This is just a footnote in the decades long trend away from ownership and the right to repair towards control and magic. Up until the 80s, anything you bought

This is just a footnote in the decades long trend away from ownership and the right to repair towards control and magic. Up until the 80s, anything you bought would, reasonably, provide schematics, diagnostic info, and at worst on request details on the original designs or how substitute parts would work in almost any mechanical system, including TVs. Phones were extraordinarily unique at the time in how proprietary they were, in that Bell Labs had a government monopoly until that decade that gave them carte blanche to not care about consumer satisfaction and let them extort people en masse both for money and never giving an inch of control in the PSTN. Then computers happened, and they were sufficiently magical for a sufficient number of people to tip all of our society away from the autonomy to own things and know how they work towards having magical black boxes that seem to do what you want them to. The Intel ME is just one aspect of this. Of how government will seize the opportunity to take advantage of the willful and tolerated ignorance of the people as a tool to spy on whomever they want. This trend is also not even close to reversing. Cars made in the 90s were still fairly open, but introduced OBD computer systems that were proprietary black boxes of diagnostic info. Now, every new car is entirely computer driven, and that computer controls the whole vehicles operation in undocumented and proprietary ways. Talk to any garage that isn't a brand dealer - the newer the car, the less they can actually do to fix it. This is applying to everything now. New tvs are now completely irreparable. Cell phones are holistically compromised and proprietary. New appliances all have proprietary computers in them. Your new house is built with proprietary computers that control the climate, the power, everything. If something breaks? You have to send it to the manufacturer I guess because you aren't allowed to know how it works or how to fix it anymore. Its "too complicated", is the excuse. Its the same excuse why the FCC is trying to cripple open source firmware on routers, or why ham radio and broadcast television are being sabotaged at every level of government. People gave up trying to understand computers, to be able to treat them like any other machine they use - and break - in knowing how to fix them. And so governments and companies took full advantage of that yielding of knowledge and authority and now hold it over all of us as a tool of subjugation and exploitation.