The interesting thing here, historically, is that this arc was followed by a lot of what can be considered tech products.
To pick one at random: cars. These days, peoples ability to self-repair and self-maintain their cars is at an all-time low, despite it being easier to do than ever. (There are a million bald guys in overalls on Youtube who will show you a video describing precisely how to replace a fuel control valve on a 2012 Ford Fiesta.)
The reason for this is that cars got better, and more reliable. For many decades after their introduction, if you owned a car at all, you had to be conversant in their maintenance and repair, because those things broke down or were just straight-up factory lemons in ways that would be unthinkable in a modern automobile. So the populace as a whole became very "car literate," because you had to be.
Then they made them better. (There's a lot of literature on how Toyota specifically revolutionized car quality in the 80s.) And because they were better, you no longer NEEDED to know all those things. It's entirely possible to own a car for decades and never need to field-replace a part because you broke down on the road somewhere, a situation that would have been unthinkable in our grandparents time. (This has had a lot of implications for AAA.)
And so, except among dedicated hobbyists or DIYers, that knowledge is slowly draining out of the populace.
You had other arcs like this with the vast array of mechanized products available to people in the industrialized world with the advent of widespread electrification. Things like refrigerators and vacuum cleaners and TVs were absolute garbage, and if you owned one it was in your best interests to learn how to replace a blown fuse or stripped wire. Then they got better, and that knowledge drained out of the populace. It is true that these things are to some extent deliberately designed to not be field-repairable anymore, but it's also true that your vacuum cleaner is far less likely to blow a fuse, I mean a literal vacuum-tube fuse, and start a fire when you plug it in, something that used to be very common.
When it comes to computers, what we think of as "modern" tech... well, I've been doing this for a long time. If I wanted to install a game in 1995, I had to load into the autoexec.bat and config.sys files and edit my HIMEM settings so that Wing Commander II wouldn't eat itself in a stack overflow on load. It had a whole manual telling me how to do surgery so I could launch the game.
These days I click three buttons in Steam, and that WORKS like 99.9% of the time.
I go back and forth on if this is a bad thing or not. I mean, it's absolutely bad that we aren't ALLOWED to service our own shit if we're so inclined. But, well... we're transitioning from "this tech is new and shiny and the wave of the future" to "this stuff is just stuff. It's stuff we use. Why should I know everything about how it works?"
I rent a house. My house is a technological marvel by any reasonable standard; the plumbing and electrical wiring and HVAC system represent some very complex systems that were installed by experts. I have no idea how to do anything but the most basic maintenance or repair work on them, and I have no idea how ANY of it works. I can reset a breaker from the box in the basement. I can change a lightbulb. I can unclog a toilet or a garbage disposal. But if you asked me how any of the wiring in the walls works or how precisely water pressure is maintained, I wouldn't be able to tell you. I certainly couldn't re-wire anything. Nor tell you how I connect to city gas lines which keep me warm in the winter. If any of that stuff seriously broke, I am completely tech illiterate. I'd call an expert.
Because this stuff isn't tech to me, even though it's absolutely tech by any reasonable definition. It's just stuff. It works. I see no need to understand it beyond that. I am very tech illiterate about my home, as are many people.
That's what "tech" is to the people who didn't live through the information revolution. It's just stuff. It works. Their smartphone is no more remarkable to them than our grandparents rotary phones were to THEM back in the 50s. To those of us who are older, the smartphone is a revolutionary device that changed the world. To those who are younger, it's just... a phone. It does phone things. Why do they need to be literate about it?
