I mean, imagine a future where every computer is just a chromebook, phones are no longer phones but just a “terminal” that streams the actual OS which runs in the cloud.
I mean, with 5G, I think its possible to make it seamless. And I think corporations push for this because they would love to have your data in the cloud, both for surveillance, and to charge a subscription for storage. I think this enshittifications would eventually happen to digital storage.
“You would own nothing and you’d be happy”
So how likely will this dystopian future happen?
I’d predict a 90% chance of this happening, and almost everyone would be okay at first, until they start overcharging for cloud storage subscriptions, but by then it’d be too late, there’d be a monopoly.
“Cloud” is just a 2010+ term for multihomed server. Before around 1995, almost all Internet-related storage was “cloud”, with people using terminals and terminal emulators connecting to the mainframe servers that hosted their storage.
And yet, even back then, people stored local data on floppy disks because sometimes you needed something when your online storage wasn’t available for one reason or another.