Interesting take, though I don't fully agree with your conclusions. I take some heart that in the time since you wrote the piece, both normal people and non-geek politicians seem to have noticed that all is not well with the way things were going.

We're starting to see borderline-draconian privacy and data protection laws such as the GDPR in Europe, and while I question the implementation of that law and how effective it will be, the very fact that a group of politicians covering all of Europe managed to identify a risk and make actual law to try to deal with it is noteworthy in itself.

I suspect what will really make a difference in the near future though is that now social media and "fake news" and other consequences of the centralisation and commoditisation of online communications are messing with elections and our democratic systems. Politicians, even those who might otherwise give big businesses a pass on questionable ethical behaviour, do care about the systems that get them into positions of power, and they care very much about attempts to compromise those systems in ways that might remove them from power. If there's one thing in life that I have found quite reliable under all circumstances, it is the ability of a class of people in power to recognise threats and take steps to protect itself.

I also take some comfort in a few conversations I've had with non-techie friends in recent years, particularly those who are of the younger, digital native generations. It's become very clear to me that while my slightly older generation have sometimes been quite naive about the implications of new technologies, those behind us are much less so. Things like basic steps to stay safer online are taught in schools now. Social media accounts are ephemeral and kids switch to different networks in a way that would make it very difficult for the likes of Facebook to reach critical mass as it has with the older generations. The constant updates and sometimes breakages of software or access to multimedia content are getting old. And again, perhaps most heartening of all, while the younger generations consider these technologies an integral part of their lives and accept to some extent that there are compromises made in order to use them, that doesn't mean they like those compromises, and they will switch away if better options become available.

All of this is probably bad news for the long term prospects of businesses like Facebook and Google (and all the other big data hoarders we don't see because they run their marketplaces discreetly behind the scenes instead of with big public websites on the front). But it's probably good news for those of us hoping the centralised/distributed pendulum for computing is starting to swing back towards the distributed side again, in part driven by privacy, reliability and longevity concerns. The biggest weakness I saw in the article was quite a big jump to the conclusion that embedded and mainframe are the only two natural kinds of computing. I don't see why personal devices -- or rather, running substantial software and doing substantial data processing locally on those devices instead of just using them as essentially thin clients -- shouldn't be on that list as well. The form factors might change, but I don't see it as inevitable that personal computing will revert to being primarily a hobbyist's endeavour. There are some very good reasons it should not.