Personal Computing 2.0: Your Data, Your Computer, Your Revolution
Personal Computing 2.0: It's time for a personal computing revolution
The author, who fell in love with personal computing as a child, argues that the original PC era gave way to an internet strangled by Big Tech, spam, and closed AI. He proposes Personal Computing 2.0: a paradigm where your data is truly yours, running on any device, powered by open-weight AI models. This shift would restore privacy, enable instant search across all your data, and force AI companies to compete on cost and performance rather than lock-in.
The ability to delete your life and career is far more power than any one company should have.
- advael
I think it's not been easier for people to own their own PCs in a meaningful sense in my lifetime, but the tech companies will fight that tooth and nail however they can. The level of control over people's lives that has become the norm is just too useful, too profitable, for companies to give up on. Wanting this means opposing their interests on the level of both personal choices and policy, and this idealism will go nowhere if not coupled with a willingness to actually have that fight
- BatchJob
There is a personal computing revolution already happening...Its called you wont have one if you can even afford one.
- spottedmarley
1.0 and 2.0 are, sociologically and culturally, two completely different paradigms when considering how people use their devices. In the early days, even for the first decade or so of the internet, the computing world was largely homogeneous, most people had almost identical hardware, software and use cases for their home PCs. There was not a lot of variation. In 2026 the entire world is fractured in terms of the hardware, software and applied use of their myriad of devices. Impossible to label any of it as PC2.0 when virtually no two PCs are the same or used for the same purposes. So it would be more like several billion unique PC revolutions.