The Slow Death of the Power User
fireborn.mataroa.blog
fireborn.mataroa.blog
The water comes out. The water has always come out, every time, so it's not really a thing worth investigating. Like the sunrise.
In many many domains I am that person.
If a person doesn't know (except in the vaguest terms) where their water comes from, where their poo goes when they flush, where their food comes from (the supermarket!), or the energy that heats their home... what do they really know? Most of us know very little about the concrete networks and systems that keep us alive.
But this is what civilisation is.
But my kids call any internet connection WiFi. My wife didn't understand why she couldn't print with the WiFi switch off (back when we had switches). And every time I try to tell them "how the internet flows", I take them to the hotspot and tell them what WiFi is, how the UTP cable goes to the modem and the fiber goes into the ground and somewhere it gets information from some other computer. And I tell them why they have less issues with our local Minecraft server then when he gets invited to a worlds on someone's Playstation across town (in Bugrock).
It's tiring in a way, even more so for people around me. And still, it also brings me many nice things.
I was listening to a tech podcast last week, and a guest host, who's a tech reporter and an intelligent person, at some point talked about "Wi-Fi plans" and "getting Wi-Fi for your house". I cringed so hard inside.
Nothing against them personally, and I don't think it's super meaningful (e.g. "how could a tech reporter say that?!"), but yeah, it was a little sad for me.
Bonus anecdote:
A while back I was considering renting an ADU-type unit, and I remember bunches of listing saying "Wi-Fi available". One place I looked at in person, the landlord said a similar thing, and seemed nonplussed when I asked if I could pay for my own internet service to be set up (which I can understand for more valid reasons).
That's the depressing part in modern (western) society. The lack of curiosity is one thing, but it seems to spread to a overall lack of care for anything these days. First it's lack of knowledge, then it's lack of care for fellow beings, then it's lack of care for the broken windows everywhere. Community breaks down in real time with the reaction of a shrug.
>If a person doesn't know (except in the vaguest terms) where their water comes from, where their poo goes when they flush, where their food comes from (the supermarket!), or the energy that heats their home... what do they really know?
What are our schools teaching us? I don't expect perfect domain knowledge, but I learned the bare basic supply chains in middle and high school. Food comes from trucks distributing from a factory that gets ingredients from farms and other types of food procurement. Water comes from pipes connected to the house connected to a grid filtered through government purification systems that is retrieved through ravines and dams (and then the water cycle comes in).
Not knowing that much just feels odd.
Do you think the average medieval farmer was questioning how everything around him worked while he worked day and night trying not to starve? Do you think today the average Japanese person knows more about water supply than the average American? This is such a weirdly romantic view about the past that I don't know where to even start.
> Food comes from trucks distributing from a factory that gets ingredients from farms and other types of food procurement.
This is like saying the internet is when two computer send 1s and 0s over copper wire. A technically correct description that lacks so much detail that it is practically useless.
I think the average medieval farmer understood how to harvest food and draw water, yes. This isn't as esoteric as using SSH in 2026. Knowing where your necessary resources come from should be basic knowledge.
For a more modern context of why: I hope people don't simply rant about "why are groceries expensive" and simply believe that a single politician is the reason and that an upcoming politician will magically lower prices. A medieval farmer would not see their crops having low yields and ponder why there's less food.
>This is like saying the internet is when two computer send 1s and 0s over copper wire.
If they aren't specialized in computers, it'd be a start. Things are abstracted, so I'm expecting less knowledge of bits and assembly and more about landlines and isps.
In short, if you use and pay for something everyday, you should understand who to hold accountable when it breaks, or suddenly gets more expensive. Knowing that one breadcrumb can start the trail for further thinking.
Or maybe they would take it as divine punishment. Who knows.
But sure from there they would blame the bad weather causing that on their respective religion's directive. Or some other group for lacking resources they desired.
Probably yes. Our education systems and culture are so very different. Japan is far more structured and standardized. In the US, schools are a complete gamble unless you've got the means and motivation to explicitly move to an area with "good schools". Given the incredible number of adults who read below a sixth grade level, I'd fully expect the average US citizen to be less informed and less capable of informing themselves as the average Japanese citizen. This would translate into more Japanese citizens being familiar with things like water pressure.
but you are right that curiosity should be promoted more in school
> 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 router’s 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.
What? Computers were everywhere in all kinds of domains by 2006, but you can bet that your average accountant of the time would most likely not be able to SSH into a server (nor should they need to...) I guess it really depends on what the author qualifies as a "serious engagement with computers."
I'd say almost all of that became redundant for the average person with windows 3.1 release (34 years ago) or, maybe, more windows 95 (31 years ago).
I remember desperately trying to get two computers to talk to each other so we could play doom in the early 90s, whatever black magic we had to do seemed to take hours to get working.
