The drive to turn general-purpose computation devices into information appliances is something that I find interesting and a bit disturbing. I'm not sure that it's just a fault of streamlined UIs, though. People actively want to neuter their machines to present only what they want and are familiar with, and not a great deal else.
I'm not a Luddite, I don't believe in bashing up the machinery of the internet because it shall enslave us all. It is bewildering, though, that when given ever-better tools for learning and problem-solving, we've managed to infect everything with the same bullshit advertising and consumerism memes that plagued our parents.
Given the opportunity and mechanism for solving problems that were utterly infeasible mere decades ago, for connecting people of different walks of life across untold miles, and for storing several times over the combined sum of mankind's knowledge, a good chunk of startups appear to be either banking on advertising or data mining (for better advertising) as their core business.
Worse, our customers (read: product) flock in droves to our sites and give up their information, buy our products knowing full well our anti-competitive practices (secure boot, trusted computing, and all the rest) because they're too lazy to maintain their own systems, and cheerfully pull down any of their member that question the economic assumptions that condemn "piracy"--and we laud and encourage them!
From time to time we see folks making light of the FSF and Stallman and GNU and that whole mess. I'm basically convinced at this point that the only real mistake those neckbeards have made is making the assumption that the users are worth protecting and ensuring the freedom of.
Why are people concerned about educating the next generation of willful idiots?