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by pas
1191 days ago
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There's a (few) meta-level(s) for this. They should recognize the value of, and accordingly advocate for, having more "hackable/discoverable/understandable tech environments/contexts". And not necessarily for themselves. The post opens with the classic just brew install blah, and immediately runs into the problem of people not having brew (or some other package manager) preinstalled and ready on their computers. It's the walled garden problem. And it's not a trivial problem. And even this meta-level argument is not necessarily straightforward, because it comes with serious trade-offs. And .... unfortunately even one level up, where it should be straightforward to see how a walled garden monopoly is bad (as the consensus on rent-seeking being bad is pretty strong in economics) people mostly don't care about this issue, because they don't connect it to the value of "more power user freedom". People start to see the value of right to repair tractors, people see the value of the first sale doctrine, people see themselves as temporarily embarrased rich gentlefolk, but they are afraid to see themselves as just a few commands away from a power user. |
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The dissonance stems from the fact that most people don't care about power using.
Users (most people) don't care for messing with their computers because that's not what they're at the computer for. They want to do something on the computer, and the only thing they care about is whether they can get it done.
It's like how most people drive cars to get from Point A to Point B, without giving a damn how a car works or how they could tune the car. If it gets them to Point B then nothing else matters, and tuning their car is a roadblock to getting to Point B because they aren't getting any closer to Point B while tuning their car.
Power users use computers as the end to a means, users on the other hand use computers as a means to an end. More dials and knobs on their computer is irrelevant and even prohibitive for users. Most of us here are all power users and it's natural to want more people to be like us, but the reality is we are not the majority of people on the planet.
As an aside, most of us also gloss over how computers work without a care even as we preach about how the commons must understand the complexities. I doubt most tech bros and neckbeards would understand electrical engineering even as they preach how everyone must understand bash and Powershell.