The time we had 3 or even 4 computers playing Baldurs Gate together I swear we started trying to get the computers talking at 7pm and didn't start playing till 10 (but it was amazing).
The author has a rather distorted view of how things actually were in 2006.
Curious coincidence, I was literally thinking yesterday: “but why does the water come out of the tap?” I self-answered “must be the pressure somehow” but did not dig much more…
Yeah, but at some point you need a plumber who at least has a passing understanding of where it comes from, and more importantly knows how to fix any problems you may have with your plumbing and its connection to municipal water/sewer.
And there needs to be someone employed somewhere who understands the whole municipal water supply and sewer system and how it is engineered and all the problems that it has.
Also, it is good to have the intellectual curiosity so that you could at least take a stab at it off the top of your head, and you wouldn't be averse to learning about it, if it suddenly became relevant to your life.
And there is a difference between the person who will hit a high priority "bug" in their life and will grind on it until they get it fixed, learning whatever they need to in the process, and people who just get stuck and try to avoid the problem.
As an example from work, I've been dumped into an open source codebase that I had zero familiarity with (keepalived) and found a missing ntohl() bug that affected Solaris/sparc servers (explaining quite nicely why it didn't affect Linux once the bug got found). And I did this when we were shipping keepalived in our product, fixing it under an extreme time crunch, and rescued a large contract with a Bank. This wasn't even a product that I was actively working on as a developer anymore either, but the devs on the product weren't familiar enough with C hacking.
I get the feeling that "kids these days" would just say "I dunno, Solaris is just cursed".
And that is an out of date, overly specific technological problem, but you can probably update that with any of the popular blog posts on this site where someone digs into some highly specific problem to find some incredibly detailed problem resolution. There's still people doing that. The stories are fairly popular. But it is weird to see so much "I don't need to know, and I don't need to care" sentiments on "Hacker" News in response to the (admittedly AI generated) title article.
In my grandfather's peer group, you were lacking essential knowledge if you couldn't rebuild an engine.
Modern IT has become a ubiquitous commodity, much like the car. You don't need to know how an engine works to drive; while that knowledge might make you more efficient, it isn't strictly necessary to get from A to B. Besides, most twenty-two-year-olds ten years ago didn't know how to use ssh, either.
However, if you want to call yourself an engineer (and work in the field), you must understand the underlying mechanics. IMHO if you want to defeat a competitor today, you don’t need industrial espionage - you just have to cut their internet and/or AI subscriptions. Modern vibe engineers would struggle to function.
> The man page is dead for most users. The RFC is unread by most developers who depend on the protocols it describes.
Well, those who are accustomed to using man pages still use them today. I find them far more accurate than whatever an AI might spit out at any given moment. As for RFCs, they were always read by a small population - either those implementing the protocols or the few of us who like to brag about obscure technical details.
> You can now write complete programs without understanding what a single line of them does... until something goes wrong in production at two in the morning and you are completely without tools to respond.
I’m not worried about this. When things go south, there will still be experts who will know how to fix them. But since those experts will be fewer and farther between, they will likely charge $1k/hr, and rightfully so. If you are in that field, more power to you! :D
I feel like when I was twenty two I would have been very surprised if more than a couple of my peers knew this stuff.
DNS is a phone book, I think!
But yeah, maybe "bad examples" by the author.
The one that really confuses me is this, though:
> You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.
Sorry, what are you saying? Software exists to unzip files. It used to be a "dedicated app" like WinZip, 7zip, WinRAR, etc. Now it's built into Windows. Or you use the 'unzip' command in Linux.
True, but on the other hand, when I started programming (hell, even before the whole LLM craze began) and you took away my internet/stackoverflow/google I would also drastically lose productivity. Especially in my more junior years, and later, of course I could still write code, but if I had to figure out how a certain library worked or why a certain error in the auth layer happened, without internet I would be nowhere.
In grad school I worked on TinyOS, and my advisor told me to print out the source code and spend a week reading it until I knew how to make the changes I wanted.
When I worked at Google there was no external documentation to use, so if you couldn't find the docs, you better figure out how to read the source. They have very good code search there.
Connecting to SSH seems like something a "power user" should be able to learn but not necessarily know already (probably more likely they know what a VPN is)
> These are the same people who would lose their minds if their city government told them they could only buy food from vendors the city had approved, licensed, and taxed
But it is exactly like this in the developed world, and not many would buy food from a trunk of a roadside car.
That's the point.
I agree with the author regarding Apple's walled-garden app distribution, but the analogy just doesn't work here.
People are still building these apps at every level of developer experience so the kids must be alright.
Yes people, in general, have less knowledge of file systems and networking now because things just work. Every LAN party as a kid took at least an hour of networking to get started. Now kids don't do LAN parties because everything is already networked by default. But there is also an order of magnitude more people doing these things now -- in the past those people just went without.
