There's some meta-analysis, perspective, that I think Cory Doctorow captured very well on this topic, broadly, recently. "Descartes' God has failed and Thompson's Satan rules our computers"[1] is the true fact of the day, describes the hell-hole shit-crap reality we have been forced into via extremely aggressive IP rules & enforcement. Corporatism pushing ever-diminishing legal & ethos-based respect for humanity keeps making victory after victory, against humankind's ability not (just) to repair, but to understand, to be in contact with, to learn about the world about them. Corporate machinehood has permission to dictate that the user know nothing, learn nothing, understand nothing, be merely reduced to an end-user. This is poison, at the deepest level an abject violation of the spirit & virtue of the fundamental birthright of man- the tool maker- to learn & develop & improve their environment. The new equation of computing turns us into animals, mere users of what is. It is vile. A right to repair is such a basic, fundamental expression, of our right to continue, to avoid loss, but the real battle is so much larger, so much about whether corporations are allowed to control & own understanding, or whether mankind is permitted an ongoing say & understanding of the artifacts that fill our world. Man became great upon a backbone of natural science, but science of the artificial is prevented by law.
Props to Cory, for, as usual, calibrating us & driving us towards some very common very basic sense.
It is dehumanizing to me that we have invented legal & technical systems that reverse the historical trend, of man, the learner, man the toolmaker, man the natural scientist, who understands more & more of the world about them.
We have created proprietary knowledge, proprietary systems, that are massively popular, ubiquotously used, that none of us are allowed to nor can understand or learn about.
I am in awe, have huge respect for the hight heights of this high technology that we have arisen towards. But, for the first time, it feels like it is captivated wonder. And unlike something complex like a train or airplane, this high tech is deeply deeply fundamental to our everyday life, reshapes our reality immensely. And it is a hell, forever boiling & changing around us, that we can not see, can not understand, have no access to, no ability to learn about these deeply propietary bits of tech that are all around us, that we spend so much time enmeshed in.
It is a philosophical violation of the spirit of humankind, of the highest order.
These modern systems are just extremely complex, created by the combined energy of many, many people. But nature around us is still even more complex, and there are many mechanisms in nature we don't understand (like the human brain). Therefore I don't understand why you consider the technical systems to be especially "hellish".
Even if you Mac is somehow "locked", you can still take an electron microscope to its mainboard and try to understand the circuits and so on. (In theory - in practice, I've just read a modern Ryzen chip consists of billions of transistors, so good luck trying to reverse engineer it).
Props to Cory, for, as usual, calibrating us & driving us towards some very common very basic sense.
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons...