That's entirely our industry's fault. After all, there are no files anymore, just cloud documents on remote websites.

And we didn’t reproduce the hierarchical nature of files in the cloud, rather we have flat lists, tags, sort-by-recently-opened, etc.

However, flat structures are harder to use, and people tend to use Google Docs less than the shared network folders when Word existed.

I don't think dealing with files made people any more computer literate, nor is understanding the folder/file UI abstraction any more of a badge of tech literacy than understanding what "pull to refresh" might do on an iPhone.

We like to overdramatize the importance of computer literacy because we take it for granted that computers are our livelihood, not some principled quest of self-betterment to understand the world.

We're like a group of mechanics finishing each other's sentences over how everyone should know how a carburetor works, and then circlejerking over how we "failed the people" with the move to power steering. And don't even get us started on how push-button ignition set the public's car literacy back 100 years from the golden age of turning a key to really understand the inner workings of locomotion.

We failed by no longer giving anyone the ability or even the right to understand their tools. A computer is just a tool to get things done. It's perfectly reasonable that to a lot of people, it will remain this black box of magic they'll never understand. But now it's a black box to everyone, including non-technical people who cared enough to know more about their tools even if they weren't their primary interest.

It feels to me that tech will eventually hit a point where there's only two ways to interact with it. Either you're a "typical user" who has a glass orb you speak into and pray that it does what you ask without shattering to prevent tinkering, or you're a programmer who gets a command line and that's it.