We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own

It doesn't work. Everything from banks to Netflix and others are slowly edging out anything where they can't fully verify the chain of control to an entity they can have a legal or contractual relationship with. To be clear, this is fundamental, not incidental. You can't run your own operating system because it's not in Netflix's financial interest for you to do so. Or your banks, or your government. They all benefit from you not having control, so you can't.

This is why it's so important to defend the real principles here not just the technical artefacts of them. Netflix shouldn't be able to insist on a particular type of DRM for me to receive their service. Governments shouldn't be able to prevent me from end to end encrypting things. I should be able to opt into all this if I want more security, but it can't be mandatory. However all of these things are not technical, they are principles and rights that we have to argue for.

And I'm afraid most of us are part of the system, rage-clicking away most of our days, distracted, jaded perhaps, like it historically has always been.

There has never been a utopian past and there will never be a utopian future. The past was riddled with despotism and many things that the average man or woman today would consider horrific. The basic principle of democratic society is to prevent those things from recurring by pitting elite factions against each other. Similarly business elites who wield high technology to gain their wealth must also compete and if there is any sign of them cooperating too closely for too long, we need to break them up or shut them down.

When Apple and Google agree, cooperate, and adopt the same policies - we are all doomed. It must never happen and we must furthermore break them up if they try, which they are now doing.

I wouldn't call it utopian, but I'd say we are way past "peak democracy" at this point.

There was a time in which corporations did get broken up when too large, when we did understand that it's about serving the population first and accumulating wealth after that, when corporations influencing politics was widely seen as a negative. It does seem to me we are now way past that.

Personally I think there are technological preconditions for stable democracy that have recently been countered by authoritarian leaning technology. We need to invent counter technology to those things.

New technology doesn't change anything about social institutions - the most powerful groups before the technology was invented simply own the technology after it's invented and use it to further cement their power.

I think the luddites were on to something. We don't need technology, we need humans doing things a little differently, maybe even doing bizarre things like setting factories on fire. Personally I hope we can try other things before setting factories on fire, see Keith McHenry's version of The Anarchist Cookbook for peaceful resistance solutions as well.

The point is though without a restructure, new technology doesn't liberate, in fact it further entrenches existing power structures.

This is of course demonstrably untrue. Marshall McLuhan devoted his life to illuminating how technology changes society. The printing press, radio, television and the Internet have all undoubtedly changed our social institutions. It's hard to imagine secular democracy ever becoming a thing if we hadn't been able to mass produce books and newspapers, and writing manuscripts had remained mostly under the control of the Church. It seems less probable that the Nazis would have come to power if not for the immense skill Goebbels and Hitler had in the use of radio. And I doubt Trump would have been elected if he hadn't known how to press people's buttons so well on social media.

Let's not forget that more ancient things like fire, agriculture and accounting are also technology that irrevocably changed humanity and put new people in power. Or take a look at how railroads remade American society. Or how sufficiently advanced sailboats placed half the world under the thrall of colonialism...

Absolutely there can exist technologies which are anti-democracy, and surveillance technologies are exactly that. You become afraid to say or write the wrong thing in public, and then to say or write it in private, and then to even think it, and finally the thing is forgotten. I felt like Orwell made the point well enough in 1984.

All that said I don't see technology saving us from our current problems, it needs to be invented, it needs to mature, there needs to be adoption. One might imagine mesh networking and censorship proof distributed messaging or something having an influence on society but we simply aren't there yet.