Fundamentally, abstraction fosters illiteracy. You have an entire generation or two of people who grew or are growing up solely on touch devices, and many of th

Fundamentally, abstraction fosters illiteracy. You have an entire generation or two of people who grew or are growing up solely on touch devices, and many of these devices expose no native filesystem (e.g. iOS) to its users. And as the article says, these devices are used largely for consumption (media, social extensions), all by design. You now have to go out of your way to learn even the basic, trivial fundamentals, but kids handed a smartphone at age 9 may very well have no desire to do so. Of course, and to use an analogy, not everyone has the time or motivation nor even reason to become an auto mechanic. But something like transportation has always been a means to an end. The difference with consumer technology now is that nearly everyone fancies themselves a "tech" enthusiast in one form or another thanks to proximity and thus familiarity. But at the same time, many (perhaps most) remain underexposed to the very technology they use as a lifeline. There's a pervasive "just works" mentality that has influenced everything, partially spearheaded by tech companies like Apple circa Steve Jobs. This wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for people spending so many hours of their own spare time using technology, but simultaneously learning nothing. The equivalent time spend in a traditional computing environment would teach the fundamentals whether one is interested or not, simply through exposure. But there's little such exposure in modern personal computing.