Something went slightly wrong with personal computing. Not all at once, of course. It happened gradually. We started with personal computers that were, well, personal. Our programs ran on them. Our documents were stored on them. Our photos were on our hard drives. And if we wanted to move something somewhere else, we copied it ourselves.
Then came the cloud. And the cloud was fantastic. No more worrying about which computer contained that particular document. No more carrying USB sticks around. Email, photos, documents, notes, calendars and eventually almost our entire digital lives became available everywhere.
There was just one rather important side effect: Our data moved away from us.
Somehow, our data became their data
Today, an enormous amount of personal information sits inside infrastructure operated by a surprisingly small number of very large technology companies. We created that information. We wrote the emails. We took the photographs. We made the documents. We entered the appointments. We built the contact lists. We generated the browsing histories.
Yet increasingly it feels as though these companies own the environment in which our digital lives exist, while we are merely being granted access to it. Sometimes for free, in exchange for data and attention. Sometimes through a subscription. Sometimes both. That is a rather strange arrangement when you think about it. And now AI makes the question even more interesting. Suddenly all those documents, emails, photographs, notes and other pieces of personal information are extremely useful as context for AI systems.
Personal Computing 2.0
So perhaps this is a good moment to reconsider the architecture. There are different names floating around for this idea. Some people talk about Personal Computing 2.0. Others prefer local first. Others simply talk about bringing personal computing back to where it started: with the individual. Although I often use the term “local first”, the terminology doesn’t matter much to me. The principle does: My data is mine.
That doesn’t necessarily mean everything has to sit on the SSD inside my laptop. That would be unnecessarily restrictive. My data could be on my laptop. It could live on an SSD connected to a small server somewhere in my home network. It could be on a NAS. Or it could even be stored at a hosting provider that I have deliberately selected.
The important difference is control. I decide where the data lives. I decide which software can access it. And I decide when somebody else gets access.
And then there is local AI
This is also one of the reasons why I am so interested in running open-source and open-weight AI models locally. AI makes local first much more interesting. Imagine an AI assistant that can search your documents, summarize your notes, analyse your personal archive or help you write something based on years of your own material — without uploading that entire digital history to somebody else’s cloud.
That is a fundamentally different model. And yes, I would happily pay for good local AI models.
In fact, there is an interesting parallel with my recent post about shareware. Let me download a model. Let me experiment with it. Let me see whether it actually helps me with the things I want to do. If it does, I’ll pay for it. That seems like a perfectly reasonable transaction. I pay for the software. The developer gets paid. And my data remains mine.
We need trusted hosting as well
There is one complication. Local first shouldn’t have to mean everything must be physically inside my house. There are perfectly good reasons for storing data elsewhere: backups, availability, collaboration and simply not wanting to maintain yet another little server.
But then I would like to know something about the company storing my data. Does it really leave my files alone? Is my information analysed? Can it be used for training? Who technically has access? What happens when authorities request data? What jurisdiction applies?
Perhaps what we need is some kind of genuinely useful certification for hosting providers that offer this kind of personal cloud. Not another logo created by a marketing department, but a clear and independently verified promise: we store your data, but we don’t use it. That could make local first much more practical for ordinary users.
Can we have our computers back?
I don’t want to get rid of the cloud. I don’t want to stop using AI. And I certainly don’t want to return to computing as it existed in 1995. Quite the opposite. I want better computers, better AI, better synchronization and better services.
The next big step in personal computing isn’t putting even more of our digital lives into a handful of gigantic clouds. It is about bringing control back to the edges: our laptops, our home servers, our chosen hosting providers, our local AI models. Call it Personal Computing 2.0. Call it local first. Call it whatever you like. I would simply call it my data.