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Everything ebbs and flows. Lenny Bruce made a career on censorship and now far worse things are being actively promoted by the large media networks.
The next frontier for pure computing is crypto. I don't mean the financial instruments like bitcoin, but all of the superscale distributed information sharing protocols. Interplantery Filesystem comes to mind.
This will, like everything in life, be both good and bad. Good in that actually free, I-control-all-of-my-own-shit computing plus actual anonymity (until quantum is a thing). It will also be bad in that the bad people will have access to all of this too - there's already cheese pizza on the main crypto blockchain for instance. But how new is this? Modulo math and cryptography have been around long enough that anybody who really truly wants to send out "bad" data (bad in a moral or ethical sense or w/e) has been able to.
There will be a period of transition. I think we're already in it. People who have to learn how to use computers again, at a lower level. It is amazing the number of college undergrads who begin a compsci class and have literally never heard of a "directory structure" before and have never, ever popped open a terminal of any type.
And that last part is the real shame of it. The gamification / subscriptionification of personal computing has destroyed what was (and will be, eventually) a fundamentally liberating technology. A few weeks ago, my Dad (late 70s) bought a new laptop with Windows 11. He was an early user of COBOL (!) back in the day. To see - and help - him trudge through all of the surveillance-ware screens was deeply sad. It was like watching a delta blues musician see Mick Jagger shimmy to "Brown Sugar" at some chintzy Las Vegas mega venue. His simple comment was succinct; "computers aren't fun anymore."
But I remain an optimist, although not one that believes "the good" comes for free or without some metaphysical combat. The bifurcation, I think, will be people who are content to let Corporate BigAI into the very depths of their minds and hearts simply in exchange for a daily (hourly?) dose of DOPEamine. On the other side of that line will be folks who value the human spirits role in intellect, epistemology, and information / knowledge / wisdom cultivation. I think this later group will engage in some sort of "dark-techno-renaissance" where some really hardcore but compelling Linux distros pop up. Perhaps to the point that a crypto-first layer of the internet emerges. A kind of BBS / IRC version .... 2030.0?
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