then at some point, the balance started tipping.
Things I specifically remember:
- half life required you to register online to install your single-player game from CD
- turbotax would only install on one computer.
- software started rooting around on your system and uploading the findings
- the iphone didn't let you install your own software
- microsoft. enough said.
AI local rigs feel like the pc did in 1980.
Now it's the opposite. The computers belong to the corporations. They're just generously allowing us to use them, and only in ways that they profit off of. Computers, arguably humanity's most important invention, reduced to interactive television, a mere vehicle for corporate advertsing and surveillance capitalism.
It's truly disgusting. Makes me sad like nothing else.
What computers "are" has been ebbing and flowing decade after decade. They've been repurposed to something that they initially weren't. It was originally niche, and not at all the norm.
Then, there was a brief period when counter culture was pop culture. That was reflected in everything in the 90's, from music to computers.
Imo 90s sci-fi had a lot of this techno optimism, even if the settings were often dystopian. Cyberpunk was pretty wild and who knows a lot of that could still come to pass.