Captive Supporters
More from Ursula Franklin:
The early phase of technology often occurs in a take-it-or-leave-it atmosphere. Users are involved and have a feeling of control that gives them the impression that they are entirely free to accept or reject a particular technology and its products. But when a technology, together with the supporting infrastructures, becomes institutionalized, users often become captive supporters of both the technology and the infrastructures. (95)
The example she uses is the automobile: once upon a time, cars may have been optional, but in many locations they (and the roads that have been built to carry them) have become so much a given that doing without one imposes significant hardships -- not least as alternative infrastructures like rail have been eliminated.
This is what makes me worry so much about cloud computing: now that we've moved so much large-scale web hosting to AWS (and, to a lesser extent, Azure and Google Cloud) and we've dismantled so many of the alternatives (such as campus-based hosting), we've become captive supporters of those major infrastructure providers. It's becoming harder and harder even to imagine alternatives.
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