I wouldn’t be so quick to blame it on Chromebooks. Had they not been developed, or even if schools had never went all in on devices, the future would surely look different but I doubt it would significantly change the average persons’s interest in learning anything about how computers work. Perhaps, for a time, they would be forced to retain awareness of the concept of a file, but eventually someone would realize that most of them really don’t want to, and will happily pay for a sealed black box.

Again, I would compare it to electricity. There’s all sorts of possible futures from its invention, but in each one, I think the pattern would be the same – an initial rise in understanding and awareness as people learn about the new thing, and cope with early limitations, followed by a decline back to near zero as it becomes infrastructure.

To be clear, this saddens me too. I’m not saying this is good necessarily, only that I think it’s inevitable. When I was younger, I was so certain that computers would change the world, and that this change would involve more people discovering the beauty that I had discovered within the machine. Several decades on, I believe that I was mistaken. There is still beauty in there for those who are interested, but most are not, and never will be. It’s just a tool, it’s just infrastructure, that either works or doesn’t.