How surveillance capitalism and DRM turned home tech from friend to foe.

For a while—in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s—it felt like nerds were making the world a better place. Now, it feels like the most successful tech companies are making it worse.

Internet surveillance, the algorithmic polarization of social media, predatory app stores, and extractive business models have eroded the freedoms the personal computer once promised, effectively ending the PC era for most tech consumers.

The “personal computer” was once a radical idea—a computer an individual could own and control completely. The concept emerged in the early 1970s when microprocessors made it economical and practical for a person to own their very own computer, in contrast to the rise of data processing mainframes in the 1950s and 60s.

At its core, the PC movement was about a kind of tech liberty—–which I’ll define as the freedom to explore new ideas, control your own creative works, and make mistakes without punishment.

The personal computer era bloomed in the late 1970s and continued into the 1980s and 90s. 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. We need to take back control of our digital lives and make computing personal again.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not calling the tech industry evil. I’m a huge fan of technology. The industry is full of great people, and this is not a personal attack on anyone. I just think runaway market forces and a handful of poorly-crafted US laws like section 1201 of the DMCA have put all of us onto the wrong track (more on that below).

To some extent, tech companies were always predatory. To some extent, all companies are predatory. It’s a matter of degrees. But I believe there’s a fundamental truth that we’ve charted a deeply unhealthy path ahead with consumer technology at the moment.

Tech critic Ed Zitron calls this phenomenon “The Rot Economy,” where companies are more obsessed with continuous growth than with providing useful products. “Our economy isn’t one that produces things to be used, but things that increase usage,” Zitron wrote in another piece, bringing focus to ideas I’ve been mulling for the past half-decade.

This post started as a 2022 Twitter thread, and I’ve offered to write editorials about my frustrations with increasingly predatory tech business practices since 2020 for my last two employers, but both declined to publish them. I understand why. These are uncomfortable truths to face. But if you love technology like I do, we have to accept what we’re doing wrong if we are going to make it better.

Learning From the Past

While consumer and computer tech today is more powerful than ever before—and in some ways far more convenient—some of the structural ways we used to interface with technology companies were arguably healthier in the past.

For example, which part of the Apple II was predatory? It promised productivity, education, and entertainment. You could program it yourself, repair or expand it without restriction. No subscriptions, no hardware DRM (though there was software copy protection), no tracking. No need for special tools to repair it either. In fact, Apple openly encouraged experimentation.

Further, what percentage of your income had to go towards annual software subscriptions on a 20th century Windows PC (like this Sony VAIO)? You bought an application and you owned an indefinite license to use it. If there was an upgrade, you bought that too. And if you liked an older version of the software, you could keep using it without having it vanish in an automatic update.

How many Nintendo Entertainment System games sustained themselves with in-app purchases and microtransactions? What more did the console ask of you after you bought a cartridge? Maybe to buy another one later if it was fun?

Which part of this TV set kept track of everything you watched and then secretly sold the data to advertisers?

Which part of Windows 95 fed you ads without your consent and kept track of everything you did remotely so Microsoft could keep stats on it? And which part of Solitaire demanded a monthly subscription to play? (And which part attempted to record literally everything you do on your computer?)

Which part of Amazon.com in 2000 tried to get you to buy millions of no-name counterfeit and dangerous goods propped up by stealth advertising and fake reviews? In its early years, Amazon arguably succeeded through good selection, fair prices on reputable brands, and the wisdom of the crowd through authentic customer reviews.

Which part of this Motorola StarTAC cellular phone kept track of your every move and sold the information, behind your back, to private data brokers? And which part included sealed-in batteries that would ruin the entire phone if they went bad?

Which part of this BBS used automated algorithms that intentionally fed its users inflammatory and false information to drive engagement for profit? (The users themselves provided the flames.)

Which part of Google in the 1990s and early 2000s blanketed its results with deceptive ads or made you add “Reddit” to every search to get good results that weren’t overwhelmed by SEO-seeking filler content?

Which part of this VHS tape disappeared or became unplayable if the publisher suddenly decided it didn’t like it anymore—or didn’t want to pay the writers and actors residual fees?

The Extractive Model

Americans have allowed runaway business models, empowered by tech, to subvert privacy and individual liberty on the road to making money. Our default tech business model has become extractive, like part of a strip-mining operation. Consumers—and now creative works (used for training AI)—are treated as a natural resource to be milked and exploited.

The extractive model may end up being self-destructive for the tech industry itself. In the physical world, resource extraction needs limits and regulations to be sustainable. It can be wildly profitable until a resource becomes over-harvested, or the harvesting process corrupts the environment that lets the industry exist in the first place.

There’s also the drive to lock consumers into an ecosystem, powered by DRM. You should buy tech products and get direct value fairly, not unleash a secret vampire to track you, manipulate you, and attempt to extract money from you forever. Just because companies have unlocked this “everything as a service” endless money hack does not mean they should do it.

And there’s another problem. Very soon, we might be threatening the continuity of history itself with technologies that pollute the historical record with AI-generated noise. It sounds dramatic, but that could eventually undermine the shared cultural bonds that hold cultural groups together.

That’s important because history is what makes this type of criticism possible. History is how we know if we’re being abused because we can rely on written records of people who came before (even 15 minutes ago) and make comparisons. If technology takes history away from us, there may be no hope of recovery.

How We Can Reclaim Control

Every generation looks back and says, “Things used to be better,” whether they are accurate or not.

But I’m not suggesting we live in the past. It is possible to learn from history and integrate the best of today’s technology with fair business practices that are more sustainable and healthy for everyone in the long run.

In the short term, we can do things like support open projects like Linux, support non-predatory and open source software, and run apps and store data locally as much as possible. But some bigger structural changes are necessary if we really want to launch the era of Personal Computer 2.0.

