> I expect these comments to be full of agreement.
It's interesting there is a lot of agreement. In a way I'm surprised because I often get the impression a lot of people here have pretty well drunk the Kool-aid of corporatism.
It's the least surprising thing in the world! The article is a totally standard bit of left-tech activist writing of the sort that has been widely found online for decades. It used to be a staple of Slashdot, a staple of USENET and it's a staple of HN too. RMS made a living giving talks exactly like this.
What would be actually surprising is to read a full throated defense of modern tech and the companies that build it, and then see an HN thread full of agreement. It's certainly possible, I'd disagree with almost everything in the article. But the sort of people who disagree tend not to waste as much time on HN as me :)
I'm curious what you disagree with! Personally I understand the sentiment, but I'm not sure it's necessarily a bad thing that stuff get's more locked down. I've delved deep into custom roms and linux, riced my desktop and advocated for FOSS and discussed privacy concerns with friends and colleagues. But at some point you also need to work and be productive. Use the technology that's available. I need Office for my work, and I'd like to point my partner to a nice restaurant with Google Maps when we're on holiday. The Microsofts, googles and Apples of this world excel in actually delivering results. And it can be argued that that's more important than you really "owning" a device or a service.
"At its core, the PC movement was about a kind of tech liberty"
There was no such thing as the PC "movement". Personal computing was a market driven phenomenon in which competition drove the price of computing down far enough that people could afford to have one at home - that's it. It didn't represent any particular philosophy of society. A microcomputer in the 80s was one of a wide mix of competing manufacturers, all of whom were much more closed than a modern computer. Proprietary hardware and software ruled the day. DRM was widely used in this era, including "hardware" DRM like code books or oddly manufactured floppy disks.
By the mid 90s IBM has fluffed its control over the PC platform, so hardware is at least getting more open and interoperable and you can "control" your device in the sense of adding more RAM or extension devices. Pretty useless to anyone who isn't a HW manufacturer but nice in terms of better enabling a free and competitive market, continuing the downwards pricing pressure. It wasn't deliberate and lawsuits flew. So much for being a movement for tech liberty.
By this point Linux was just a few years old and nearly nobody had heard of it. Most PCs out of the box came with Windows 95 or 98, which if they were connected at all were connected via AOL, MSN or CompuServe: entirely closed networks that required both subscriptions and had advertising. DRM was still widespread, now with exciting things like USB dongles and garbled CD-ROMs.
The world this guy thinks existed never did. To the extent there was anything special about the microcomputer, it was that aggressive market competition made previously expensive devices cheap enough for people to buy at home. Nothing about this was a social movement though, and nothing about it came with any particular ideology of freedom or control. That's why words like "freedom" in the software context are indelibly associated not with the PC pioneers like Bill Gates or IBM but rather with RMS, who didn't develop for the PC at all. He was writing stuff like emacs and gcc for the existing proprietary UNIX big iron of the time, which were fully proprietary.
Arguably the modern computer is more open, more free and more hackable than any previous time in history. You can compile and run an open source web browser, run it on an open source OS that's booted by an open source BIOS, on an open source CPU, speaking openly documented protocols from A-Z. I don't remember any of that even being imaginable in the 80s or 90s.
No, you missed a big part of the desire for liberty. The liberty to run programs without regard to timesharing limits, without need for permission from folks in labcoats. The fact that FLOSS took another decade+ to become viable does not take away from this more fundamental liberty.
It's just been so long we tend to forget, or some of us are too young to remember a time when digital computers were not available to individuals.
> The Microsofts, googles and Apples of this world excel in actually delivering results. And it can be argued that that's more important than you really "owning" a device or a service.
Not to go too Godwin here but that sounds like a "Hitler made the trains run on time" argument. There are all kinds of things that "deliver results" but with hidden costs that are unacceptable when brought into the light.
Yes I understand, but all I’m saying is that there is an argument to be made there. And luckily the transgressions of Microsoft pale in comparison to the Nazi regime :-)
The unsurprising thing is that people here think that this is left-tech activism. The true cool-aid[1] is this particular tech ideology which is all about “liberty” on the surface but is either agnostic of or embraces privatization.[2] Yeah, unsurprisingly the author explicitly embraces “the tech industry”. It’s just gone wrong or too far. It’s not like the good old privatization in the old days.
Wanting tech companies to be regulated more in this day and age of such extreme tech behemoth domination is left-wing activism in the same sense as (not being a Peter Thiel-style maniac) = left-wing.
It's interesting there is a lot of agreement. In a way I'm surprised because I often get the impression a lot of people here have pretty well drunk the Kool-aid of corporatism.