The vast majority most of knowledge I ever had from the time the author describes is obsolete now anyway. I can still remember so much but that's not going to help me with my React app.
As a power user, I feel weirdo when trying explain something what I take for granted. :)
Total commander/norton/midnight commander, bash, cron, portable apps, zip a file, automation of email processing, having a non-gmail address, markdown, “don’t touch mouse” editing, pdf manipulation, block editing in Sublime text (don’t mention vi/vim, Emacs :)
In my time, not being able to read assembler code meant you weren't a power user.
DNS and SSH were/are things 'techie' people know. I can assure you most people had no idea what their IP was or what a DNS was. Being the "hey my computer is acting kinda slow can you look at it" guy. It felt like they actively sought out to not know. Honestly cellphones and tablets have basically ended my endless side job of 'hey can you look at my computer'. Because they hid all of that techno junk that is interesting to me but to most people isnt.
But most importantly, and what the author missed, is that it works both ways. I know how to connect to a BBS, but I was literally paralysed by the fact that there is no LAN game in Counter-Strike 2. Where is LAN?! Why do I need a Steam account for every player to play with friends sitting in the same room? Why would I even need external servers for this?
idk, it's a modern world and I don't belong to it, so perhaps we should accept the slow death of 90s or 00s 'power users', and the rise of new 'power users' of the 20s, who won't even know what floppy disk icon on the Save button means.
In a Bash terminal, if something goes wrong, it's probably my fault and there's a clear path forward to troubleshooting and fixing it. That feels way more palatable than a bloated website that throws an "Oops, something went wrong" error. For us, that's hitting a wall, but for people who aren't living in a Linux terminal, needing to open one at all is hitting a wall.
LAN gameplay disappeared because it was the power user way. Steam is a complex centralized proprietary software stack that abstracts all the hard parts of online gaming away so anyone can do it. You can't just intuit the existence of Steam using knowledge of computer and networking fundamentals. That's a knowledge gap, not a lack of skill.
I mean I'd like to keep playing and organizing LAN games but most of us who playedv togather as teenagers are too busy with real life. And youngsters have probably better ways of spending time with friends.
So true, but this has been going on for quite a while. Phones accelerated it and I have seem many of the concerns come up in IT where I worked.
A couple of examples:
1. My favorite, about 10 to 15 years ago. A user said this finance report always had 2147483647 in the total. This was looked at for weeks by another group.
After a few weeks our manager's manager called a meeting with everyone to look at the issue. Everyone had no idea what to do. When I saw the number it look real familiar to me. I then released it was the max value if an int. I told them the issue was its variable could was too small. A simple change fixed the issue.
Another old programmer who was not at the meeting asked me what happened. I showed him the report and he know instantly what it was too.
2. hex dumps, no one can read them now. About 25 years ago I was looking at a dump to see where a packed numeric value was, people who saw be thought it was magic. I had to explain how that number was read and what the hex represented.
I fear what will happen if AI becomes a real thing.
However, I think the bigger problem with it is what I used to call a "Slashdot Attitude." If you don't remember or are too young, it was the "users are idiots/lusers" and "people should suffer like I did" i.e. non-constructive perspectives that were often expressed there. (Getting that vibe, although may be my own perception.)
I'd argue that the main problem isn't the ease of use, but rather the elimination of freedoms and privacy that prevents learning. A friend and I wrote our thoughts and hopeful solution here: https://trustworthy.technology/
If it was only the Apples' and Google's who thought sandboxed apps were the future you might have a point, but most tech savvy people arrive at something that looks and awful lot like sandboxed apps. You see power, most see[1] a[2] dumpster-fire[3]
: [1] ; ls /usr/lib | wc -l
: [2] ; ls /usr/bin | wc -l
: [3] ; find /usr/share/man/man* | wc -l
Power users, tinkerers, and so on were always extremely niche. By definition they were always only a few. They are still a few, probably in similar numbers as before.
The only thing that changed is that normal people now have access to computing devices. My wife does not want to know what a file system is, or what happens behind the scenes when an app is installed. She has no idea what a DNS is. Why would she? She is a lawyer with little interest in technology. She wants to use Instagram, not self-host a Matrix instance.
The normal users are the majority, and it's more profitable to serve those users than assholes like me who get pissy when they can't sideload an apk.
And I am okay with that.
Pre-AI, I worked with Devs that didn't even know what an HTTP request is (difference between GET/POST/etc) - we were building an enterprise software where higher level libraries abstracted that away..With AI, it's becoming even worse now - just ask Claude
It's engineered dependency.
Then they spent 25 years engineering understanding out of every single interaction, and now point to the resulting learned helplessness as validation. "See? Users don't read!" No, you spent decades training them not to by ensuring that reading was never rewarded and never necessary.
My read has always been it was painful for a certain type of PM to think and so they assumed "minds like mine" and ... here we are.
