Something Russell wrote is niggling at me. Has been since I read it.
A lot of the people I see in the BRIG and around and about on the internet grew up with the web. They invented jobs to do on it and became very good at them. They built good bits of it. They understand it. But a lot of them did it, not because of something intrinsic about the technologies but because it was the new thing to understand, the new thing that other people didn't know about, it was arcane, unformed, novel. It needed inventing. Now, however, they're bored. They've done that. The web is baked. They're wondering what to do next.Perhaps not quite middle age and letterpress, but something.