The new users doesn't know how the technologies work. "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."

And that’s the real damage. It’s not just end users who don’t know this stuff. It’s developers.

The smartphones initiated by Apple is also to a certain degree. The hardware is locked behind safety reasons, but "safety is the stated reason, revenue protection is the operational reality".

Google started Android as an opposition, but they added the Compatibility Test Suite, then Play Protect (treats every sideloaded app as a threat by default), then the long series if API deprecations, then changes to make bootloader unlocking harder with device-specific security keys. Then the Play Integrity API.

You paid for the phone. You own the phone. Google and its partners have decided that ownership does not include the right to modify it.

It leads to the more harder point: "The users who grew up on these platforms don’t know what they’re missing. They’ve never used a system where they were genuinely in control."

So they are only consumers. It has its own issue: "The problem is that users have been convinced to treat pervasive surveillance infrastructure as benign or beneficial, and to respond to any criticism of it as paranoia, technical elitism, or failure to appreciate convenience. The learned helplessness is the crisis."

Apple tells not to install Apps from outside the App Store because it's dangerous and people nod.
Microsoft's Recall feature was reintroduced quietly.
Algorithm does not encourage what is healthy and good for the people, but what converts to engagement. The correct response to this is to reject the algorithmic curation model and use information architectures that don’t depend on it. RSS still works. The actual response is to try to game the algorithm. To figure out what the system wants and feed it signals that will produce better outputs.

Technical literacy is valuable and we're losing the ability to audit It's the prerequisite for meaningful consent. We're losing resilience compared to the Google Reader case, the Twitter's API one. The builder pipeline is also losing: "Power users become developers. Tinkerers become engineers." Developers are only building within the platform constraints. The adversarial capacity to break platform lock-in has atrophied.

The technical community is mostly not going to fix it either, because most of it has retreated into professional specialization and has largely given up on the broader project of maintaining technical literacy outside the profession. The OSS community does important work but it communicates almost entirely with itself.
So what’s left is individual stubbornness. Which is not nothing. Organized individual stubbornness, pointed in the right direction, is how every important counter-cultural technical movement has worked.

So how? The answers relies in the following paragraphs. " It is an argument for being considerably angrier about it than most people currently are."