Wow, there's a lot to unpack there. We went from not being able to schedule a meeting between four people in a calendar app, to lamenting the lack of computer repair skills, to denigrating people as somehow less than human ("homo simplex") because they have better things to do with their lives than to devote them to your hobby, to the rise mass surveillance.

There's no shared thread among any of these things, except they all contain a silicon wafer somewhere. They also all contain plastic, but I don't any one lamenting the lack of knowledge about polymer chemistry among the populace.

The calendar problem isn't necessarily a "computer skills" problem, as much as it could be simply a lack familiarity (solved by time), UX problem (making it literally not the user's problem). You want to know a secret? I don't know how to use GMail. Seriously. I don't.[0] I had to get someone to come over and show me how to simply reply to an email, because every time I clicked what looked like reply arrow, the damn thing went back to the list. I have no idea how to sort the inbox, even if you can. Perhaps, the most popular email client in the world. I don't know how to use it. Am I illiterate? Sure looks it. Yet, I can send an email using telnet.

Personally, given that people find word problems complicated, can't calculate restaurant tips in their head, and are prone to fall into personal bias supporting arguments, I think the failure to schedule a meeting is more of a general problem, than a computer one.

You're elevating "computer literacy" as some sort of giant lift in the economic chain. Really? Sure software engineering pays well, but it's also completely unrelated to sending out a calendar invite. If that was the metric, then why aren't secretaries paid $100k? Similarly, you can swap out software engineering, with any other high earning field, say hedge fund managing. Arguably, that's a better field, and you don't have to know how a floating point numbers are represented, nor do you have to send your own calendar invites.

Finally, yes, mass surveillance is a real issue, and yes more education about what is being done, and what is possible, and at what scale these things are being might help. It might not as well. These are much more political, legal, and philosophical questions than computing questions. After all, I don't need to understand how carbon and iron bond to understand that ethics of stabbing someone in the throat with a knife.

[0] Before anyone chimes in. I don't really care how use GMail. It sucks.