i like the optimism and really hope you are right, but there has been a very deliberate trend to strip us of ownership, and the powers that be seem very serious about it (think uber instead of car ownership, netflix and game streaming instead of media ownership, renting instead of home ownership) as capitalism concentrates wealth.

and with the ubiquitous internet infrastructure we have now, centralizing computing is easier than ever when all they really care about is that we are able to do our button pressing work.

i really do hope they come up with a way to fix silicon. because stuff like motherboards can already be easily repaired with mostly off the shelf components, but silicon gets… complicated to say the least, and it’s at the center of our current bottleneck. or that used server hardware isn’t somehow efused, encrypted or otherwise made nonviable or too hard for consumers to reuse.

there is some hope for some other potentially capable player like china and their shiny new semiconductor industry or russia can step in and offer alternatives to enshitified us tech as they wedge themselves into the global market, but that gets difficult with import controls that would certainly be put in place to stop them from taking hold.

but yeah, the next decade or two will see some muddying of these waters as the war season picks up, cooperation shuts down and resources get scarce as they are redirected to murder.

i will go as far as to say the big changes you allude to are already in the pipeline and IDing everyone on the internet and pushing cloud is just the beginning.