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After reading the linked post, I find your associations strange. To me, it's not at all about understanding how routers work, it's all about the social aspects, trends, fashions, services, the gig economy, the fake ess of online interaction. None of this changes much if you understand TCP/IP.
The nerd likes tech for the sake of it, the enjoyment of the tinkering, the fiddling. To see the machine do a thing. Once it's figured out and it works, it's no longer interesting. Like the data hoarder who endlessly organizes and categorizes tens of terabytes of media but watches none of it, the nerd builds and mods things for the process itself, not for prolonged enjoyment of its use. And so this has little impact on whatever happens to the social significance of the internet.
Richard Stallman already said in the 80s that if users can't control their computing, the software makers will control the users. But general users have little interest or capability to control any computation.
So how are things changing? In my tech bubble I see a lot of anti-tech sentiment as it relates to modern tech companies' practices, the criticism of walled gardens, censorship, locked down devices etc. People who understand tech seem to want none of the smart home stuff, they keep their kids away from gadgets. The new status symbols are logging off and being physical, appreciating ancient literature etc. There's also a different type of tech person, the fan boy who is loyal to big tech brands, loves the prospect of the metaverse, fills his house with proprietary automation tech and lives his techiness via owning the latest iPhone at any given moment.
But nerds, tinkerers and tech enthusiasts don't matter so much in the big picture. The question is how the mass of consumers will react. Is there something in humanity which will reject the matrix and turn away from the algorithmic dopamine machine? Will people get exhausted or can the machine adapt and transform to keep people hooked?
I mean when have we ever seen large scale voluntary rejection of tech, except for deeply religious communities like the Amish or orthodox Jews? I don't really see a way around AI seeping into your coffee machine, your dishwasher, the fridge. Rejecting it might become a hobby for some upper class people, like having a fancy fireplace in your mansion just for the aesthetic. But for the gen pop...
People don't Münchhausen their way up to self-reliant rugged tough people without external pressure. There has to be a crisis big enough that it forces people.
On the other hand there's always some cyclicality to the generations. The sexual revolution, drugs, free love and tolerance led to metoo, low levels of risk taking and sex and drug consumption among young people, the wokescold moral police etc. But just as the original social rebels rejected conservative Christian moral authority, new generations may reject the DEI religion.
It cycles but stays the same. One can argue that the original matrix that made us prisoner slaves was agriculture and the settled life. That true life is living off the berries of the forest, fighting mammoths and facing the beasts of the night, and watching your children die, that that's what chisels a firm soul.
The heart flies high like this author's, but he, like many before, imagine some cataclysmic realization by humanity of their own need for true freedom and agency, but it never comes.
I think this is your central point. And I think the answer is yes, just like we tamed other unhealthy forces in our environment like alcohol or fast food. Meaning, my bet is that we'll develop social rituals, habits, taboos around software tech (social media first, probably) that will limit its unhealthy effects and eventually steer it toward something useful and acceptable. But we'll never be completely free of its side effects, just like we'll always lose people to alcohol or fast food.
I don't think high tech and self-reliant ruggedness are at odds. Instead of fighting mammoths and faces the creepy crawlies at night, we're fighting against surveillance, addiction, and control. It's a very real fight for survival, perhaps less physical and more about soul/agency. But it's strenuous, demanding both instant action and long-term strategic thinking.
Maybe, just maybe, this is actually the escape hatch from our all too comfortable physical lives--being forced to fight for your the life of your soul and agency, your very humanity, against a growing, sly, unthinking machine.
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