The world of tinkerers and builders has noticed for a few months now that the cost of consumer-oriented computer parts, especially RAM, has shot up like fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Earlier this month, Micron announced it will close up its consumer line of processors.1 Internet retailers (e-tailers) are closing. On your consumer-based budget, you cannot upgrade your TrueNAS system. (Maybe next Christmas…)
The reason for the uptick? Companies are turning all their resources south, to Nan Curunír, the vale of the Wizard.2 The attention of companies is bent upon AI companies, their needs and their demands. They are responding with discontinuing consumer product-lines, celebrating the bloated prices, while they last. As the EVP/CBO at Micron put it:
The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments.3
I’m not sure how common these decisions are, but this feels novel at least in the sense that the reason is fairly transparent. The scale of the ‘AI now or China wins the century’ project has well surpassed the Manhattan Project’s budget (thirty odd billion in today’s green backs). Allusions have been made instead to the total military spending during the second world war (more or less 1.3 trillion) in view of the roughly 1.5 trillion spent to build out AI infrastructure.
And so, companies have decided to close down the economy of parts which are the building blocks for tinkerers, garage dads, home-server enthusiasts, Youtube technical Lore-masters, and your very average Joe with a mind to self-ownership and right to repair.4
For a brief moment, this uncovers something worth recalling: the infrastructure of digital nodes and end-points (internet and computers) was and remains a military technique. Consumer products are the crumbs that sometimes fall “benevolently” from their table.
The turn from codical (bookish) to digital information technology is a change from one political framework to another. The digital seemed to promise a shift from a some-to-many to a many-to-many transference of knowledge and ownership. It seems more complicated, however. The internet is not in a solid state. It seems right now to be wobbling between many-to-many and very-few-to-many.