The chart is interesting, but misses on an important thing: semiconductor production on it's own is complicated, but producing equipment for semiconductor production is the whole new level, that's why ASML.
Free products are not the consequence of megacorps existence. Free products exist, because you are the product. Big companies also doesn't necessarily mean monopolies.
However, none of that was fed to you by algorithms, but rather your own curiosity for weird stuff and your ability to find it. I am not saying that it is good or bad, but in my book, it is different from infinite algorithmic feeds we currently have.
I think Fowler's work is an underrated must-read for anyone who works in domains related to moving money. Makes any kind of engineering practices and architecture principles logical and make sense.
In oppressive regimes like USSR (as if there are or were any regimes "like USSR") (where censorship was manual) there always were loopholes to avoid censorship and convey messages you wanted to. In the West (as well as in the East) today the platforms don't allow for any loopholes, or even when such loopholes are found, they're being censored out very quickly.
Oh, it absolutely is. Censorship in USSR was manual labor. The scale at which its is operating today is incomparable, as is the amount of false positives which it captures, as well as the variety of censored topics across different institutions.
A button is a bad UX example, because it is rather a switch with two indicators - now it is on, and turn it the other side/way to turn off.
A TV remote is also a bad UX example, because you can actually see that the TV is on or off by looking at the TV itself, and then use the button to perform the desired action.