thinking about it more i think a lot of issues have arisen from technology, specifically computers (and smartphones by extension) and the internet, becoming so much easier to use and more streamlined. the ease of use obfuscates a lot of the behind the scenes technical details that previously people had to be consciously aware of and/or interact with in order to use the technology properly. now we have people spreading misinformation about how query parameters in URLs work and what purpose they serve, people who don't know how to torrent or pirate in general beyond like illegal streaming sites, people who don't want to bother with or even just plain don't know about alternatives to paid subscription services like netflix and spotify, people who don't know how a vpn works, and on and on. these kinds of things you kind of learned by nature of growing up in the days of sharing one shitty desktop that sounded like a metal utensil in a garbage disposal whenever it did anything, scouring limewire for the right songs or ripping youtube videos to mp3s, having to render your landline useless while using the internet, etc.
technology advancing means a whole plethora of new ways for governments or corporations to surveil, track, and sell your information and behavior while the obfuscation i mentioned means most people who didn't learn about all this are more vulnerable than ever because they don't need to do much to get what they want from the internet besides typing something in google or downloading an app, so all the behinds the scenes surveillance can happen unchallenged/uninhibited
obviously things being easier to use is good in a lot of ways especially with how crucial the internet/technology is to go about day to day life for a lot of people but idk. also bad due to how power will inevitably lead to exploitation by capitalism
would recommend “On Software, the Persistence of Visual Knowledge” by Wendy Chun and “Software as Ideology” by Alexander Galloway! these touch upon the philosophy of these obfuscation of technologies. also the contradiction of computers bringing about “transparecy” (more data to everyone available at all times) even though the information they generate can “obscure” bc users can only create things in abstraction
