> I guess this is what the scribing monks felt once the moving press came about. The paradigm changed, and our way became obsolete, fell into disuse, and finally a footnote.

I think the autor is trying to say that they worry on general purpose personal computer being moved aside by something else - they do not clarify - perhaps mobile edge devices always more owned by the manufacturer that you and cloud platform ecosystem that ownes your data and you computing than you do. And this is what the tecbro elite - Zuck, Musk, Thiel, Bezos, etc - have been doing for early 00’s onwards: own the internet, own the data, own the access, own the computers, own everything. And they have been succeeding, until only recently getting push-back.

There’s unfortunately plenty of people to whom computer is a touch screen terminal via which you access Meta and Google products, as well as increasingly various AI models. But fortunately Linux is better than ever, and LLM-models have capability to make learning CS and basic computer knowledge easier than ever, combined withh all the resources internet has to offer. Printing press was fas more superior technology in spreading infomation whereas edgecomputing hardly is mostly a matter of convenience, so perhaps the analogue on monks is not as adept as one might first think.

Basically, we will have freedom as long as we have freaks, geeks and nerds.