I stumbled on this thread the other day, and it won’t leave my brain:

The short version: We struggle with cybersecurity because we don’t understand how our tech works, and that gap isn’t accidental. Big tech benefits when you know less.

Let’s break that down.

Years ago, I worked on a knowledge-capture project with a brilliant old-school hacker; the kind of person who could solder a motherboard and tell you why every chip was shaped the way it was.

His philosophy was simple: If you don’t understand how the parts work, you can’t tell when something’s wrong.

I’ve never soldered a motherboard, but I have cracked open a laptop, dusted out its guts, and swapped a battery, thanks to iFixit’s excellent tutorials.
They’re also leaders in the Right to Repair movement — the very idea that if you can’t fix it, you don’t really own it.

Somewhere along the way, the demand for profit slid into the spot where the right to ownership used to be. And the tech ecosystem has been warped around that trade-off ever since.

I place a lot of blame on early Microsoft for teaching a whole generation that “if you break it, you’ll wipe your operating system.” That fear pushed people toward the idea that only professionals should touch the machinery.

At the same time, software became more of a closed garden than an open toolbox. Consider the humble Word document:

This isn’t about convenience — it’s about control. WYSIWYG tools (WIZ-ee-wig; what you see is what you get) lowered the barrier to entry, but also quietly lowered the ceiling for what users could understand or change.

The trade-off: Easy to use = harder to understand = easier to exploit.

Because (surprise!) it’s profitable. If you:

…Big Tech wins. The less ownership you have, the more revenue they get, and the less control you have over your options.

When you code or customize your own tools, you control your workflow.
But that requires knowledge, and time, so the market pushes us toward speed over understanding.

The rise of AI is repeating the same mistake at scale. We’re handing creative control to tools whose guts we can’t see and weren’t meant to.

“Move fast and break things,” Facebook’s previous motto, really put a point on it. Funny how no one imagined the thing getting broken would be… us. Yet here we are.

Here’s where it hits cybersecurity: If you don’t know how something normally works, you can’t spot when it’s behaving strangely. For example:

This isn’t about becoming an engineer. It’s about knowing enough to notice when something is “making a funny sound,” the same way you do with your car.

Cybersecurity starts with awareness and tech literacy is the foundation.

(Yes, we’re still big Ted Lasso fans here at the ’Tea.)

Everything you need to understand the basics of modern tech is out there:

Before you buy a piece of tech — whether it’s software, a gadget, or anything under DRM — look up:

And then teach someone else to be curious, too. Because knowledge is power (and what you don’t know goes straight to someone else’s bottom line).

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