Articles like this are only surprising because some two generations of propaganda has convinced young Americans that everyone deserves a trophy and we can all be Einsteins and Armstrongs if we just set our minds to it.
The article is about how economic class and educational inequality prevents everyone from having meaningful technical experiences that lead to technical literacy. I think you're missing the point by a mile or so.
>The article is about how economic class and educational inequality prevents everyone from having meaningful technical experiences that lead to technical literacy
No. That's exactly what I'm arguing is wrong. We're putting the cart before the horse. The internet is ubiquitous, even if you're poor at this point - it's in your schools, it's in free libraries, and entry level smartphones are cheap enough that all but the poorest can afford them if it's a priority.
The problem is none of that. It's that not everyone is technically competent - and no amount of education or money will fix that. Intelligence is a high dimensional spectrum and technical details regarding computers are out of reach for a sizable proportion of the population. This is exacerbated by poverty and/or poor education, but those are at most half of the problem.
If you want to accurately act on 'inherent intelligence' you need to correct for external factors first, or else you'll just get a slice of the bell curve based on how rich/poor people are.
I'm not arguing against that. What I'm saying is that we have been drastically overcorrecting for too long because we refuse to collectively acknowledge the reality of intelligence as a distribution and allocate resources that maximally benefit society.
If anything, we've been undercorrecting. A simple example would be the many studies that show that IQ in children measureably increases in the years following a move from a poor area to a rich area, even if the child's family's income doesn't change.
Most school Internet domain-blocks Wikipedia, libraries are not in walking distance for substantial amounts of people (and that's leaving out how library fees are prohibitive for low-income families), and entry-level smartphones are locked down to the point of making curiosity irrelevant.
When you look at who in this industry succeeds, you very rarely see people from low-income populations. There isn't substantial reason to believe that distribution of opportunity isn't the handicap for a significant amount of people.
YC: founded by the son of a nuclear physicist, and the son of one of the UNIX authors.
Microsoft: founded by the son of a lawyer whose firm is currently making a billion a year in revenue and was similarly doing great at the time.
Facebook: founded by the son of a shrink and a dentist operating in one of the richest areas of New York, rich enough to be sent to private school.
Apple: founded by the son of an engineer at Lockheed.
Amazon: founded by the son of an engineer at Exxon.
Netflix: founded by someone whose family was rich enough to extravagantly donate during the Great Depression.
Google: founded by son of someone with a PhD in Computer Science (one who had multiple thousand-dollar personal computers filling their house since said son was born at that), and the son of someone with a PhD in Computer Science and a researcher at NASA.
C: written by the son of someone...who worked at Bell Labs.
Rob Pike gave a great example once of how Computer Science is nothing if not under a caste system, although by accident (explaining why one of the early UNIX usernames was 'sjb'):
8. Q: Adam Buchsbaum's original login was sjb. Who is sjb?
A: sol & buchsbaum
Adam was one of many Unix room kids with parents who worked at the Bell Labs. Adam was unusual because his father was executive vice president but apparently didn't have enough clout to get his kid his own login.
Women used to be the majority of computer programmers. Where are they now? The strongest counterexamples to the general rule of "People with rich parents that had connections" were all significantly before computing became a prestigious field, and even they didn't get all that far (I don't see McCarthy's contributions all around the field despite largely being significantly better than alternatives offered by people like Backus and Ritchie; what's the difference between the one and the other two? McCarthy was the son of communist immigrants, Backus was the son of a stockbroker, and Ritchie was the son of a Bell Labs employee).
If you look at the history of this field, you see nothing but people with all of the opportunities in the world getting all of the success from it. People from affluent families becoming more affluent through upbringings that involved science heavily. "Meritocracy" isn't "The best of the affluent children win," it's "The best win." Computer Science does not resemble meritocracy in any fashion, and largely never has.
The only general counterexample out of all of the FAANG founders, Jobs (the son of lower-middle class parents with no education to speak of), has been mocked for years for being comparatively non-technical. Notably, he strongly believed that the problem was an access problem, not some magic hand-waving "Some people are better than others!" nonsense. His vision of what libraries should be like today was far different than yours[1], but because your mindset permeates among the people who make these decisions, more or less wasted.
That's not in all areas. The closest library to the town I grew up in charged fees for a card (required for both checking out books & computer access), as an example.
Further, there are fees almost everywhere else, too: overdue fees. Unsurprisingly, when you get rid of overdue fees, participation rises:
Since the fine-free policies went into effect, the library has seen an increase of 29,094 patrons year over year. In addition, 3,900 of the 6,500 patrons who were prevented from borrowing items due to overdue fines have returned to use library resources.
The changes were enacted after a city study revealed that nearly half of the library's patrons whose accounts were blocked as a result of late fees lived in two of the city's poorest neighborhoods. "I never realized it impacted them to that extent," said Misty Jones, the city's library director.
The article is about how economic class and educational inequality prevents everyone from having meaningful technical experiences that lead to technical literacy. I think you're missing the point by a mile or so.