> As you mention, computers can become "orders of magnitude more capable" simply by shrinking to a smaller form factors. We're about to have smartphones that are fully usable as computers, or smart watches that you can run free OS's and homebrew applications on.

He talks about functionality. Not power. Yes, computers are more powerful now. But the point is that old computers were way more flexible and "powerful" in an usability sense. New computers are full of arbitrary (and natural (1)) barriers to stop you from having full control of your pocket CPU.

(1) The natural additional barrier is also complexity. Early computers were simple. Some hobbyist could write a system from scratch just by having some knowledge about computers and electronics. Now you have a lot more factors, an OS, a plethora of drivers and a browser that's closer to a VM than a HTML parser.

> There's still plenty of projects trying to do that kind of thing. Big Tech social media is only the most popular part of the Internet, you're mostly free to ignore it if you like.

You are right. But that kind of connection is disappointing to our 20 year old geek self. We (naively) wanted more people to become computer literates. Instead, we got algorithms and fake news.

All sorts of cool things that we’re now getting back to with Starship 40 years later… sounds like the very definition of a dead end to me! No one took Shuttle and iterated on it. It had a bunch of impractical ideas combined for primarily political reasons that resulted in actual shuttle flights being incredibly dangerous.

It delivered lots of pork, but at the cost of actual progress.