It is dehumanizing to me that we have invented legal & technical systems that reverse the historical trend, of man, the learner, man the toolmaker, man the natural scientist, who understands more & more of the world about them.

We have created proprietary knowledge, proprietary systems, that are massively popular, ubiquotously used, that none of us are allowed to nor can understand or learn about.

I am in awe, have huge respect for the hight heights of this high technology that we have arisen towards. But, for the first time, it feels like it is captivated wonder. And unlike something complex like a train or airplane, this high tech is deeply deeply fundamental to our everyday life, reshapes our reality immensely. And it is a hell, forever boiling & changing around us, that we can not see, can not understand, have no access to, no ability to learn about these deeply propietary bits of tech that are all around us, that we spend so much time enmeshed in.

It is a philosophical violation of the spirit of humankind, of the highest order.

These modern systems are just extremely complex, created by the combined energy of many, many people. But nature around us is still even more complex, and there are many mechanisms in nature we don't understand (like the human brain). Therefore I don't understand why you consider the technical systems to be especially "hellish".

Even if you Mac is somehow "locked", you can still take an electron microscope to its mainboard and try to understand the circuits and so on. (In theory - in practice, I've just read a modern Ryzen chip consists of billions of transistors, so good luck trying to reverse engineer it).