A truly free society will require small, cheap chip fabs. If we have to trust a chipmaker, then there's always a backdoor. Chips need not be the most cutting edge - if we can print up 10 mb on a card that fits into a slot, then we have infinitely scalable sovereign computing. The bar is low. But we can't even do that. That was one of my first questions after I understood bitcoin... We're totally dependent on backdoorable stuff even for that unimpressive level.