So basically the technological equivalent of:

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people" - (attributed to) H.L. Mencken

I don't really disagree with you, but I do have some thoughts.

1: Catering to the masses is not necessarily good for everyone. Services cater to the masses first, and to the "difficult cases" second. Facebook works for mom and pop but whoopsie, it also enables neonazis, oof, that's difficult. WhatsApp is great for a lot of people, except when you're in a bloodthirsty village in rural India.

Services serve people, but disservice others. More and more it seems like you can't have the first without also having the second. Now we can blame that on the people, and not on the tools, but I don't think that's entirely fair because services remove so much friction. If the tool enables wrongdoing so much more effectively than the alternatives, its design has led to that end. People kill people, but guns kill people too.

2: There is power in impermanence. There is powerlessness in dependancy. c_hawkthorne and I discussed our music libraries. He's one of those people that I envy, who have kept their music library at a pristine level for the past decade or two. Meanwhile I've given my soul away to Google Play Music, who will definitely merge it with YouTube music at some point and fuck everything up.

I mean - I pay for GPM and YouTube Premium, even though the former is included in the latter. That's not because I like giving Google money, no, it's because I do not trust Google not to fuck up merging those to subscriptions. And when they do fuck up, I have nowhere to go, and all my collected music of the past half decade will be gone with the wind. Because Google does not have any way for me to export my full list of music. I can't jump ship because there's an ocean between me and the alternatives.

3. We use plastic, the most permanent of materials, in the most impermanent disposable ways. Similarly, we somehow ended up casting the most permanent of digital things - files - aside for the impermanence of services. There is no reason my stuff is locked up in services when I can have a goddamn file and have it work in ten, twenty years from now.

I'm pretty sure GPM will not exist for that long. Thing is: these services can totally make it easy to transcend their own fleetingness. GPM could allow me to download a list of all of my songs at once, but they don't. Pretty much every service doesn't let me download shit. They never let me take back the control we yielded to them, some Hotel California-ing and dark-patterning us into paying forever and ever and ever.