Well, with a general purpose computer, one can do their own public key cryptography. This represents a very powerful capability for the individual.

Modern cryptography was once classified by the US government as a munition and sanctioned for export.

Of course we won that battle in the crypto wars of the 1990s thanks to some very brave nerds who saw the importance of it. Have we won the war though?

One can detect the trend where computers are becoming more and more curated and controlled walled gardens. Phones and tablets are locked down and Windows and Macs are becoming more and more so. Apps are getting canceled from app stores. Could they someday outright prohibit some apps? Ban running your own software?

Sure seems like some in power would like that capability.

I could envision some future dystopia where TSA wonders what kind of troublemaker I am because I have a linux laptop with a LUKS partition.

"What do you you use this for sir?"

I could be running my own large language model on there with computing capacity of 10^23 integer or floating-point operations per second or other such prohibited naughtiness.