The Democracy Laptop

Quasi-Normalcy names a dream I share.

You know what, fuck it, I don’t want some frivolous, artisanal, lighter-than-air computer with no customizability, no upgradeability, no reparability, no ports, and a lifetime of maybe 3 years if you’re lucky. I want a fucking great BEAST of a computer that’s designed to last a minimum of 50 years, with ports up the wazoo and optional drives for every kind of media! I want modular components that you can drop in a bog for a year, dry them off, and have them still work fine! I want them to make a noise like “ker-chunk!” when you slide them into place! I want a switch that you pull to turn it on! And I don’t want software that constantly forces you to get a pointless, cosmetic “upgrade” every few months either! I want durability! I want longevity! I want satisfying haptics! I want Silicon Valley to go fuck itself!

Damm straight. I want a computer designed and built for the ages, meant to deliver a lifetime of use. The Honda Cub, the Leatherman Multitool, the Fender Stratocaster of computers.

This is of a piece with my dream that tech platforms should be democratically accountable public utilities, because contrary to the assumptions of capitalism, both industrial manufacturing and software / electronics technologies incline toward robustness and democratic pervasiveness. So I have thought for a long time about an Office Of Reference Computing which releases a new Democracy Laptop once every ten years. For the rest of the decade, the design stays unchanged save for necessary bug fixes. As much as possible it employs open standards; when it cannot it sets an open standard. The ORC would be the opposite of Agile, engineering with the kind of flinty deliberateness and caution they use at NASA.

The hardware would be designed to be durable, reliable, inexpensive, and easy to maintain. There would be maybe a few variations — the smaller one, the bigger one, maybe an extra-nerdy one that is more hackable — but they would be interoperable, use as many of the same parts as possible. The ORC would manufacture an initial run of maybe thirty million of them, and sell them at cost … that is to say, projected per-unit cost to manufacture in year four, so they would initially sell at a loss, to seed the ecosystem. Of course every schoolkid would get one.

The operating system & core applications would be designed to be stable, secure, and wicked fast on the hardware rather than cutting-edge. They would be released open source, and use file formats legible as plaintext as much as possible. Encryption and other privacy measures would be baked in from top to bottom. The UX design would focus on accessibility, coherence, patterns which they hope other applications will steal, and a nice steady learning curve which makes them easy to pick up but also worth digging into.

The ORC would maintain an application agora which makes it easy to publish open-source software components, datasets, and complete applications. They would police these tools to make sure they were not engaged in shenanigans. A user would be able to download whatever applications they wish from the agora at no cost. One can make money on stuff released to the agora — a Democracy Laptop watches what software it runs for how long, and tallies up a hashed report to the ORC so they can say, “hey, Ms. Developer, 1000 people each spent 10 hours with your tool this month, so here’s 10,000 pennies for your trouble”. Of course to be eligible for that, someone at the ORC is going to look at that tool, to make sure it isn’t breaking things.

Those pennies, plus the cost to design & develop and tool the construction of Democracy Laptops, come from the public purse. I like Georgist taxes but I bet you may have even better ideas?