Why I’m scared of the post-PC era.

Personally I'd like it if I could hack my fridge. And my thermostat. And my dishwasher.

But those actually aren't as important as a computer because I don't use them to make things.

I don't dismiss the power of giving access to information consumption devices to the masses. But I would prefer if we could put the means of production into their hands as well. So I agree to some degree with the author.

As for censorship, everything you say is true. It doesn't make fears of censorship unfounded. The iPad has close to 100% marketshare for tablets. And Apple actively censors its sole means of app distribution. That's a lot of power for a private company to hold. Not illegal or immoral, but scary.

I think a future in which everyone chooses to live in Disneyland is kind of scary, even if I can continue to choose not to live there. And the way to fight it is to convince people that there are alternative visions of the future. And that's how I read this post.

But please stop whining. <- This sounds more like whining to me than the post did.

In 1951 you could have whined, "With the rise of pro-grammable computers, the Engineer can simply turn his brain off and let the computer do all the work. The era of craftsmanship has come to a close. No, no need to think dear friend, we have ourselves a Computer. Aughh!"

Then, in 1961 you could have sighed, "The knowledge of how to maintain a computer will be gone forever with this increase in reliability. How will someone ever know truly how computers work unless they have to fix them piece by piece."

Then, in 1971 you could have pined, "With the rise of these time-share based operating environments, the future programmer has all the hard things taken care of for them. All that you need now is a data-bank administrator and record input clerk. There is no future in computing!"

Then, in 1981 you could have lamented, "Baugh! The rise of these pre-built micros means that the future generations won't know how to work a logic analyzer or an oscilloscope. They will never use a soldering gun or know the joy of assembling a memory board because they will just drop it in the slot. Ug!"

Then, in 1991 you could have scoffed, "well with all these new fancy compilers, nobody will appreciate the joys of directly manipulating registers and stacks. Instead, they will spend their career in higher order abstractions without ever truly knowing the soul of the machine."

Then, in 2001 you could have cried, "This era of the world wide web is hastening the decline of single system software and entertainment consumption is simply supplanting productivity for the largest use case of computing. Programming has become nothing more then playing Oz in the Emerald City; pulling pre-built levers as the scarecrows and tin-men of the world marvel on the sidelines"

Could not agree more. I can only imagine how much closer my thirteen year old self would have come to building my iron man armor had I'd been armed with a broadband connection and a digikey.com account back in the 80s.

Well, one thing I worry about is the ability of hackers to continue to develop their own OS's and load them on machines. Surely big companies will need to continue to be able to do this but it's possible to imagine that that might be only able to be done with a contract with the hardware manufacturer in the future, which could destroy the ability of hackers to load their own OS's on machines. (i.e. custom os's is something that there might be insufficient demand for despite not being able to create them with future devices.)

And if you did, you'd be missing the point. The explosion of computing in the general public over the past 20 years has seen the explosion of innovation - "the internet", as an industry, is really only 15 years old. Not even that. And yet it's innovated and transformed forever our modern societies.

That innovation has been driven by the masses being able to create things on their computers. Something that potentially restricts the ability to innovate across the masses shouldn't just be handwaved away like yet another whine.