I agree with the sentiment for sure, but there's no way for anything else to have happened. People aren't smart. They don't want to understand. They want to not think. When computers first came out they were for the dorks, now what you would probably call an autist. They were for people who were cool with spending 12hrs straight trying to make a thing do what they wanted it to do. These weren't normies. Even into the 90s and early 2000s computers were really just glorified word processors or email machines. Sure there were gamers and some of us knew about usenet and BB systems and icq/irc but not many and most didn't care. The iphone brought the internet to rich normies. Android brought it to the rest. But it's not the internet you get on a normal pc. It's the walled garden of the app world. This is what normies want though. This is what they deserve and this is why there will still be a very small group of people who run lineage on our phones or roll their own arch and teach themselves vim. I've met people who code for a living who know fuck all about how things actually work. They know a language and that's all they want to know the end. This shows that "being the computer guy" isn't about actually knowing how to use one. It's about having the desire to understand how all the parts interplay and then having the understanding and motivation make changes or just see what you can see. Yes walled gardens suck. Social media sucks. Normies suck. But they are only really there if you choose to live in their space. Don't be a normie. Be the guy who knows how to jump over the wall and sees the digital world for what it is. 99.9% of everyone else just doesn't understand enough to care / doesn't care enough to understand... so fuck 'em. Let them live blissfully in their cages.

I wholeheartedly agree with the authors concerns, I wrote a poem that kinda touches on the mentality we're stuck in, but it needs some work. Through malicious incompetence again and again we've been failed by the institutions designed to protect us. Yet the population continues shambling apathetically forward along this gently declining road. The road to pacification, institutionalization and finally; domestication. Fearing the shepards ire, oh how we've embraced detention in the hope of escaping the crook. Patiently, willingly -even wantingly- we celebrate each wall as it's erected around us, the rolls of razor wire flowing, twisting, winding. Jagged, unceasing cursive penned mendaciously for our protection, but; the final flourish is left up to us. The final decision, to seal our fates, left in our idle hands, guided by our poisoned minds. In a dictation, in a prison, choice; an illusion and freedom; a collusion.

True internet folk need to understand that ease of accessibility is a curse, not a blessing. The growth of the internet proved once again that gatekeeping has an important purpose, keeping out the masses. Other skilled professions have understood this for centuries. I'm bullish on things like +Urbit, Secure Scuttlebutt, Gemini and other less-than-friendly tech for this reason, we need an "inner domain" with an inaccessible technical barrier to block normies.

are you the non-straight individual that complained after someone posted his code here on ruqqus?