People don't know that it is fear. They think it's normal for computers to be difficult, confusing, fragile, and have internalized the belief that they are stup

People don't know that it is fear. They think it's normal for computers to be difficult, confusing, fragile, and have internalized the belief that they are stupid and lazy and incapable of understanding without years of dedicated effort. And they think that because people who "know computers" keep telling them so, either directly or by designing interfaces that support that notion. It isn't wholly irrational fear, either. Computers are uniquely fragile and prone to disrupting expectations. People looking for Facebook who wound up on ReadWriteWeb got there by doing something that had worked the day before. Ideally, they would have an understanding of what was going on and what assumptions had been violated. In practice, they had no intrinsic reason to until that moment. (In fact works even better now: Google has added a link to the Facebook login within the suggestion box for the search "facebook login".) It's identical to people afraid of flying, driving, swimming, going out in public, etc. These are all things in which much effort is made to eliminate painful experiences and prevent feared things from happening. You can never get 100%--there are practical limits to what you can do or need to reach a level where people will use them. I don't believe that we have reached the limit of what can be done from the creation side to make computers less painful to use on the consumer side.