I blame Google and Apples bid to dominate the K12 market. Windows devices, like laptops, around 15 years ago were just trash. If you had a classroom set of laptops you would spend a shitload of time and money trying to keep these things from grinding to a halt under the stress of windows updates on 27 devices hitting a single AP after being offline and asleep for a week.

That was my experience with managing the damn things. Teachers hated them because they took forever to boot, and when they did boot they took forever to sign in, and when they did sign in they would start pulling and installing windows updates, which made people use them less, which only made the issues worse.

Then the Chromebook came out, along with Gsuite. We switched from Exchange to Gmail that year and replaced the Windows Laptops with Chromebooks. Eventually that lead to more Chromebooks, and less time in computer labs. Eventually that lead to the removal of computer labs. Then with COVID all the grants allowed us to impellent a 1:1 program where kids are now assigned a device from 2nd grade till graduation with a replacement cycle when they promote between elementary, middle, and highschool.

This has lead to a total collapse in "computing" classes, "keyboard" classes, etc. Kids still get taught keyboarding, but its very different and mostly handled by something like TypingClub. Googles Drive and associated apps have almost completely replaced Office. Google offered all this, Enterprise Email, Collaborative Doc editing, UNLIMITED storage in Google Drive, Unified control of Chrome across all platforms with Gsuite, for FREE for at least a decade. Well before Microsoft ever could have.

Drive has robust searching and suggestions such that there is almost no reason to organize your files. In most cases it assumes you want new files in the root of drive. The same is true for Gmail and with nearly unlimited storage. You can "label" emails but they're never "organized" into folders. Breaking teachers of their concepts of "folders" from exchange and teaching them that emails are just "in your account" is an ongoing process but only for older generations of teachers.

The result is that kids have no concept of "drives" or even "folders" or why you would need to even organize your files into folders. Drive doesn't care where your files are. Shared files are just there, in your "shared with me" section until YOU decide to move them into the "My Drive" category. In the last couple of years I had to implement am archiving protocol in the department that ensures critical drive files and folders are properly transferred to new accounts because we had people loose those documents when staff retire. This is because of changes on googles end regarding license. When an account is suspended now, access to shared docs are lost. This caused massive headaches as people discovered their critical documents were owned by long retired users and had no idea. Leaving us to try and find them.

All that to say, no one knows who owns their files and where they even exist or originated from under Google's framework.

Most of these issues are replicated on iPads, but they have such a smaller slice of the market that they're hardly to blame. They are simply replicating the market leader.

The free services paired with incredibly cheap devices lead to massive market share of the edu market for Google that no one has shaken. Devices have become more and more designed for the least technical person, where they used to be exclusively designed for technical people. They're designed now for the least friction. Design of modern device OS is geared to make the "device" disappeare behind the slick UI design patterns which make saving and finding files simple, make turning off aspects of the device a click, and installing software nearly fool proof.

Its consumer focused design as opposed to designing devices for technical, research, or general scientific uses.

This is less the fault of young people and more the fault of a hyperindividualist society that is too selfish and tired to ensure that knowledge is passed down. Couple this with anti-intellectualism and you get this. Everyone is too far in their own bubble and the structures that used to be in place to make sure skills were properly passed down no longer exist. Workplaces used to train you. Parents used to teach their kids how to fix a car. The sharing of knowledge simply isn't there anymore. I fully believe this started after Thatcherism, my own parents never bothered teaching me anything, everything I know I had to learn myself. I think the only reason Millennials are tech literate is because we grew up around computers during a very specific time where we were allowed to fuck around with them. Similar to why boomers tend to know more about cars and handiwork than we do. There also is the question of availability and means, computers are expensive now, you can't afford to take them apart and fuck around anymore, nor are most of them built to allow you to.

It didn't start with genZ either. When I reached job market age the media was complaining about a 'skills shortage', but what they didn't consider what that we weren't getting the training on the job that our parents got. Employers wanted to avoid the costs of training by hiring people who already knew what to do, the beginning of the 'Entry level job but we want you to have years experience' job ad.

