The gradual but steadily accelerating rise of authoritarianism scares me far more than terrorists, drugs, child abuse, and the pandemic.
Unless we push back mightily, it will be a question of when, not if, owning a general-purpose computer that's not controlled by the government or a company becomes discouraged, suspicious, and eventually illegal.
Do you honestly think this, what I'm doing right now - posting on HN on a general-purpose computer, on an open source browser and server stack - will become limited to only licenced professionals?
Companies holding interests in copyrighted works would love to see general purpose computers go away, replaced by "trusted" media players that can't make unauthorized copies or be used to make unsanctioned independent creative works.
Totalitarian governments would love to take away general purpose computers to prevent end users from removing surveillance and anonymity.
Companies who want to control software markets would love it if all software licensing transactions ran thru their "marketplace".
Of course, his suggested solution of open-source didn't quite work out --- because even with the source available, you're still enslaved by things like Secure Boot and other cryptographic jails; and on the other hand, as evidenced by the long history of the cracking scene, and Windows modding in general, not having the source is no big obstacle as long as you can still arbitrarily change any bit. Perhaps what is truly important to software freedom is not "right to read (the source)", but "right to write (anything)".
Apple is not an autonomous hive mind. The hundreds of people that built this and coordinated the deployment across multiple teams including management, deployment, QA, beta testing, machine learning, and SWE aren't lying and the majority of them certainly have good intentions.
The gradual but steadily accelerating rise of authoritarianism scares me far more than terrorists, drugs, child abuse, and the pandemic.
Unless we push back mightily, it will be a question of when, not if, owning a general-purpose computer that's not controlled by the government or a company becomes discouraged, suspicious, and eventually illegal.