The line from creator to consumer has become increasingly long and tenuous. This can increase efficiency (knitting your own clothes is slow and the capital requ

The line from creator to consumer has become increasingly long and tenuous. This can increase efficiency (knitting your own clothes is slow and the capital required for a clothes factory prohibitive), but it also means that the learning required to improve things is something for specialists, and not an everyday person. I think the wonder of software, at least at one point (80's to early 2000's), was that you were using a thing that you could also improve - it was a short path from consuming web sites to creating them, for instance. The clever youngster described in the article could easily look at something and think "I can make this better" and learn how in a practical time frame. I'm not sure that's still possible now. It's still easy to make a 90's website, but building production-quality work is increasingly specialized. It hasn't really materialized, but this was part of the early excitement behind 3d printing - finally, when you saw a plastic widget that could be made better, you could try it out on your own, cheaply and quickly! It probably doesn't help, either, that our most valuable assets are controlled by cartels and monopolies. If you want to build a home near decent jobs, you will find doing so defaults to being illegal, and you need to beg for an exemption to be allowed to do so. We allow owners of homes to vote whether to allow building more homes (making them effectively a cartel). If you want to produce software for phones, you need to give a cut to the two big manufacturers, or risk irrelevance. The existing players have such big network effects there's very little room for new entrants to the market. If you have a clever idea for an invention, and want to use it, you risk inviting extremely expensive lawsuits from huge companies who have coopted the patent system to show they have prior art for nearly anything you can imagine, and have worked to capture the courts deciding these cases. It's not completely unlike a cobbler's guild shutting down a clever new shoe design that threatens incumbents. What does the clever young person with a good idea do now, aside from try to win VC in an incredibly crowded and competitive market?