There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what it was doing and why. Someone who read error messages instead of dismissing them. Someone who, when something broke, treated it as a puzzle rather than a betrayal.
That person is dying off. And nobody in the industry seems to care. In fact, most of them are actively celebrating the funeral while billing it as progress.
This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Congratulations to everyone involved. You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.
The average person who grew up with smartphones has a fundamentally broken mental model of computing. Not broken in the sense that they can’t operate their devices — they can, with terrifying efficiency. Broken in the sense that their understanding stops at the glass. They know how to use apps. They do not know what apps are. They know files exist somewhere, in the cloud maybe, or possibly inside the app itself — the distinction isn’t clear to them and they’ve never needed it to be.
The concept of a filesystem — of hierarchical storage that you own, that lives on hardware you control, that persists independently of any company’s servers — is genuinely alien to them. Not because it’s complicated. A child can understand that files live in folders. But they’ve never had to understand it because the platforms they grew up on hid it from them. iOS shipped without a user-accessible filesystem for over a decade. Google Drive abstracts away the folder metaphor entirely if you let it. iCloud will “optimize” your local storage, which is a polite way of saying it will silently move your files to Apple’s servers and give you a ghost of them on your own machine, and most users have no idea this is happening or what it means.
Ask a twenty-two-year-old to connect to a remote server via SSH. Ask them to explain what DNS is at a conceptual level. Ask them to tell you the difference between their router’s public IP and the local IP of their laptop. Ask them to open a terminal and list the contents of a directory. These are not advanced topics. Twenty years ago these were things you learned in the first week of any serious engagement with computers. Today they’re exotic knowledge that even a lot of working software developers don’t have, because you can go a long way in modern development without ever leaving the managed abstractions your platform provides.
And that’s the real damage. It’s not just end users who don’t know this stuff. It’s developers. People who write software for a living who’ve never had to think about what happens between their API call and the response. Who’ve never had to debug something at the network layer. Who’ve never had to read a full stack trace and understand every frame of it. Because the frameworks handle all of that, and the frameworks are good enough, and figuring out how things actually work is optional.
Optional until it isn’t.
(Read the rest at the link.)
