> During the Enlightenment, owning a physical copy of a book meant intellectual freedom. You didn’t rent ideas; you had them. Today, most digital knowledge is hosted, locked, or streamed — leased from platforms, not owned. We’re in fact drifting into digital feudalism, where access to culture, tools, and even history depends on gatekeepers.

I get your broad point, but I would argue that for the vast majority of time most people did "rent ideas". Most people didn't have massive private libraries of books. Knowledge was locked in public or private institutions where if you were granted access by the owners of that institution, you would be allowed to go there and read the knowledge. If it was a public library you might even be able to take that knowledge home with you temporarily. But you wouldn't be able to keep anything you couldn't keep in your head, or transcribe yourself into your own documents. If the library closed, burned down, or you lost access to the institution, you also lost access to the knowledge contained within.

Which seems like then the argument should be for systems that allow you to take advantage of the ease and relative cheapness of copying and archiving digital forms of knowledge. To that end, "Print to PDF" being built into the operating system on mac OS might be one of my most favorite features. I have more than a handful of archived information from pages that don't exist anymore because of it.