I call it perception arbitrage. In the commodities markets arbitrage trading is buying and selling the same thing in two venues where it is differently valued. Corn is selling for $1.09 in New York and $1.06 in Chicago, so the arbitrage trader buys a lot of corn in Chicago and sells the same corn in New York. There is nothing evil or underhanded about arbitrage trading, it keeps the prices of goods uniform throughout the world, and it may even be a useful function in the economy. If the arbitrage trader does something dishonest to drive the prices up and down, then I have less sympathy for his cause.
What do I mean by perception arbitrage? It is the selling of something deliberately presented to suggest value that isn't there. This is more than fraud, an activity that has persisted long before modern or post-modern times. Nobody said that Microsoft Word makes better documents than alternative technology, only its association with the NASA computers that put a man on the moon. (My latest version of Microsoft's flight simulator a few years ago had obvious errors in the flight equations that were cheerfully acknowledged when I called their technical support. I was told to try buying the next version if I wanted to run a version without the errors. Would you want these programmers working to send you to the moon?)
Nobody said there was a cathedral ceiling in the house with the high-pitched roof. Nobody said the new Volkswagon Beetle was as fun and nimble as the my old bug. Nobody said that the new "Star Trek" television shows were going to be as rich in content, drama, and character as the original series. But the choice of design and name is clearly intended to suggest these things. In fact, if these things were what they suggest they are, then we might stop buying more of them (like software upgrades) and following their false hope.
This is the new form of Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders. These things are all clearly suggested without statement. Not only is there no fraud, but there is no spasm of conscience as there would be with an outright lie. The accountability to truth and rationality has been lost.
In my preference of rationality over perception,
I do not reject the role of emotion in making decisions.
The role of emotion is found in setting goals,
deciding what is good.
Then we should employ "scientific" reasoning
to decide how to get there.
(While I find Ayn Rand's reasoning flawed in other areas,
this is one concept where she was right on the money.)
The failure of business and government in the post-modern era
is in following our hearts when we should be using our minds.
The result is a sequence of barely-justifiable, short-term
decisions that plunder any hope of long-term success.
How is post-modern perception arbitrage in computers
any more deceitful than any other advertising?
After all, Fab claimed their detergent
gets clothes "whiter than white"
knowing that it isn't true.
While such advertising may get people to buy one brand over another,
it hasn't created a market for a product that doesn't exist.
If my clothing turns out to be no whiter than white
(maybe a good thing for my colored laundry),
then I still have a basket of clean clothes to wear tomorrow.
Misinformation about computers has done more harm than that
and has created a market for a
segment of society
who might otherwise be doing more useful work than
pretending to coax inherently-unreliable computers to run reliably
and charging us a lot of money for the privilege.
If people knew how fundamentally flaky these machines are,
then they would never buy them for fundamentally important tasks.
Shoot-'em'-up games are one thing,
but managing family finances deserves a machine that won't break.
They're using Windows machines
to monitor patients
in hospital intensive care wards.
What level of reliability must
the people who bought them
have believed they were getting?
Take away that belief and the market for
computers gets smaller
and the computer-fix-it crowd gets a lot smaller.
On the other hand,
if the machines ever become as reliable
as consumers believe they should be,
then the maket for the fix-it crowd also gets a lot smaller.
These people make a cushy living
on the arbitrage between
the computer buyer's belief in reliable computer performance
and the reality when the computers are put into service.
The real clincher is the way the computer geek community
gets the users to blame themselves
and to use their chequebooks for absolution.
Today is 2012 February 5, Sunday,
0:44:13 Mountain Standard Time
(MST).
2557 visits to this web page.
