No, all washing machines were centralized in the OpenWash company. In order to do your laundry, you needed a subscription and had to send your clothes to San Francisco and back.
Exactly, it wasn't the case then with washing machines and it's not the case now with AI. Your example is pretty relevant!
Today, anyone can run SOTA open-weights models in the comfort of their home for much less than the price of a ~1929 electric washing machine ($150 then or $2,800 today).
That was something I struggled to understand for AI-2027. They have China nationalize DeepCent so there's only one Chinese lab. I don't understand why OpenBrain doesn't form multiple competing labs because that seems to be what happened IRL before this was written.
Because it's an excuse for a psychiatrist to wank about their political hobbyhorses, not an actual work of any effort, other than cavorting in the right circles. (i.e. we see a your question can also be framed as: "why doesn't the geopolitical fantasy masquerading as a serious whitepaper try to imitate real life, like, at all?"
Today, anyone can run SOTA open-weights models in the comfort of their home for much less than the price of a ~1929 electric washing machine ($150 then or $2,800 today).