The PC is Dead

Benj Edwards at Vintage Computing and Gaming say The PC is Dead: It’s Time to Make Computing Personal Again:

For a while—in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s—it felt like nerds were making the world a better place. Now, it feels like the most successful tech companies are making it worse.

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The personal computer era bloomed in the late 1970s and continued into the 1980s and 90s. But over the past decade in particular, the Internet and digital rights management (DRM) have been steadily pulling that control away from us and putting it into the hands of huge corporations. We need to take back control of our digital lives and make computing personal again.

The whole thing is that Personal Computers¹ used to be personal. Now they seem to just be subserviant to mega corp that build the hardware and compromise the software, spying on people, showing unwanted ads, and restricting what you can do because it might hurts the bottom line of a mega corporation somewhere.

I maintain that today, commercially developed software no longer serve the users. It serves the profit of mega corporations taking users for a ride, trying to make a run with their data and their money. It’s part of the surveillance capitalism.

Free and Libre software can help fighting this situation, like if everybody was switching to Linux, but it’s not easy. Lots of people are content with what they have, and there are far too many gaps. I could go on with what needs to be fixed, but this would take a lot for me to write and yu to read. But we sure can try to push back, not having Microsoft or Apple try to restrict what you can run on your computer, not having a system that will spy on everything you do even if you don’t want, idiotic summarizer that will reinvent the facts, or rent revenue extraction for you to continue to have access to your file to take every single penny they can, from Trillion Dollars corporations, all giving you an after taste that you don’t own your computer.

A bout of nostalgia about how things used to be better, but having lived it, I think things are different now and we can move to better to counter the enshittification. But the road is long and winding, and its sustainability more than uncertain, to bring back the “personal” in PC.