Y'ever get struck by how much of "the tech sector" is built around treating general purpose home computing as a mistake?

I'm serious. From closed app stores to restricting screenshots while streaming to cloud based storage & subscription software.

— Clarissa Littler (@ClarissaAdjoint) September 17, 2021

It has been a tragedy, but a predictable one. Powerful corporations and the media (in the most general sense) have always despised general purpose computers and have been on a decades-long campaign to root them out. Now they have almost succeeded.

A large part of this has been by a very effective campaign to snooker the rubes by claiming it’s all been done for “security.” Even some of my very smart friends have fallen for this flimflam. (Sorry, friends, but if you believe they need to remove the ability to install what you like has anything to do with “security,” this is only true in the sense that they want to make the computer secure from you, the user.)

There was a brief time — maybe 15 years — when information became more widely available, computers were powerful and free of tampering and censorship, and there was no limit on the possibilities of what one could do with them. That world is gone now and not coming back. The great project of the last decade and now this one too is stuffing the information genie back in the bottle, and then burying the bottle under two miles of rubble.