There was a golden age when computers were something you owned, not like before when they were big machines your employer or university would give out access to, nor like after when they went to the cloud, you bought what was essentially a thin client and every software became a service.
At least in the olden days the computers weren’t forced into every single damn part of society!
Now in order to talk with most of your friends and family, you have to sell your soul to every one of the thousand ToS’s. It’s impossible to meaningfully use your personal device you bought with your own money without the internet, as every app and their mom needs to call home for some reason. For some reason, it is morally acceptable for a company to prevent you from being able to have someone you pay to replace parts of your device with third-party components you bought with your own money!
Now, of course, you can simply install some Libre operating system and use Lemmy, or Mastodon or whatever. But computers are so embedded into society that it is simply impossible to go without these services unless you want to get yourself isolated (and potentially in trouble with the authorities).
Besides, from prior experience, most people are unwilling to use technologies unless it is physically placed in front of them, whether through social influences, advertising or word of mouth, which generally corporate services do better than Libre alternatives.
It used to be that computers and programs were made for the end user. Now they are simply tools for ad and data-collection companies to extract every byte of personal data and force every second of advertising on others.
I’ve been seriously considering to remove computers from most aspects of my life, but as paper slowly disappears from our lives, this becomes harder and harder. Now you would likely be fired if you refused to use Teams or Slack or whatever your company uses. No one uses fax or writes mail or watches live TV anymore.
The only other alternative is to take back computers and make them personal again.
A decent percentage of Gen X and early millennials grew up familiar with computers. You kind of had to be, to some extent. Stuff didn’t always work smoothly or easily, so some tinkering and understanding of how things work beneath the surface was required.
We’re moving towards a future where a computer becomes just like an appliance, like a TV. Both the hardware and software will be locked down and set up to work. You just tap and press buttons to get it to do its thing.
Eventually, we may even get to the point where computers are required to be locked down “for our safety”.
If we get that far, then I can imagine those who want to build their own and have full freedom to install and customise it any way they want could be considered the very fringe/fanatical elements of society.
“Hey, you want an illegal unauthorised computer, why on earth would you need that, are you a terrorist or criminal or something?”
I hope things don’t go quite that far. But I don’t think it’s out of the question.