I mean, imagine a future where every computer is just a chromebook, phones are no longer phones but just a “terminal” that streams the actual OS which runs in the cloud.
I mean, with 5G, I think its possible to make it seamless. And I think corporations push for this because they would love to have your data in the cloud, both for surveillance, and to charge a subscription for storage. I think this enshittifications would eventually happen to digital storage.
“You would own nothing and you’d be happy”
So how likely will this dystopian future happen?
I’d predict a 90% chance of this happening, and almost everyone would be okay at first, until they start overcharging for cloud storage subscriptions, but by then it’d be too late, there’d be a monopoly.
It’s pretty funny how I’ve seen posts exactly like this one 10-15 years ago, and nothing has really changed that much from a consumer perspective.
It’s just simply cheaper, more reliable, and more convenient to have local storage.
If you dug into history - with computers in the 70s-80s, we used to remotely dial into another computer. The terminal at your school (as home computers were pretty expensive) would dial into a stronger computer and you’d use up their resources.
Every few years, I see that mentality coming back. Cloud computing. Chromebooks. Remote desktops. Stadia and gaming on-demand.
Its fascinating.
People also know what cloud gaming means now.
If that device loses service, it’s just a fancy paper weight until some nerd on GitHub spends a month rooting it and writing homebrew.
But people are also fucking stupid, so… They’ll buy anything, just sell it.