Pretty much sums up my experience of use since Sept 2025..
The Fairphone 6 won the design award and I have just learned this design was a collaborative effort with the Above Agency, and they also worked together before on Fairphone 4?
A must read from the interwebs.
Mainly about the mechanics behind AppStores, Instagram, etc. and why this causes users to become consumers and the spreading of tech illiteracy. But also much more.
Moved your post here. Overall as a common sense when posting a link (and its somehow fitting to the article sharedā¦)
Plenty of good thoughts in that one. I especially like
Kids learned by watching, by lurking in forums, by getting their stupid questions answered by people who then expected them to answer someone elseās stupid questions eventually.
and
You can now write complete programs without understanding what a single line of them does, and the programs will often work well enough in the happy path that youāll never know how thoroughly you donāt understand what youāve built until something goes wrong in production at two in the morning and you are completely without tools to respond.
There is one more thing regarding the āphoning homeā aspect that has been on my mind for a very long time which IMHO fits the blog post quite well: people often complain that devices/programms/apps collect data and send it somewhere.
From a developersā point of view I can see this as kind of self-defense. People get angry at bugs. And the only way to find/analyze them nowadays seems to be capturing telemetry data, because - IMHO fully in line with the article - people just are not able/willing to write proper bug reports anymore.
20 years ago, you could ask someone to run a traceroute to your server to pin down some networking issue. Of course not everyone knew what tracert actually did or how to interpret its output. But they could copy commands into a terminal and copy back the output in text form instead of a screenshot (that gets scaled down by todayās messages so that the receiver can hardly read it or would need OCR to work with the output properly).
Sometimes I think, people today only know how to take screenshots (and miraculously ALWAYS manage to miss the important parts/relevant context) and have totally forgotten how to use links. rant off 
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 routerās 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.
In which parallel nerdiverse does the author live? (Not that heās entirely wrong, though.)
The SSH part might seem strange, but we live in a technically advanced world and people should now about DNS, like people know about gravity. This is now basic knowledge about how the world works.
In the one users try to get help from with oftentimes astoundingly basic tech problems. Long may it last.
While the same users need a driverās license with mandated learning about car and traffic basics to be allowed to operate a car, but donāt need a computer device operatorās license to be allowed to use a computer device ā¦ for surely logical reasons and for the obvious propelling forward of all humanity towards a most shiny and favourable future.
Well, I actually do tick all those boxes. But Iām also aware that most people - the vast majority - have never known these things ā not today, not 20 years ago, and not 40 years ago. Expecting them to is like insisting that, in order to drive a car, you should also be able to repair the engine, or that to live in a house, you should understand the electrical wiring and plumbing. Iād say that itās enough to be able to choose a safe, ecoāfriendly car and an energyāefficient house in a location that isnāt prone to earthquakes or flooding ā or, for that matter, to buy a Fairphone with /e/OS. But as I said, I think the author is generally right.
I would not go this far.
It once was common to do repairs of your car. Exchange tires, light bulbs or breakers. It was even guided by manuals and there where books explaining lots more.
The manual for the Commodore C64 explained programming in BASIC.
People where able to do common things and check whether they need an expert or not.
And of course: Things were designed to be understandable and taken apart.