Lies of Accessibility

Just a feverish musing. Most people are familiar with the idea that good UI/UX makes the user dumber. There was a headline floating around a while ago about engineering students not knowing what a folder was on their PC. I've been thinking about this a bit recently, also because I was helping a friend troubleshoot Nvidia drivers on Linux. Most of the systems people interact with daily are abstracted away from the actual computing infrastructure so much that they are almost completely foreign. Who ever uses the file manager on their phone? Who ever cares about how application sandboxing works? Everything is made to be easy to use; which is great for giving more people easy access to powerful computing. But like we already know, there is a cost. Perhaps it's even more insidious than just not knowing what a folder is. You probably vaguely know that everything is tracking you for advertising, but you don't really see it. People complain more about Flock and Meta glasses than the spyware…