computer costs
This strategy is about looking at the different types of costs associated with computer use. While cost is as expansive a concept as value, these are a a few specific categories of cost that can help organize thinking or at least prompt more open-ended discussions.
Financial cost
This is the literal as stated price of the computer program or system in question. When considering financial cost, there are generally conversations about the licensing of a product. These licensing costs can be expected to come due annually.
Environmental costs
As with so many other commercial products, the environmental costs to computer use are generally made unclear. At this point in the arc of climate collapse, there is growing and beneficial interest in understanding the broader environmental costs to the use of computers.
Security and stability costs
At this stage in the development of global and national surveillance systems, there are strong arguments against the ongoing proliferation deeply networked systems. These types of computer systems create a brittleness in supply and service chains, they provoke conversations of nationalist control, and they are not durable to environmental collapse.
Opportunity costs
It can help to bring up and have conversations about which alternative ways of doing things and knowing things fall when switched over to a computer-based approach. This can help surface options to keep in play, maybe even in addition to computer use, to support pluralism, accessibility, and transition.
Social costs
There is an increasing amount of awareness and concern about the use of computers in a range of social situations where privacy, data protection, security, and other features aren't the problem - the consequences on us socially are, or are at least cause for concern. Understanding that our use of computers changes us, changes how we think and act, is an overwhelming feeling. The use of computer programs often amplifies older and deeper problems and behaviours, problems and behaviours that existed well before the advent of the computer that become super-charged by automation, speed, and ease-of-use. To engage with these problems at a deeper level requires a number of different interventions. It is not a situation that can be managed by the frameworks offered by the regulation of computer use and related public policy, though all parts of our democratic systems have roles to play.
These are a handful of the types of costs that might serve as useful prompts when framing a conversation about computer use. They are here to help expand the scope of conversations about computer use rather than accept the narrow bounds they are generally offered to us in.