We Have Been Here Before
Computing was once centralized in the server rooms of banks, universities, and large corporations, until two people in a garage changed the game. With AI we have returned to a cloud-centric architecture. Is the same thing about to happen again, 52 years later?
From the 1950s to the 1980s, computing meant one thing: a mainframe in a basement, terminals on desks, and access controlled by whoever owned the machine. IBM. Universities. Banks. Insurance companies. Computing was powerful but inaccessible to almost everyone.
Then a group of hobbyists in garage workshops and Homebrew Computer Clubs decided that computing should belong to the individual. They built their own boards. They hacked Atari hardware. They formed a bohemian revolution of individualists who believed that computing was not a corporate privilege but a personal one. The personal computer was born. Apple did not invent the computer. They decentralised it.
Are we now repeating that pattern?
Cloud AI has rebuilt the mainframe era, just with better UX. Intelligence lives on someone else's server, accessible through someone else's API, switched off by someone else's government on three days' notice.
Data sovereignty. IP sovereignty. Compute sovereignty. All concentrated in a handful of hyperscalers.
The Fable 5 shutdown was not an anomaly. It was a reminder of the architecture.
The question is now what it was then
Should intelligence belong to whoever owns the largest server, or to whoever generates it? The Homebrew Computer Club answer was obvious. So is ours.
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