The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)
Phones, consoles, Chromebooks and other unrootable hardware, restrictive hardware licensing, arm&#x27;s business model, abstraction over abstraction, SAAS, corporate cloud infrastructure,  web apps over local, streaming over storing, walled gardens, signed binaries, nearly everything about &#x27;modern safe computing&#x27; is all about taking control and responsibility away from users and handing it over to somebody else to be paid for and properly managed by them for the users own safety.<p>This is bullshit. It&#x27;s for profit and control.<p>The general purpose computer is hands down the most amazing, equalizing piece of technology humanity has ever created.<p>It&#x27;s one of the few things that gives the average person the same abilities as the wealthy or elite. Whoever you are, where ever you are, if you have a general purpose computer and some knowledge, you can do just about anything.<p>Rather than teach people about this amazing, near magical piece of technology enabling anyone to do amazing things, the whole attitude, at least since i&#x27;ve been around using computers going back fairly far is, &#x27;users can&#x27;t be trusted with this power and need to be protected from themselves at their own expense by some other benevolent entity&#x27;.<p>Instead of being taught as something that&#x27;s now just a part of life, the way something like driving is, despite being nearly as, if not more important than, driving is in society these days, general computing is still pushed as this mysterious arcane art the average person needs to be protected from through the use of everything mentioned in my first paragraph by someone who can lock everything up and provide security for them.<p>How else could they convince people to own three, four, five a dozen of what is essentially the same thing? Just locked down in functionality in different ways.<p>I lay responsibility on the early generation of tech people that got rich quick in the late 90&#x27;s early 2000&#x27;s. They seen the potential computers had to bring, they took advantage early and made money, they got greedy and have done nothing since but try and keep the average person out through whatever means necessary.<p>Those people are the ones running the tech giants today, pushing locked down hardware, and trying to crush general computing as a thing.<p>ETA: I changed my original wording from blame to lay responsibility on. My intention wasn&#x27;t to blame anyone in particular but to bring awareness to the let down by those original people that benefited from the openness of general computing only to be at the forefront of trying to lock it down now.