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You underestimate the level of horror.
The average person doesn't just not know how things work... They know as a matter of objective fact that they're hostilely designed to take agency away from them.
It is not only a pain in the ass that all cars have computers, it is now illegal to make new ones that don't have computers, those computers ensure you can't do maintenance on your own car, the user agreement might make it literally illegal to do that maintenance via cracks and work arounds, and the government is passing new regualtions so that your car will have remote automatic shutoffs, and maintain tracking data, so that it will betray you if you ever try to run from the state, and bear witness against you at your trial.
That's just cars. Computer software for the past 20 years has only gotten worse for 90% of users, going from an objest you owned and could install, to a permanent relationship tying you into dependence on hostile corporate entities you are now a permanent funder of... if Adobe decides they don't want you to be able to create certain images, they can just update your copy of photoshop to make it automatically stop you... sound far fetched? Try photocopying a dollar bill. The machine will detect what you're doing and override you. That isn't even software as a service, that's hardware.
Then there is the near permanent surveillance enabled by all the apps you literally must have to not be shut out of the economy and rendered homeless, the constant assault on your attention and hostile design meant to distract you that you must constantly fight on social media, which you also can't opt out of because that's now how business, romance, communtity organizing and basic socializing is done and you'll die alone and abandoned if you don't give in and feed your personal data and waning atttention to it...
and then even if you accept that as the cost of doing business those systems supposedly objective results are manipulated by people who hate you
to politically disempower you and destroy the last bits of resistance you could possibly muster.
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Technology has not advanced in America... If we define technology as allowing people to get what they want: Improve their lifestyle, secure shelter, secure social relations, travel... Every aspect of American technology, from cars, to air travel, to office tech has only gotten worse since the 1980s.
Hell flying cars existed in the 1910s (teenagers could fly the Focker Dr3 and it would fit in a double wide garage), Nuclear batteries and freighters existed in the 60s, we had lighter than air freight service in the 20s.
By rights international trade should be dominated by 3000ft nuclear powered zepplins by now, and personal travel by cheap prop planes (you can not tell me just reproducing the Dr3 is more expensive than the modern nisan)
Theil made the case that American technology had advanced in the world of bits, but not atoms, because the world of atoms has been regulated to death...
I disagree America has advanced. Outside of surveilling the population, killing foreigners, and safety features no one would willing pay for and thus have to be regulated... America has only regressed. Housing is uglier, smaller, and more expensive anywhere anyone wants to live, cars are uglier and more expensive (no GM factory worker is getting a new one every 2 years)... even in the realm of health any gain to lifespan has been more than offset by obesity and chronic disease destroying the quality of youth. Hell lifespans have even stopped rising...
The one thing this society values, being safely infirm longer, and even that one metric is reversing.
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The age of "The Social Network" has seen an implosion of relationship formation! An implosion so catastrophic the greatest geopolitical factor is now population implosion.
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