I think it is worse than we admit. IMAP will soon be dead, and the only way we can check our emails will be on the terms of Google or whoever. And because of h

I think it is worse than we admit. IMAP will soon be dead, and the only way we can check our emails will be on the terms of Google or whoever. And because of how websites work now, ad blocking is an uphill battle that will only get harder, as server side rendering becomes more common. So, welcome to a future where you can't check your email unless it is on a multicore computing device with out least 2G of RAM, running an OS that is less than two years old. And you have to submit to email tracking beacons. (But don't worry, they will be proxies through Google so marketers will only know you opened them, but not your IP). Google will make concessions for accessibility of course, but it will be strictly on their terms, and the screen reader will still need absurd system requirements and have to execute javascript quickly, to be able to read static text. This WILL happen, and soon. And tech journalists will celebrate this, and say that IMAP was obsolete and "needed to die". They will praise the responsive and fashionable UX (the only interface allowed), and there won't be any serious pushback. Maybe Google will require that you run an app or use some browser extension to fully utilize features that you used to get for free. And the OSS community will obediently scramble to implement these regressive requirements, because if Firefox and Ubuntu don't play ball with the latest DRM/restriction garbage, then they wouldn't be cool or something. Federated email will slowly get squeezed out and die with a whimper. OK, maybe an exaggeration, but is it really far fetched? And this is just a microcosm of where technology is going. The reason I am pessimistic is that the developer culture that I knew is dying out. Younger developers just accept that the centralized corporate internet is the internet. And people I think are far more obedient with technology than they used to be. But what's so frustrating is that they are accepting and obedient I think partially for very shallow and superficial reasons, and wanting to be cool and accepted. As if people think that Apple is too shiny to and cool to betray us. "So what if it's horribly intrusive DRM, It's Apple, come on. Nobody wants that second best obsolete crap. It is obsolete because that cool guy said so. And Google is 'the best' so we have to implement it their way. Please don't laugh at me." I have said it many times before, but I just wish that people were as skeptical of Google and Apple as slashdotters of old were about "Micro$oft" or Oracle.