In the 1970s the Personal Computer was heralded as a great revolution, bringing the power of computing to the masses. Democratising it. Taking it from something you had to be affiliated with an institution to enjoy to something many people could afford.

Halfway through the 2020s the Personal Computer appears to be a threatened species.

Decades of complacency have enabled corporate giants to own vast swathes of the computing market, and increasingly enclose their users with more and more restrictive computing platforms, and now with the advent of the AI bubble’s reshaping of the computing market, they appear to be preparing for a killing blow.

Gone are the days where a computer magazine would act as a hub for fellow readers’ shared source code, coach readers on how to approach computing problems and even programming. I fear we are in for a decade of the corporate interests pivoting us into owning nothing and enjoying only slop.

As a long-time Mac user it pains me to say it, but I think we’re gonna have to seize the means of computing. We must be free to use our bicycles for the mind lest it be taken from us. macOS has been slowly degrading for years now. Windows is way ahead of the curve on this. But from this position it feels inevitable.

You should be able to control your devices. You should be able to repair them. You should be able to upgrade them. You should be able to keep them going longer than the manufacturer would like to keep their profit margins up. You shouldn’t have to rent computing power from a datacentre which is poisoning your fellow human and the environment we share. And in the year where solar is starting to beat coal for the first time, we shouldn’t be investing in more dirty power to do it.

Hack your devices. Resist corporate control. Delete corporate bloatware. Run community-maintained software. Host your own services. And teach others to do the same. Keep using that “old” RAM they already sold you. It’s not broken, corporate software is just bloated.

I fear it’s our only path through this bubble.