Eleven years ago I wrote something in my notes that I have been hoping to be wrong about ever since.

The prediction was simple: by 2025 we would start seeing the first serious moves toward putting your entire computing life in someone else’s cloud. By 2035, I wrote, this would be mainstream. Most people would own a screen, a keyboard, and a camera — and nothing else. Everything that actually runs would live somewhere in a data center, billed monthly, accessible only as long as you keep paying.

Look around. We are already halfway there and most people haven’t noticed.

How it starts — with convenience

It started with photos. iPhones offload your images to iCloud and quietly free up local storage, making it feel like you have unlimited space. The photo is still “there” in your gallery. It loads fast enough. You don’t think about where it actually lives. You don’t think about who has access to it. You just tap and it appears.

Then it was documents. Then contacts. Then your entire operating system state, synced across devices so seamlessly that the boundary between “your device” and “their server” disappeared entirely — by design.

Each step felt like progress. Each step was a transfer of ownership dressed up as a feature.

The logical endpoint

Here is where this leads, and it is not complicated to see once you look at the trajectory.

Your future phone will be cheap. Beautifully cheap. It will have an excellent camera sensor, a brilliant screen, a speaker, a microphone, and a chip powerful enough to decode a high-quality video stream in real time. That is all it will need, because that is all it will do.

When you take a photo, it lands in local cache for a few seconds and then it’s gone — uploaded, processed in the cloud by compute you are renting, and returned to you as a finished image. The CPU-intensive work of noise reduction, computational photography, colour science — none of that happens on your device anymore. Your device is just the lens and the screen.

Your apps don’t run locally. WhatsApp, your browser, your email client — they run in your compute space, somewhere in a data center, streamed to your hand over 5G with low enough latency that you can’t tell the difference. The phone in your pocket is a remote control for a computer you will never touch and do not own.

When you get home, you sit at your desk. You press a button and your entire environment appears on your 32-inch monitor. Same apps, same state, same everything — because it was never on the phone to begin with. Your “home computer” is another thin terminal. A nice screen. A keyboard. A decode chip. Nothing more.

The laptop you carry to a café? The television in your living room? All of them are just windows into the same rented space.

What this unlocks — and it isn’t for you

A seamless experience across every screen in your life sounds genuinely wonderful. And it will be marketed exactly that way.

What it also unlocks is a kill switch.

Miss a payment? Your compute space goes dark. Every device you own becomes a brick simultaneously — your phone, your workstation, your television. Not because anything broke. Because someone flipped a switch in a data center you have never seen.

It unlocks surveillance at a scale that is currently impossible. Right now, end-to-end encryption can protect data in transit. When all your compute happens on someone else’s hardware, there is no “in transit.” Everything is already there. Every document you write, every search you make, every conversation you have — all of it processed on infrastructure that does not belong to you, under terms of service that can change at any time.

It unlocks a world where you own your hardware in the same way you own a rented car. You are holding it. You are paying for it. But the moment the lessor decides otherwise, it stops being yours.

Where we are now

I wrote 2025 as the beginning. I was not far off. We already have cloud gaming services that stream entire games to thin clients. We already have phones that function poorly without a data connection because so much of their intelligence is server-side. We already have operating systems that are essentially browsers with a login screen.

The infrastructure is being built. The habits are being formed. The dependency is being cultivated carefully, one convenient feature at a time.

I really, genuinely hope I am wrong about where this ends.

But if I am right — and the past eleven years have not given me much reason for optimism — then the most important thing you can do right now is understand what you are gradually giving up, and make deliberate choices about how much of it you are willing to hand over.

Your computer should be yours. Your data should be yours. The alternative has a name, and it is not progress.