We've seen this historically with other technologies. There was a short-lived era when people knew how to repair cars. To tune and modify engines. But as automobiles became ever more of a commodity, that population seemed to shrink too.

It may be difficult for a child to become fascinated with a particular technology once it becomes ubiquitous. It's a testable hypothesis too, because if that were true then you should see hackers appear in different geographic regions at different times due to how unevenly these technologies are distributed.

The confounding factor, I think, for computer technology at least, is that by the time they become ubiquitous in the third world, they may no longer be simple enough to "get started" on.