1 – First of all a user is precisely that, a user someone who is just able to utilize a system but who can't really do more than that, agile as they can be. Users, though, are clients….. and as clients, users are used. Any system then, mainly proprietary systems, provides and allows the user to do just inside their boundaries what they have elected to be the proper tools;
2 – To my understanding, other systems, like Linux open source ones, being modular, required and also allow a bit more from the user. The user is at leatst someone who adjusts, who makes choices, wider or narrower, who installs this or that tool / programs on top of the OS. In a sense, they are more like co-creators in that each machine may very easily be unique and adequate to the individual's needs. Further then that, a modular system requires that some of the fundamentals of the elements of a machine/Pc system are understood and so some degree of IT literacy . Users here are not just consumers – they may even fee using freeware - , they are one step ahead;
3 – For the most part, we are using IT tools we don't quite understand. From smartphones to tv boxes, some of the basic systems are totally alien, in its workings , to the majority of their users. Compression, encryption, Ai, deep learning, machine learning, IoT and a lot more are concepts that though used in everyday life (many times without our being aware of them ) . Combined with the fast pace at which development is unfolding, the merging with neurosciences, the overall automation growth, the rise of personal 3D printers, the importance and dominance of concepts such as cyberspace , privacy , security and warfare technologies this portraits the reaching of a threshold of a huge leap forward, a transformational one in the next one or two decades. We must not enter, as a group, a world which most of us can’t really understand; in which we are passive users, hence passively used, enjoying a very low degree of freedom. We are facing a huge gap between generations but much more than that: a gap, much wider than the previous one, between literates and illiterates. Those few who can create and understand, so in a sense the one who have appropriated this advances and the common people, the new commoners who don't see what's coming, who rely on the good will of others to grant them their rights and who can't even tell whether these are being respected or trumped upon. They may , in a happy world, enjoy the fruits of this development, or may not. One way or another they remain as slaves , because of their illiteracy.
4 – Some initial or and urgent measures seem to be of the utmost importance and urgency: to increase the general level of public understanding – even if only of the questions and the technical concepts (that is, even if not able to conceive and encryption system, or a compressing system, to be able to understand them conceptually with higher detail.
5 - A second type of measure implies the recognition of IT services to be as vital to the community as garbage cleaning and to have advanced technicians publicly available to instruct and support the general population in understanding further, to grow into the next level of expertise and to customize and so to apply sovereignty over their interaction with it systems. Also, to keep them up to the high end up the high paced developments and the way they are applied in the many areas of human endeavor.
Now, as always but perhaps more than ever before, education is a matter of Human Rights . Foundation ideals as the ones of the liberal revolutions, of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity cannot be upheld any other way. We are also presented with a greater chance to actually live according to them than ever before. let’s rise to the occasion as one Humanity.