Still, something was lost with the rise of personal computing. One clue comes from a 1978 article by the leftist tech activist group Boston Computer Collective. Writing in the radical science magazine Science for the People, they took aim at the hollowness of the personal computing revolution, reviewing Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines, a widely circulated book celebrating that revolution.

Making computers more widespread would not "pave the way towards a just society" they argued. Smaller machines would not mean more personal power and less corporate control. [...]

In subsequent decades, their critiques seem to have proven correct. Decentralization and personalization - watchwords of the personal computing and internet era - did not automatically serve as forces for liberation. Rather they were something of a Trojan horse: a way of making computer technology so intimate that it brought profit-making and corporate power into every aspect of our lives.