I remember the Alpha with fondness. It was the one architecture throughout the '90's that genuinely excited me. I still get the jollies thinking back to playing with NT 4.0 running on an AlphaStation. DEC had a huge opportunity. They were in the right place at the right time, and the marketing droids still managed to fuck it all up. It's one of the great travesties of computing hardware history that they bungled it on such an epic scale.

You touch on a greater problem. One reason for the volume of robocalls is massive youth unemployment in places like India and the Philippines (itself a result of large-scale urbanisation). Until that problem is licked, technological solutions will only go so far.

The Powers That Be want socialism for themselves, laissez-faire capitalism for everyone else.