So was the learned helplessness already ingrained by 2000? How far back does it go?
"back in my time", you'd have some c code, one .conf file, you'd "make", edit the config (or hope it works with default settings), run, and you'd have a program running. Now you need five different services running, it comes in a docker, running on some random port, proxied to another random port, the configs are split into 12 yaml files, plus it needs 7 gigs of hdd space...
..sometimes providing the same functionality as the old 300kB software of the yesteryear.
I'm considering terminal utilities as apps too, btw.
These are the type of persons who would get a girlfriend without a master degree in psychology.
To put a slightly finer point on it for puncturing the cliche, "needing to hide" has a time-component. Everyone has something to hide from a potential future, whether they're good at predicting it or not.
I "have nothing to hide" about my religion today, but when if extremists seize power and declare "death to apostates", the exact same fact-pattern will very very much need hiding.
> The industry isn’t going to fix this. Every financial incentive points the other way.
Cory Doctorow has a hopeful--perhaps over-hopeful--idea that a disruptive wedge can be created, where a profit-motive will promote breaking the system of control. Specifically, that some place with a legal haven for tinkerers and wall-breakers will reap benefits from letting them openly sell device-unlockers, export-your-data tools, etc.
Can't both of these be true?
Apple, Microsoft, and the evil tech companies us nerds love to vilify actually brought computing to the masses. In the early 1980s only tech geeks and corporations used computers—the Apple Macintosh changed that. In the early 1990s, only tech geeks and universities used the internet—Microsoft Windows changed that. In the mid 2000's, only tech geeks and business people used "smart" devices[1]—the iPhone changed that.
At every technological leap, business savvy entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to expand their markets by making their products enticing and useful to millions of more people than the previous generation of products did.
Unfortunately, this also came at the expense of the apparent "dumbing down" of computers, as every new abstraction hid more of the actual computer users had to interface with. And it also made things easy to control and lock down for corporations.
But I don't think we would've seen the explosion in the popularity of computing had this played out any other way.
I also disagree with the article's premise that power users are dying. We're still here, but we're a tiny minority of computer users now. We're both amused and frustrated at the insanity of where technology is taking us, and who is leading us there, but we still have our corners of computing we can retreat to.
And I also disagree that our favorite layer of computing is somehow more "real" than anyone else's. We scoff at Gen Z's inability to use the terminal as much as Baby Boomers scoffed at our inability to program in assembly. It's all relative. Except "AI". That is more of a disabler than an enabler, even though we're too hypnotized to see it now.
[1]: Yes, the BlackBerry was a cultural phenomenon, but it didn't have the capabilities nor mass appeal of the iPhone.
Feels like there's some irony here given the rest of your comment. "It's always been this way and probably always will be... except for this time it's different."
I'm not trying to say you're wrong, just a funny thing I noticed that reminded me of an Arrested Development scene.
There's an attempt to deny the need for IT knowledge and expertise at every level, Big Tech does it out of self-interest, while most others do it out of ignorance. They often claim, "Oh, it only takes a few minutes or days on your own; just a couple of clicks and you can do everything." Yet, those who say this don't actually know what they're talking about and refuse to even try to prove their own theory.
The outcome is even worse: nowadays, doing it yourself is a struggle even when you have the right skills. All recent software is built to be unmanageable because there's no operation/infra vision. Don't even get me started on documentation; everyone talks about the need for a "documentation culture" yet what actually gets documented ranges from nothing to total garbage (basically text that's useless unless you feed it to an LLM and hope it can make some sense of it).
To make matters worse, standard hardware is getting more and more expensive, first it was graphics cards, then RAM, and now NVMEs, with the result that many people simply don't want to or can't afford to buy, so they're literally living on someone else's computers even if they don't like it. This is especially true for students, who are at the best stage of their lives for learning and who won't have the time or energy to do it later on.
To complete the picture, the business model just isn't sustainable; no matter how much is invested, a real digital evolution isn't possible while living on the computers of four giants limited by their own services, and this implies that a social collapse awaits us regardless.
For me, the solution is managing to have enough leverage so that we can push for mandatory FLOSS and open hardware de jure in response, in order to limit the damage and geopolitical upheavals who push anyone to relocalize, which necessarily implies starting over on a small scale. I see something coming: Nostr, Meshtastic, the Fediverse, the rise of self-hosters and their average age show that there's still an active group of people who want a different world. But they are few and far between, burdened by significant technical debt in a world that's becoming increasingly hostile,and that's exactly where things need to change.
The problems caused by centralization, from various companies getting burned by relying on giant third-party providers, to banking scandals driving crypto (not stablecoins), to the need for resilience that requires cutting down on SPOF might actually make a difference. I hope it'll be enough, and I hope anyone who gets it does their part to spread that understanding while we still can.