If you want to learn how machines actually work, go watch a mid-century industrial film. The ones shot in black and white, with the clipped narration and the cutaway diagrams. The ones that assume you can pay attention for twenty minutes, remember a sequence, and behave like an adult around rotating mass and stored energy.
Then compare that to most “training” made today. It is either infantilized entertainment, compliance theater, or vendor marketing in a lab coat. It tells you what to click, not what to understand. It teaches substitution, not diagnosis. It gives you a vibe, not a skill. It is worse than useless because it produces the confident incompetent.
This is not because people got dumber or because cameras got better. It is not because “the culture changed.” It is not because we forgot how to teach.
It is because the legal system made truthful instruction radioactive.
The moment you treat instruction as a liability surface, you stop teaching and start lawyering. That is the whole story. Everything else is downstream.
Products liability did not start out as the all-consuming machine it became. Early 20th century law still had privity barriers, which meant manufacturers could often hide behind the immediate seller. That begins to crack in the U.S. with MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. in 1916, where Cardozo extends a manufacturer’s duty beyond the direct purchaser in negligence.
Around the same era, industrial injury law gets rerouted into workers’ compensation. Wisconsin adopts a workmen’s compensation act in 1911 (a no-fault tradeoff that also eliminates the classic employer defenses). That mattered because it carved off a big chunk of workplace injury into an administrative system. It made the “teach the workforce and move on” model more stable.
Then the consumer and products world goes the other direction, toward broader manufacturer exposure. Warranty disclaimers and fine print start losing. Henningsen v. Bloomfield Motors in 1960 is a famous example of courts refusing to let auto makers disclaim implied warranties the way they wanted.
A few years later, California makes the new rule explicit. Greenman v. Yuba Power Products in 1963 is a landmark strict products liability case. Then the American Law Institute codifies the idea for the country with Restatement (Second) of Torts § 402A in 1965, which formalizes strict liability for selling a product “in a defective condition unreasonably dangerous.”
This is the pivot. What happened next: “defect” metastasized to include not just bad manufacturing or bad design, but bad words. Failure to warn. Inadequate instructions. Not enough caution tape in the manual.
By the time you reach the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Products Liability, “inadequate instructions or warnings” is explicitly treated as a defect category. Congress’s own CRS products liability overview describes failure-to-warn as a defect consisting of inadequate warnings or instructions.
Now you have the poison pill: the manual is not just documentation. It is an exhibit. The training film is not just training. It is discoverable narrative. Every sentence is reframed as “you knew,” “you foresaw,” “you should have added,” “you should have redesigned,” “you should have warned harder.”
So companies adapt. Not to educate. To survive.
When lawyers are in the loop, the goal is not to make the reader competent. The goal is to make the record defensible.
That flips every incentive.
The safest instruction is a non-instruction. The best manual, legally, is the one that says nothing actionable. The best training, legally, is the one that proves you “provided training,” not the one that transfers judgment.
This is how you get the modern text that is everywhere: “Read and understand all instructions.” “Use only as directed.” “Refer servicing to qualified personnel.” “No user-serviceable parts inside.” “May cause injury or death.” “Do not use if damaged.” “Always wear appropriate PPE.” It is word confetti. It is designed to be unhelpful because helpfulness creates specificity, and specificity creates targets.
And it does not stop at warnings. It changes design and business models. If you teach repair, you implicitly admit repair is foreseeable. If repair is foreseeable, the injury from repair becomes foreseeable. If it is foreseeable, you have “duties”. So you stop teaching repair, you stop selling parts, you serialize components, you lock diagnostics behind lockouts and NDAs, you withhold service documentation, you turn everything into module swaps. Not because it is technically superior, but because it is legally tidy.
The legal system punishes legibility. So industry rewards opacity.
Academics have been pointing at this for decades. Warnings “proliferate,” and excessive warnings become self-defeating because nobody can read them, process them, or prioritize them. Even products-liability scholars who are not anti-plaintiff, like Henderson and Twerski, describe failure-to-warn doctrine as confused and prone to imposing excessive liability. That is not a culture-war take. That is the field telling you the warning regime is structurally broken.
The result is overwarning, followed by under-informing. A blizzard of CYA that crowds out the one paragraph you needed about the actual failure mode.
Practical adult education dies in exactly the places it matters most: where judgment meets hazard.
The old industrial films did something modern training refuses to do. They treated the viewer as a responsible actor in a mechanical universe. They showed causality. They showed sequence. They showed failure. They showed why the interlock exists, why the standoff exists, why the guard exists, what happens when you bypass it. They were not “nice.” They were not soothing. They did not flatter you. They made competence feel non-optional.
Modern corporate training is built to produce a checkbox, not a mechanic. Modern consumer documentation is built to win a deposition, not to teach you anything. Modern “how-to” media is built to monetize attention, not to transfer skill. Those are three different poisons, but the lawyers are the one that made the first two mandatory.
And you can see the societal consequences everywhere. Repair literacy collapses. Trades become credential-gated while simultaneously deskilled. People lose the ability to reason from symptoms to causes. Everything becomes a black box serviced by a priesthood. Machines become disposable because maintenance is treated as unauthorized tampering. The consumer gets trained into passivity. The worker gets trained into compliance.
This is not progress. It is institutional self-protection packaged as safety.
OSHA and the modern regulatory state get blamed for some of this, and regulators do contribute to paperwork gravity, but that is not the core dynamic. OSHA is created by the 1970 Act and opens its doors in April 1971. The CPSC is created by the Consumer Product Safety Act signed in October 1972. Regulation pushes standardization. Litigation pushes silence. The deadening effect you feel in manuals and training is overwhelmingly litigation-driven, because litigation weaponizes your own words against you.
Once that happens, “adult education” becomes legally indistinguishable from “self-incrimination.” So it gets strangled.
Not with a conspiracy, per se. With incentives. With billable hours. With risk committees. With document-retention policies. With the slow, careful removal of anything that might actually teach.
And that is how you end up in 2026 watching a 1950s filmstrip to learn what a competent adult used to be allowed to know.