Disclosure: this article was written from my own thesis and lived experience, then shaped and edited with AI assistance. I reviewed the argument, revised the structure, and stand behind the ideas here.
For most of the digital age, humans had to learn how to think like machines.
We memorized syntax. We learned rigid menus, brittle interfaces, command lines, templates, ticket flows, and rules that punished ambiguity. We trained ourselves to break imagination into tiny mechanical instructions because computers could not meet us halfway.
To make technology useful, we first had to translate ourselves into its language.
That translation did not just shape software. It shaped people.
