Learn the interface.
Break the abstraction.
The line runs from acoustic-coupler modems and BBS command prompts through web infrastructure, product cycles, community systems, and twenty years of public work online — into the present, where the machinery is AI and the question is the same: how does it actually run.
The current posture stays on that axis: closer to the mechanism, less impressed by the layer, unwilling to borrow authority from platforms that conceal how the system works.