The End is Near

I love my TiVo. I’m not the only one: Former Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell got one for Christmas in 2002 and declared it “God’s machine.” Many people share our fervor for digital video recorders. But while there is much to love about TiVo, there is also much to hate—and even fear— about the digital future it represents. Why such ambivalence? Because TiVo is a creature of television culture. Although its technology is new and powerful, its uses are not. Similar to its sleek digital siblings—iPods, iPhones, BlackBerrys, Xboxes and other 21st century information devices—the TiVo is built like a household appliance. Offering a welcome simplicity and elegance, these products stand to become the primary way we use information technology. Yet such devices also reinforce the idea that users are only consumers: Single entities—the vendors— shape and approve how everything within them functions, even after they leave the factory.

Indeed, TiVo offers content providers new power to monitor their viewers and determine how television can be watched. For example, if an originator tags a show as “not to be archived,” TiVo will respect the tag and refuse to keep the program in its library, regardless of the viewer’s wishes. While TiVo offers a seemingly unlimited number of channels and programs, it exists only to distill and repackage video from standard sources. In that crucial respect it offers only one channel and one activity: TiVo. The viewer’s role is to watch it. What TiVo does, it does to perfection. But if TiVo is to do anything else, TiVo itself must provide the means.

It may be difficult to imagine wanting these appliances to work any other way. Who, after all, would complain that a refrigerator, dishwasher or hair drier is too easy to use or that it and its accessories emanate from a single vendor? The answers to these questions may be found by looking at technologies that are entirely different from the TiVo and iPhone.

The Internet and the personal computers connected to it were set up to allow contributions from any quarter. Anyone can use and build on them, not just people with technical training. Mainstream users may acquire a PC and Net connection for a few limited purposes only to discover the PC can be used for others. So someone named Jimbo can set up a near-empty shell at wikipedia.org and declare it a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. (We know this because in 2001 he did. Strangely, people listened, and today Wikipedia has millions of respected articles—as well as some not so respected ones—in more than 200 languages.) And three guys from the Netherlands could invent Kazaa, a file-sharing program, and circulate it to tens of millions of computer owners in a matter of weeks. (After nearly destroying the music industry, they set their sights on the telephone industry and invented Skype, which facilitates Internet telephony. Their current software project is Joost, which takes aim at television.)

Art by Daniel Bejar