The PC era is dying. Welcome to the collective computer era 

What happens when you take the personal out of the personal computer? In an age of AI as metered utility and OpenClaw rigs jacked into ChatGPT or Claude, we’re about to find out.

[Illustration: FC, D Graphics/Adobe Stock, Buddee/Adobe Stock (source images)]

 “The purpose of computers is human freedom.”

– Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974)

The computer is as emblematic of the American dream as the automobile. Perhaps it’s only natural that Apple, HP, Adobe, Google, and Amazon were each launched out of a garage. 

It was inside the garage that the modern era of personal computers was born, where anyone could own the power to calculate millions, and then billions of processes per second. PCs are a tool designed to move us faster, with a hood you can pop open to soup up. We insist that our computers speed up every year if only because it’s proof of progress. The very term “personal computer” promises liberty and autonomy; this isn’t the bus, but a transistor-powered rocket carrying a payload of rare earth minerals and rainbow hued headlights. 

The PC shrunk whole industries of work to our desktops, driving our ambitions anywhere they wanted to go. Whether you were publishing without a publisher, creating art without a studio, balancing books without an accountant, or mailing without a post office, the computer offered an all-in-one device for self-starters—a business in a box. Like cars, we invest in new computers because they are more expensive to fix than keep. And they enable us to pursue the two most important American ideals: self-expression and capitalism. 

But half a century since the idea of the PC went mainstream, the personal computer as both a product and an ideal has never been more at risk. In the age of AI, companies are acquiring unprecedented amounts of hardware, driving up prices, and affecting the entire PC market along the way. It’s affecting everyone from Dell dudes to kids dreaming about a Playstation 6. 

You can call the PC endangered, or on the precipice of anthropogenic evolution. Either way, we’re currently shifting toward a world of consolidated processing, where the PC is trending toward a luxury item. Meanwhile, computation itself is becoming a utility, priced and positioned as intelligence that we rent on demand.

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Mark Wilson is the global design editor at Fast Company, who covers the entirety of design’s impact on culture and business.. An authority in product design, UX, AI, experience design, retail, food, and branding, he has reported landmark features on companies ranging from Nike and Google to MSCHF, Canva, Samsung, Snap, IDEO, and Target, while profiling design luminaries including Tyler the Creator, Jony Ive, and Salehe Bembury More

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