A certain kind of person is disappearing from the tech landscape. The power user who understood their tools, who could troubleshoot by reading error messages, who saw broken systems as puzzles rather than betrayals. This isn't an accident but the result of two decades of deliberate effort by major technology companies to transform technical literacy from a baseline skill into a niche hobby.

Mobile platforms did the most damage through calculated design choices. iOS shipped without user-accessible filesystems for over a decade, hiding the concept of hierarchical storage behind curated interfaces. Google followed suit, gradually closing Android's openness through compatibility requirements, security measures, and APIs that broke deep system access. The average person who grew up with smartphones now has a fundamentally broken mental model of computing — not because they can't operate devices, but because their understanding stops at the glass.

The damage extends beyond end users to developers themselves. Software engineers who've never used Wireshark, never debugged at the network layer, never read a full stack trace. People who write code for a living without understanding what happens between their API call and response. This is the industry we've built: one where technical knowledge is optional until something breaks in a way the framework didn't anticipate, and then you're helpless because you never learned that such tools exist.