The PC movement of the 90s, where it feels like this author is reminiscing, was about arbitraging the delta between what the tech could do and the literacy and expertise in government.
> But over the past decade in particular, the Internet and digital rights management (DRM) have been steadily pulling that control away from us and putting it into the hands of huge corporations.
This period of computing was notable for how a bunch of nerds figured out how to use new networking technology to stretch/abuse/violate/break copyright and fair-use laws around media.
So many ways to get ripped content then. It was fun for a teenager and felt like a victimless loophole. It both opened a bloom of interesting new creative works, but also decimating existing markets and systems, so that eventually new monopolists Netflix and Spotify could take over.
But the conditions and tools available then never went away, and private personal computing is more available today than ever before. In a few hours someone can read a few tutorials and buy/build and run a whole redudant content serving service for all of their personal needs, while writing or conglomerating a whole system of tools and capabilities to automate or agument nearly anything they could think of.