, shall we say.

It's left us in a place where most people - both in the West and in those countries with off-shored work, and at very work layer from the hardest manual labour all the way up to managerial, perhaps even executive, levels - are worried about their economic future.

How can you have time for hobbies when you're worried about surviving the next 5 years?

This means people are now, more than ever, looking for things that raise their own utility - can I earn more money, and can I buy things cheaper? If you're doing something that doesn't move the needle on one or both of those sides of the equation, you start to feel like you're being left behind and the World is going to eat your lunch, and maybe you and your family too.

In that context, there's not much space for hobbies. Hobbies were a luxury only the affluent could afford hundreds of years ago and as wealth inequality rises again after decades of historic lows, the anxiety is starting to chip away through the middle classes and into the working classes again, so that hobbies won't exist again for many people over the next 20 or 30 years.

And yes, it does harm innovation. Most scientific and technological advancements of the last 500 years were started by people having the time to muck about with things, either as a hobby or as a paid vocation in a research lab or academic setting. That's potentially going away bit by bit. Curiosity has limited value in the future, as it becomes an extravagance few have time or resource for. Many people are subconsciously or even consciously asking themselves: if something doesn't lower a price on things I'm buying or increase the money I can get for what I'm selling, and it can't do that now, why do I care?

It's incredibly sad.

[MSFT_Edging]

I've been thinking about this too. I'll sometimes run across some part of the Chinese internet where people are creating some niche product to sell on aliexpress. It's less about IP and more about the product. They're inherently short lived and typically evolve past the original idea.

One huge advantage they have is its comparatively dirt cheap to make mistakes and turn another revision. With the tariffs, this more than doubles for the American trying to also make things. When mistakes cost 2-3x, less people are going to take risks. We've been so focused on what we can turn into intellectual property that we lose focus on what we can make.

The benefit of less enforced IP is that designs can be taken and iterated on freely while in the world of strong IP, you get what the company has decided is the product.

So we can observe a low-risk, lowish reward system that rewards continuous improvement over stagnation. I have a bad feeling that we're doubling and tripling down on this to move towards a world where we can only access computing through the narrow lens that the IP holders will allow.

[jwr]

I've been thinking along similar lines when I tried to figure out if the obsession with getting something cheaper is a cultural thing, or an actual necessity. I think it's a mixture of both, and I agree that economic anxiety does play a part.