>Compared to the 1950s it's also far easier for the average individual to learn how to do basic home maintenance, change their own oil or cut their own hair.

With apologies for flipping back around to the doom and gloom, the picture for all three examples there is more complex. I get that your core point was the availability of information via the Internet, but in opposition to that the subjects at hand have generally become more complicated in themselves.

This was illustrated to me recently when I picked up an old binder publication 'home car repair and customization' from a garage sale. It was from the sixties, and what was most interesting about the content was just how much more aspects of a car's maintenance and customization could be performed by a home handiman. Drastically more than is possible on modern cars.

Paint jobs, upholstering repair/replacement, trim fabrication, structural repairs. All of them were in there and could be tackled with a relatively low density of information. About 75% of the whole publication was useless, at a fundamental level, if applied to modern vehicles.

Now, the reasons for that are varied and some of them are not net negatives. The reason most can't work on structural components of their cars today is at least in part due to safety improvements, for example.