I liked your comment, and share a lot of your cynicism about the legal system.
To be fair, though, I think you see technology and code in too positive a light, because code is also often a means for accruing power.
Your own example of a cell phone app that keeps track of restaurant ratings could serve to illustrate this quite well: such services have a tendency to become highly centralized with at most a handful of alternatives. [0]
Whoever controls the rating service then has considerable power, because they get to subtly influence the way that results are displayed, which can directly influence restaurants' bottom line.
This type of thing is even more obvious with services like Google and Facebook. Just something to keep in mind before patting oneself too much on the back...
[0] This is due to network effects: people use the service with the highest pervasiveness (basically, the most ratings and comments), and the service with the most users tends to get the most ratings and comments.
To be fair, though, I think you see technology and code in too positive a light, because code is also often a means for accruing power.
Your own example of a cell phone app that keeps track of restaurant ratings could serve to illustrate this quite well: such services have a tendency to become highly centralized with at most a handful of alternatives. [0]
Whoever controls the rating service then has considerable power, because they get to subtly influence the way that results are displayed, which can directly influence restaurants' bottom line.
This type of thing is even more obvious with services like Google and Facebook. Just something to keep in mind before patting oneself too much on the back...
[0] This is due to network effects: people use the service with the highest pervasiveness (basically, the most ratings and comments), and the service with the most users tends to get the most ratings and comments.