If you follow the PC components market or gaming even casually, you would no doubt have noticed the large increase in price of memory beginning late last year. The reason for this as I understand is the demand from AI data centres with companies like OpenAI pre-buying from the major memory manufacturers. This may (if not already), lead to a similar surge in the price of solid-state storage too. To understand how much the price has increased, the memory kit I bought in February, 2024 is now over three times the price I paid from the same retailer and there is no sign that this will change any time soon. It is a relief for me that I did build a new PC when I did as prices had fallen about as low as they would before a new generation of GPUs were released. I did so when I saw these prices finally drop after the surge in demand in 2020 from crypto miners and bored people trapped at home by the fake pandemic. What is currently happening with memory may end up being a similarly short-term issue but there are some indications there could be more to it.
What follows will be speculation and like with many topics I cover here including my very last post, I hope I am completely wrong!
A major reason I wanted a PC upgrade (apart from it being a decade since the last), was my concern that parts could become completely unavailable due to a potential incident in the Taiwan strait. This still could happen as that potential hasn’t gone away but it hasn’t happened in the two years since I built (or rather had someone else build), my new PC. It seems more likely that China will have a more peaceful reunion with that important little island but it could easily go the other way with the right provocation. Not many understand just how fragile the supply chains of various components found in so many consumer products are and how quickly they would become unavailable to the general public in any significant global conflict affecting nations like Korea and China. The only real advantage to such a conflict would be that many home appliances like refrigerators would no longer include these unnecessary additions.
In thinking this, I wasn’t considering other possibilities. Despite this potential future conflict, many modern states now depend on these same components to exercise control on their populace and their desire for further control has not been satiated. So what would cause widespread lament among PC enthusiasts would also very much effect systems of state control. How can there be digital identification, currency and surveillance systems without a regular supply of microchips for consumer Smartphones? If these weren’t widely and (relatively) cheaply available, most people would quickly switch back to the old ways. As the Smartphone is essentially a portable and voluntarily adopted version of 1984’s ‘Telescreen’, they won’t want a situation where they are no longer attainable to the general populace.
What they clearly don’t want though is the same freedom that has existed on the Internet since it became easily available beyond tech enthusiasts. Many things have happened over the years including traffic becoming more centralised to major tech company websites like Facebook, Amazon, X and Reddit. Starting earlier but accelerating significantly in 2020, there was a massive increase in censorship and de-platforming which only eased off in the last two years but is still happening. So they want people to be in their systems but they want them to be tightly controlled within them.
Then I noticed something said by Jeff Bezos recently which I have linked to but have also transcribed below:
And I looked at this and I thought this is what computation is like today. Everybody has their own data center. And that’s not going to last, it makes no sense. You’re going to buy compute off the grid. That’s AWS. We had… we were doing it internally at Amazon for ourselves and the APIs were created. There was… that’s a very interesting story in its own right. But… the… this is you know, these kind of horizontal layers like electricity and compute are now artificial intelligence. They… they go everywhere there isn’t… I guarantee you there is not a single application you can think of that is not going to be made better by AI.
The full interview of it along with an article summarising it can be found here. What Bezos means by your “own data center”, is your storage drive whether that still be a hard disk or a solid state drive. These I should add, are also creeping up in price along with memory. Companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are set to benefit from such an eventuality with their “clouds” already storing personal data. This data is definitely scanned on their servers and not at all private despite what they may claim. As has been stated elsewhere, the “cloud” is really “someone else’s computer.” It is then in Bezos’ long-term financial interest for users to be unable to own personal storage and be completely reliant on the “cloud”.
Bezos frames private storage as something out of date and not needed but the real intention should be obvious. The advantages to governments, having all Internet access run through systems that can be monitored is the ultimate goal. On the other side, it is also another example of products being turned into services that we’re required to continually pay for. This has been creeping up for a while and has been especially evident in entertainment with many media companies switching to “live services” that must be subscribed to and the slow end to physical media.
I noticed a comment somewhere recently pointing out how Microsoft had changed ‘My Computer’ to ‘This PC’ in Windows. Whatever the official corporate reason for this change, the implication that it isn’t “yours” anymore is obvious. And even if companies like Microsoft don’t say so, there actions reveal their preference with more and more computer power eaten up by their operating systems to direct advertisements and track user data. I am still using Windows 10 after being dragged kicking and screaming from Windows 7 shortly before support ended. I refuse to “upgrade” to 11 and will be switching to Linux very soon.
The title of this post refers to earlier computing where terminal screens were used to input and access data from a computer. Many terminals could be used on one computer. As more and more personal computers became available, the need for terminals declined and they basically only exist as command prompts used by very few users today. The technological trends and statements by people like Bezos suggests they intend everyone to have a little terminal that gives them access to a controlled computer through the Internet. Your identity and everything you upload and download can then be controlled. This is obviously desired by both governments and major tech companies for control and profit. Or as the WEF would say if they were honest, ‘You will own nothing and there is nothing you can do about it.’