Bruce Sterling says that Windows is rapidly becoming like an airport — an armed terrorspace. He gets it half right — the PC platform itself is becoming an armed terrorspace. Before the ‘net, in the days of floppies and BBSes and company wide ethernets, PCs were little islands of information — cute to work with, but not for serious use. With the onset of the net, the copying flexibility of the PC is a scourge for content hoarders. And for the vast majority of trusting humans who connect to what is essentially a hostile public network without the benefit of a Infosec 101 course, the net is an endless source of detritus online life leaves behind — spam, viruses and exploits designed to trip up an OS never really designed to guard Fort Knox among them. Between scheming business people threatened with extinction of business models and irresponsible crackers and social engineers, the PC of yesteryear is growing up to adulthood — and the loss of innocence adulthood entails will not be a pretty site.

The sad part is: the companies who once championed the PC most are turning away from it. Microsoft (with Palladium) and Intel (with TCPA) both hope not only to eliminate the spam and the viruses, but also the unique flexibilities of a PC that consumers love so much and which give content hoarders so many sleepless nights. Today, Apple (for all its faults) is perhaps the only company that celebrates the PC as an instrument of individual expression (apart from the geekish allure of Linux, of course). Microsoft is too caught up in readying Windows “for the enterprise” when it is not busily turning Windows Explorer into real estate to be used for MSN ads; it also treats its smallest customers like dirt, subjecting them to insulting activation procedures (which it can afford to do, having 90% of the market). There is no message from Intel that makes me think that their thinking is in any way different.

Bottom line: between the crackers, the content hoarders, Wintel and me, there are at least four groups fighting for control of my personal computer. I’d cut it a little slack if it felt embattled.