I am not so worried about games and movies — having access to them is a plus but I wouldn’t be too upset over not being able to revisit a specific game or rewatch a specific movie. Music bothers me a bit more because I like to listen to a lot of my favorite music again.
What worries me the most about this trend is what impact it will have on the computers we use.
Today you can buy a powerful laptop or desktop. You can write software on it, for it, for any purpose at any time. You can distribute that software to others freely, and you can permit others to run your software for any purpose under permissive terms of your liking that still protect the rights you have over your intellectual property, the software that you wrote.
I might be falling trap to the “slippery slope” fallacy here, but the way I see it, once the majority of new games, movies, music and other entertainment is all accessed via streaming, and all of the big players in software move the applications that are used in business and in education to the cloud, the computers we use may easily:
1) Become too weak to do intensive work locally, because everyone are using them as thin clients only, for interacting with software that is run in the cloud.
and/or
2) Become so locked down that we lose the ability to distribute software outside of cloud delivery mechanisms controlled by corporate entities.
I am not anti-corporate. But we cannot allow the corporations to be in control over the software that we use, in this way. Not because they are corporations or because they are capitalists or anything that. The same would be true of any entity, whether that entity be a business, a state, a body of the government, a non-profit organization or even just a person.
When we allow someone else to gatekeep access to the platforms we use, we are handing our freedoms over to them.
I use an iPhone that is running iOS. I can afford to allow my phone to be this restricted because I have other computing devices that allow me to develop software for them on them, and to run software written by others on the operating systems that those other devices are running.
But if none of my devices allowed me to do this, and no devices on the market allowed me to do it either, then where would that leave me?
And where would it leave us? The humanity.
In my opinion, the ability to develop software freely, to distribute that software to others freely, and for them to be able to run that software freely, is so essential to our society and to the future, that if we lose this then we need to take drastic measures to regain the control that we lost as quickly as possible. We would need to crowdfund the development of computers that allow us to do what these future locked down computers don’t. And we would need to ensure that these freedom-friendly computers become used by so many people that we could continue to develop these machines and be able to continue to produce them, at a reasonable price. So that the ability to develop and run any software for any purpose will always be possible.