Imagine you walk into a guitar shop and buy a Stratocaster. You take it home, plug it in, and start playing. After a few minutes, the guitar makes a small chime and a message scrolls across the pickguard:
"Sorry. The song you are attempting to play is not licensed for your guitar. To unlock additional songs, please subscribe to Fender Plus for $9.99/month."
You'd return the guitar. You'd write a furious review. You'd call your friends and warn them. The story would go viral within a week and Fender's stock would crater. Within a month there would be Congressional hearings. The CEO would be on the cover of every business magazine looking like a comic book villain.
Of course you can play any song you want on a guitar you bought. Of course you can modify it, restring it, swap the pickups, refinish the body, tune it to drop D, play it upside down like Hendrix, or take a saw to it and turn it into a lamp. It's yours. The notion that a guitar manufacturer would dictate what you do with the instrument after you paid for it is so obviously absurd that nobody would tolerate it for thirty seconds.
And yet that's functionally what we've accepted with most of the digital products in our lives.
Your phone is a guitar that decides which songs you're allowed to play. It has hardware capabilities you paid for that the manufacturer won't let you access. It runs only the apps the manufacturer approves. It can't be repaired by anyone the manufacturer hasn't blessed. It phones home constantly, reports on what you do, and can have features remotely added or removed at the manufacturer's discretion. If you try to install software the manufacturer didn't sanction, the device fights you. If you try to fix a broken part yourself, you'll find that critical components are software-locked to the original assembly.
Your car is a guitar that phones home every time you play a chord. Modern vehicles report telematics data back to the manufacturer constantly, and increasingly, features you paid for at purchase can be disabled remotely if you resell the vehicle, or moved behind a subscription if the manufacturer decides to monetize them later. BMW tried to charge a monthly fee for heated seats that were physically installed in the car. Tesla has remotely disabled features on used vehicles. Independent mechanics are being squeezed out because the diagnostic data your car generates isn't accessible without manufacturer-licensed tools.
Your tractor is a guitar that stops working if you try to fix a broken string yourself. John Deere sells half-million-dollar machines and then uses software locks to prevent the farmer from repairing them. If a sensor fails during harvest, the tractor refuses to operate until an authorized Deere technician shows up — sometimes days later, while the crop sits in the field. Farmers who have been fixing their own equipment for a hundred years are suddenly being told they're not allowed to anymore, on machines they own outright. This is why some of them have been jailbreaking their tractors with Ukrainian firmware for years.
The pattern is the same in every case. A physical thing you bought with your own money has been quietly transformed into a rental-like relationship with the manufacturer, where they retain veto power over what you do with the object that is supposedly yours. The transition happened gradually, hidden inside software where most people couldn't see it. If Apple shipped a physical lock on the iPhone box that said "by opening this you agree to only install software we approve," people would notice. The fact that the lock is in code instead of metal somehow makes it invisible.
The justifications offered for this state of affairs are uniformly thin. Security. Quality. Safety. Consistency. Imagine Fender citing those reasons for restricting your guitar. "We restrict the songs you can play to ensure musical safety. Some chord progressions haven't been Fender-certified for harmonic correctness. Allowing arbitrary songs would compromise the brand experience." You'd laugh. You'd recognize immediately that the actual reason is they want a cut of your performance revenue. And yet when Apple uses the same arguments to justify the App Store, somehow we nod along.
The deeper point is this: a tool for expression must be fully owned by the person doing the expressing. A guitar is a tool for musical expression, and we instinctively understand that the musician must own it completely. The moment a third party can veto what you play, your music is no longer fully yours. It's a permission granted by someone else, contingent on continued payment and good behavior.
Phones are tools for expression in basically every domain that matters in modern life. Communication. Photography. Video. Writing. Music creation. Software development. Business. Identity. Memory. They are more central to modern self-expression than guitars are, for most people. And yet we've accepted that the manufacturer gets veto power over what we can do with them. By the guitar standard, this is insane. By the smartphone standard, it's just Tuesday.
The same logic applies to every category. A car is a tool for movement, and your movement should be yours. A tractor is a tool for working land, and the work should be yours. A computer is a tool for thinking, and your thinking should be yours. The thing that connects all these fights — phones, cars, tractors, appliances, medical devices, even "smart" lightbulbs — is the principle that what you buy, you own, and ownership means control.
That principle used to be uncontroversial. The transition from mechanical to digital products quietly inverted it, and most of us went along because we couldn't see what was being taken. The pushback is finally starting — right-to-repair laws are passing, regulators are circling, farmers and hackers and small business owners are finding common cause — but the fight is upstream of where most people's intuitions currently are. People don't know what they're not allowed to do with their phones because they've never tried, and they've never tried because the manufacturer has carefully arranged things so the question never comes up.
I'm a working developer. I run a digital department. I ship software for paying clients. I use these devices every day. And the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the past fifteen years of computing have been a slow rollback of something we should have fought harder to keep. We accepted that the manufacturer of our most important tool gets to control what we do with it, and we got something convenient and beautiful in exchange, and the bill for that trade is coming due now.
The next few posts in this series are going to dig into specific examples — the FM radio chip that's been sitting in your phone for fifteen years that you're not allowed to use, the moment Apple promised developers a web-first iPhone and then took it back, the alternative phone platforms that nearly happened and got crushed, the reasons local AI might finally crack the lock open, and what a phone designed for the person who buys it would actually look like.
But the frame for all of it is this: imagine if you bought a guitar and you could only play certain songs on it. Then look at the device in your pocket and ask why that's the deal you accepted.