I’ve shown this editorial to friends, and some people felt that I did not emphasize the benefits of current technology enough. But I argue that my criticism is less about the actual technology and more about how we use it—and how companies make money from it.

Since I originally wrote my thoughts in a viral Twitter thread in June 2022, others have expanded on these ideas with far more eloquence. Five months after my thread, Cory Doctorow wrote his first post on “enshittification,” a hallmark piece identifying a tendency for online platforms to decay over time.

A common thread between many of the issues hinted at above and in both Doctorow and Zitron’s work has been the rise of the ubiquitous Internet, which has allowed content owners and device makers to keep an eye on (and influence) consumer habits remotely, pulling our strings like puppeteers and putting a drip feed on our wallets.

Additionally, section 1201 of the DMCA made it illegal to circumvent DRM, allowing manufacturers to lock down platforms in a way that challenges the traditional concept of ownership, enables predatory app stores, and threatens our cultural history.

We need comprehensive privacy legislation in the United States that enshrines individual privacy as a fundamental right. We need Right to Repair legislation that puts control of our devices back into our hands—and also DRM reform, especially repealing Section 1201 of the DMCA so we can control the goods we own and historians can preserve our cultural heritage without the need for piracy.

Tech monopolies must be held to account, the outsized influence of some tech billionaires must be held in check, and competition must be allowed to thrive. We may also need to consider the protection of both consumers themselves and human-created works (including our history) as part of a conservation effort before extractive models permanently pollute our shared cultural resources.

The way the political winds are blowing right now in the US, significant legal reform seems unlikely for now. Things may need to get much worse before they get better. But the kind of extractive lock-in we’re seeing with technology is fundamentally incompatible with freedom in my opinion, so something needs to change if we still value the kind of personal liberty the PC once promised—that freedom to explore, create, and make mistakes without surveillance or punishment.

Sure, things will never be perfect in the United States. Profits will always be chased, and there will be collateral damage. And yes, some parts of technology today are better than ever (computing power, screen resolutions, and bandwidth to name a few).

The Internet has brought amazing things, including Wikipedia, The Internet Archive, multiplayer online gaming, VC&G, and work-from-home jobs. But the urge to exploit users to the maximum extent through digital locks and surveillance should be held in check so that we can earnestly and honestly make the tech industry a beacon of optimism once more.

The stakes are higher now than they were in the 1970s. There is no “logging off,” nearly everyone has a smartphone in their pocket, and the digital world increasingly overlaps with every aspect of our lives. That means digital freedom is now equivalent to actual legal and personal freedom, and we must be allowed to control our own destinies.

Whether through purposeful reform or the eventual collapse of digital strip mining, I believe the personal computer will eventually rise again—–along with our chance to reclaim control of our digital lives.

Feedback Update: 01/21/2025

Since publishing this piece, last Friday, I’ve seen a lot of positive feedback for this piece, but also some frustration that I didn’t break down more specific personal, individual solutions to these problems.

As most technically-included people know, we’ve already been enacting those personal solutions for decades. We may store our own data locally on NAS devices instead of the cloud, use open source software, try to preserve privacy with VPNs, etc., but it has not stopped the tide of abuse from the tech industry. And I think that mainstream tech consumers (for example: most of my family members and friends) have no inclination to ever do any of those things.

That’s why I feel like the problem presented here is systemic and needs deep regulatory reform for things to actually get better in the United States. I think a good parallel may be climate change, where putting the onus on the individual to recycle or use fewer resources is misleading, when the biggest environmental abusers are large corporations and industries in aggregate. That needs deep systemic change too.

Also, I think that technical people tend to immediately reach for technical solutions, but I don’t think this is a technical problem. Capitalism, when left lightly regulated, will do what it always does: Pursue the accumulation of capital at all costs, even while damaging society at large. But I am not anti-capitalist: It is a potent tiger with great potential benefits, but it needs to be kept properly in a cage, or it will devour all of us. We should not fall into binary positions. We need balanced regulation that maintains healthy profit-driven competition but keeps capitalism’s worst tendencies in check. Achieving that is admittedly very difficult in these highly polarized times.

So I feel the issues here are ultimately systemic policy problems that need to be fixed with regulation (such as enact national right to repair laws, de-fang the DMCA, implement US national privacy protections, somehow limit the massive seemingly untouchable influence of big tech companies, and probably tax down tech billionaires).

That’s a big ask that feels insurmountable at this moment, but it’s a movement can start now with people who are fed up with our current de facto abusive tech business models. I think eventually we will get there anyway, because the I am not sure the current extractive model is sustainable without encountering massive social unrest within the next decade. The alternative to change, if taken to an extreme, may be the collapse of personal liberty for everyone.

In the meantime, while these lofty goals simmer and take shape, you can also continue to take personal steps to preserve your own tech liberty. Support nonprofits like the EFF that fight for privacy and user rights, strong encryption, open source, use local storage, and so on. I highly encourage it.

Ultimately I hope these thoughts can be a starting point for others to pick up the torch and build off of. I will also be thinking of constructive solutions for a future follow-up.

This is not the end of the conversation—it’s only the beginning. While systemic reform is essential to reclaiming broad personal liberty for everyone in the digital age, the new Personal Computing movement starts with you. Together, we can push for the regulations and systemic accountability that will restore true personal freedom in technology.

Tags: Apple II, Benj Edwards, Cory Doctorow, DRM, Ed Zitron, privacy, surveillance, tech history, technology

This entry was posted on Friday, January 17th, 2025 at 8:17 pm and is filed under News & Current Events, Retrogaming, Technology Commentary, Vintage Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.