[snakeyjake]

>I once saw all this technology as an empowering wave for individuals to accomplish their goals

There are more people accomplishing their goals now than ever before.

40 years ago you had to scrounge for some McGraw Hill or TAB books in your local library and then hope there was an electronics store within 100 miles (and there often wasn't). In the 90s there were entire categories of parts that were completely unavailable to the individual unless they were associated with a university or corporation because the only distributors that carried them only dealt with customers who had a Dun & Bradstreet number and a purchasing department to which they could send invoices: no retail sales allowed or desired.

Now there is the web and stores like Adafruit and iFixit and Digikey where you can get anything in your hands nearly instantly.

It is only slight hyperbole to suggest that there are probably more YouTube channels dedicated to smartphone repair than there were people bothering to dig up the documentation and travel to physical stores for parts to repair their old landline telephones back in the 70s and 80s.