Personal Computing 2.0: It's time for a personal computing revolution

“Computing” is so ubiquitous and personal today that we couldn’t imagine it. Well, for a lot of people, it is not a computing, it is a storage and viewing only. :)

I’ve been daily on internet since 1992 and I see what it does to me… and to all of us.

We don’t remember, we search for something all the time, people are anxious, we forget things, we hoard data, very young people all around the world get high speed access to adult stuff, most of people have similar stuff at home because of instagram, people are cynical, ironic, cannot discuss, do rage bait, news written to raise negative emotions because they make you click and share, hybrid wars enabled by social networks…

For sure, we could discuss here ad nauseam, but it is not the point.

Idealistic view is “people will start revolution”. No, they won’t. They are numbed down.

There is research already that use of LLM causes numbness.

I would say that almost in everything.

But 80 pct (<= Pareto) people use it as “a better Google” anyway…

You can make your devices personal - and offline (eg offline wikipedia that saturates your informational needs in 99 pct) - if you want to get out of mess described above. You can use offline software for everything. You can use open source and free software.

But don’t expect any revolution.

Most of us are too shy or too numb…and keyboard warriors.. fortunately, or unfortunately. It is point of view :)

There is a personal computing revolution already happening...Its called you wont have one if you can even afford one.

The things I am expecting to see in my view of this personal computing movement:

AI accelerating jailbreaking e-waste to make it usable

AI accelerating design and release of "open" hardware

Rewrites of proprietary software released as open source "clones" of closed projects

Local AI like things like llama.cpp and Ollama projects improving over time

Prices of hardware and electricity coming down so running local AI is more economical

AI decompiling and reverse engineering more proprietary stuff we don't understand so we can write "open" versions of code that don't exist

etc.

I think it's not been easier for people to own their own PCs in a meaningful sense in my lifetime, but the tech companies will fight that tooth and nail however they can. The level of control over people's lives that has become the norm is just too useful, too profitable, for companies to give up on. Wanting this means opposing their interests on the level of both personal choices and policy, and this idealism will go nowhere if not coupled with a willingness to actually have that fight

I see the versions a little differently:

1.0 - You own the hardware. Your data lives on physical media that you own. Sharing data is inconvenient and likely involves transporting it in meat-space. AI just plain isn't.

2.0 - You own the hardware. Your data lives in a combination of local media and the cloud. Not sharing data is hard. It is valuable to corporations you probably don't even know the names of. You can run AI on your own hardware, but it probably won't be very good.

3.0 - You don't own the hardware, but you can pay a subscription to access somebody else's hardware. "Your" data is no longer even remotely yours, but you can stream it if you pay for a subscription. Sharing data is no easier than in 2.0. You can also pay yet another subscription fee for AI. The AI is good, or it might be evil. Hard to say.

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Most people are now somewhere between 2.0 and 3.0 and you can get pretty close to both ends of the spectrum if you want to. I appreciate the desire to go no further towards 3.0, and perhaps even retreat back towards 1.5 or something like that. Unfortunately, that's not where things seem to be going. We're being pushed towards 3.0 hard by the people who sell subscriptions.

1.0 and 2.0 are, sociologically and culturally, two completely different paradigms when considering how people use their devices. In the early days, even for the first decade or so of the internet, the computing world was largely homogeneous, most people had almost identical hardware, software and use cases for their home PCs. There was not a lot of variation. In 2026 the entire world is fractured in terms of the hardware, software and applied use of their myriad of devices. Impossible to label any of it as PC2.0 when virtually no two PCs are the same or used for the same purposes. So it would be more like several billion unique PC revolutions.

The only thing that'd improve life for the many is if billionaires ceased to exist.

May I coin a phrase, "impersonal computing". You will own nothing and have a subscription to your compute and intelligence. Sweet mama Matrix, the future is here.

Is it?