I think the tongue in the cheek comes from a historical context that exactly this was attempted in the Great Leap Forward movement, as part of the Great Cultural Revolution movement in Communist China, which was, as with anything Communist, a huge leap and huge progress backwards.
I'm not educated about chinese history but I will read about it. I'd like to clarify that I don't mean anything radical like replacing fabs with home production. Free software never replaced software companies, they coexist.
I just wish it was possible so that we always have the means to produce 100% freedom-respecting general purpose computer hardware that's viable for daily use. That way we're not forced to accept the status quo when corporations start bundling suspicious stuff like IME into their processors.
We already have the means to produce freedom respecting software ourselves but that gets us nowhere if the chip makers start requiring cryptographic signatures before executing software. What good is free software if we can't run it?
