No, the device itself is not an attack, and it is perfectly reasonable that all kinds of devices exist. The fear, however, is that this device, and others like it, will someday vastly reduce the market for general-purpose devices.

There is no particular person in the wrong, and I wouldn’t call it “evil,” exactly, that all of our devices are now impossible to repair for the average person, or even the enthusiastic hobbyist: clocks, cameras, radios, automobiles, telephones ... everything we use is becoming too complex for people to understand, except in a rough, schematic way.

This has tremendous benefits, as we can make more sophisticated devices, with useful features, and our lives become more comfortable. But you must admit it also has a down-side: we lose the ability to repair, to tinker, to reverse-engineer, to understand our surroundings, to personally implement incremental improvements, etc. Each user sacrifices a little bit of control for a little bit of comfort, incrementally.

The bit of knowledge we do have about science ends up coming from top-down mandated curricula, purely theoretical understanding learned through books, rather than from practical experience cooking our own meals, tending our own gardens, crafting our own furniture, fixing our own appliances.

I believe that computers are amazingly useful and powerful general-purpose devices, and understanding how to program them can be extremely empowering, because it allows people to solve their own problems. If all you have is an iPad and a DVR and a built-in car GPS and a cell phone, you can only use them on the problems that other people already solved, and if your problem is different, you’re shit out of luck.