This shouldn’t have been the least bit surprising — since this is what happened to every mass communication technology over the past few centuries: print, then radio, then television. The OG computing folks at Xerox PARC indeed foresaw all this, and McLuhan wrote about this in the 50s/60s.

There were a lot of annoying detours.

A lot of the bad parts of computing originated in hollywood. They wanted certainty that you could only play "protected" music or video.

This sort of thing made it "necessary" to lock bootloaders and eventually with the iphone... The ship of theseus didn't belong to theseus anymore, it was just a license.

now lots of devices are cash registers, surveillance devices, e-meters and pop-up generators.

Advertising is a cancer on society. It corrupts all forms of media, ever since the invention of publishing and broadcasting. The internet is its most lucrative victim yet. It's where they've taken the sociopathic ideas pioneered by Bernays to their maximum expression. It is the most powerful global psychological manipulation machine, influencing everything from what we spend our money on, to how we think and act. It is unequivocally a major cause of the sociopolitical unrest and conflicts we see today. The really insidious part is that most people don't consciously realize they're being manipulated, and are happy to exchange that for some "free" products and services. This has, of course, made many companies very rich, by operating in a dark data broker market exchanging the data we've given them, and more prominently, data they've stolen or inferred from us.

To people working in these companies: you're complicit in the breakdown of society. Grow a moral backbone, quit, and boycott them.

... or that the marketing and sales department is the real scaffold for enabling computing for those without university access.