We did not all choose convenience over freedom, but the majority did. Those of us who chose freedom were still able to participate in digital society, albeit with a bit of added inconvenience, but this is becoming increasingly difficult as cloud terminal use is becoming a prerequisite for doing banking, using public transport or even verifying your age on the internet.

The chair analogy is a bit weird, because I am actually free to buy a chair, disassemble it and somehow use it as a table if my needs for a table for some weird reason happens to coincide with the form factor of the chair. I don't think the analogy really works, but if a chair worked as a modern phone then it would be built with one-way screws and in general be built to lose structural integrity if you try to disassemble it.

A better analogy is roads. Anyone can put any car on the public roads (they may be breaking the law if the car is not legal). But we are moving towards a world where the roads will slash the tires of any car which isn't approved by Ford or Tesla. Ford and Tesla didn't build the roads, but they somehow took over the control of them.

>The question of ownership is interesting. If I buy a chair, it doesn't make a very good table, does that mean I don't own it?

A better comparison is buying a chair where the seller gets to aprove who sits and when.

A phone is a computer whose creator is incentivized to make it pretend it isn't a computer, because it harms profits if they don't.

Increasingly, so is the government, because freedom of computing is incompatible with surveillance, age verification etc.