Yes, and RMS was correct in his Right to Read and so many other things - we're seeing the slow death of the never-enshrined-in-law right to compute. Luckily open-source is big enough to slow this down; we should all be pretty amazed and appreciative that there even are open-weights models at all, out there, because it is a profoundly democratizing thing.
I don't think parent commenter means tech in the modern sense. Seems like they're describing a transition to democracy which started centuries ago, not decades.