Colllaborating across tools can mean several different things: - It can mean like you are saying you have a given project and at different stages of the project you want to be able to use different tools. That's one case where an open format would help. - You might want to collaborate with other people and they might want to use their own tools, which is different from yours. It's another case. - And also there's this element of time where overtime software tools tend to atrophy companies come and go, you know, platforms changed but you at least want your data and to be able to carry that with you in some sort of archive, at least. So there are many cases. McGranaghan, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 31:28, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=AmfN5kUhQK669_VhAK9e7w
Absence of interoperability and its relationship with capitalism and prevailing social structures
I think this is a prime example of the political economy issue. It's very easy to say we should have x. And even if x is relatively easy to do, which is not, in this case, there's still this huge issue of the “we should” that's quite the weasel phrase, right? If we were to accomplish this, we will need a bunch of companies or individual developers to temporarily make more work for themselves. Lower the profitability, make their products worse for their customers in the short term to get to some kind of global maximum. It’s a case where the coordination problem is really important. McGranaghan, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 32:05, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=AmfN5kUhQK669_VhAK9e7w
I think that the lack of interoperability or standardization between digital tools today, really, it means that all work created within a tool is confined to that tool and to me that seems very clearly antithetical to creativity and specifically the collaborative aspect of creativity. I think that there's so much to be said for tools. Amplifying the power of our brains and really taking over the mechanical aspects of human thought and limiting creation to a single piece of software's capabilities is just kind of crazy if you have step back and think about it. And I just think that standardization and having tools talk to each other, which is fundamentally change the tide of how we use them and introduced in more collaborators, and really just expand the projects constraints beyond any one tool. Mielke, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 30:00, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=KRW6ed30T1KEm4G8fa8FSA
Data silos and lack of interoperability can very well be a contradiction of capitalism when we think of the political economy of social media.