You’ve felt it, haven’t you? That quiet, creeping unease when you try to do something perfectly reasonable on your phone or laptop, only to hit an invisible wall. You bought the hardware. You pay for the internet. Yet, somehow, you need permission to use your own machine.
A computer you don’t control isn’t a tool; it’s a digital leash.
Back in 2011, author Cory Doctorow gave a speech titled “The Coming War on General Computation.” He warned that governments and corporations would try to lock down our devices to protect their business models. We thought he was talking about music piracy and DRM. We were wrong. He was predicting the exact playbook being used today to hype the “existential danger” of AI.
Right now, the loudest voices in tech are screaming about unregulated Large Language Models and catastrophic risk. They demand “safety frameworks.” They want compute to be centralized, gated, and heavily monitored by a select few “trusted” actors. But let’s be brutally honest: this has nothing to do with keeping humanity safe.
Every cry of ‘existential risk’ is just a digital landlord demanding a better lock.
Look at the trajectory. First, they convinced us our phones weren’t “general purpose computers,” locking them down behind walled gardens. Then, they moved our software into the cloud, turning ownership into a subscription. Now, the most powerful technology of our generation—AI—is being kept strictly behind API paywalls and proprietary hardware requirements. They are using our fear of what AI might do to justify stripping us of our right to run our own code.
The drive to make computers “safer” by making them more controlled actually makes them infinitely more dangerous to the people who own them. If a machine is hardwired to obey a corporation or a government over its actual owner, that machine can be weaponized against you. It can censor your speech, monitor your habits, and throttle your dissent at the firmware level.
Safety is just the word they use when they really mean ‘permission’.
This isn’t a fringe debate for technologists. This determines whether you remain a citizen of the digital world or just a tenant farming on a megacorp’s platform. It determines whether the next great innovator, or even the next political dissident, will have the right to the machines they already own.
We cannot let them trade our digital freedom for their version of security. The war on general computation isn’t coming—it’s already here, hiding behind the mask of AI safety. It’s time to reject the panic and reclaim our machines.
FAQ
Q: Isn't AI actually dangerous? Don't we need some regulation?
A: Yes, AI has risks, but 'regulation' in this context means licensing compute to a few billionaire-backed gatekeepers. You don't solve a fire risk by giving the fire department a monopoly on matches.
Q: What's the practical implication for me?
A: It means the era of tinkering with software is ending. You will only be allowed to run pre-approved, cloud-tethered applications that serve the platform's interests, not yours.
Q: What's the contrarian take?
A: The 'AI existential risk' panic is the most successful marketing campaign in tech history. It's a Trojan horse designed to eliminate open-source competition and cement corporate monopolies under the guise of public safety.