In short: without the socially responsible infrastructure in place to pass knowledge down, it gets lost. If nobody values the idea of giving up their time to pass knowledge down for free than this is what happens. Like all things, capitalist obsession with looking after number one fucked us yet again.

Trying to get AI to do anything you want is exactly the same as Tech Priests talking to the Machine Spirits.

It does really seem like they just decided to not teach anyone after Millennials anything about IT stuff, since "everything is computer" now and therefore the kids must just know about it magically, since they're around computers all their lives.

During the early 2010s there was a period where anyone good at computer was a 'ninja', then from like 2018 through 2024 it was 'rockstar', now it's back to 'wizard' and 'sorceror'. Really says a lot about are society

The whole tech industry has spent every second since the creation of the general purpose computer trying to destroy it.

I've heard about this since old people have been able to avoid technology until phones and tablets, and kids have been brought up with phones, tablets and consoles. There was only one window of people who grew up 'going on the computer'. My dad took some computer courses back in the DOS days but I wasn't really taught anything through school or any official body. It was really more from needing to troubleshoot things on the computer all the time and seeing the transition from dial-up to broadband when the internet became more accessible.

I want to mitigate this with my kids by restricting their phone time and giving them the oldest functioning Linux computer I can with relatively few restrictions. I have this dual core ultrabook with 4gb RAM from 2012 that still works with Mint on it now. They can play with that, figure out how to pirate games and get them running with WINE and whatever else on there.

I feel my issue will be other parents that are either boomer-style tech illiterate or just not as interested. They'll just get their kids Switches and tablets, then that's what my kids will want to play with their friends. Instead of learning how to host my own Luanti server for my kids and their friends, they'll want a tablet to go on Roblox or a Switch for Fortnite.

I want to add another comment even though I already commented because I just wanted to say:

I think it's very, very important that we don't shame people for not having a certain skill because I think that discourages people from learning.

Skill regression in a society is a sign of a neglect. Nobody is bothering to get anyone excited to learn these skills. That's how you teach people, by getting them excited to figure things out, not by making them feel like an idiot. Ask yourself, did boomers complaining about us not being able to write cursive teach us anything or did it just make us call them out of touch?

You fix this by being an encouraging mentor, not by complaining.

I think modern computers, tablets, phones, etc. are trying to force power users to experience technology as noob users. This is annoying for power users and can usually be worked around, but it's increasingly a form of ladder pull on the younger generation.

i was the go on the computer on in my family. nobody else seemed to have the patience for its mysteries and once one of us had the aptitude, they just had me do their fixes. after i moved out/away, they just bought new devices when the old ones weren't behaving. every new iteration of devices is more duplo and less lego.

now they all phone and tablet, so their children are all phone and tablet. i'm the eccentric.

phone and tablet are so easy, so they think they are experts now. when something doesn't behave properly, they buy the new one and send the old one back.

they legitimately have no concept of how the underlying technology functions. like i will be on vacation with them and they'll say, "you download whatever movies you want at home. just do that here so we can watch it on this TV" like at a hotel. to be clear, i never bring tech shit anywhere on vacation. i bring books to read. i get enough screen time at home and work. so no, i didn't bring a bunch of pirated material on a plane, or a seedbox or a jailbroken streaming device. my phone is pristine.

the warhammer 40k shit is close to real. like they know i can do computer, but think that means i am a cyborg that can just touch a screen and hack the gibson and that i was born with this capacity so i should just do it for them. no, i don't care how, that's boring. just do the thing you magic fucking elf so i can have my treat.

i also taught myself (by learning from/assisting friends and colleagues) to cook, bake, garden, do small engine repair, drive a manual transmission, be handy, do woodworking, and went to school/grad school in the biological sciences... none of these are areas where my family felt like investing any time or effort into. they have money so they find poor people to do everything for them.

i don't even really conceptualize myself as a computer person. i just tinker. i like to fix things rather than replace them. i like to understand how things work and tweak them to suit my needs/wants. i love to show people what i've learned, but far too many people (including my family) couldn't give half a fuck. just buy new and by the time its all set up with pretty colors, you'll forget what you were even getting frustrated about with the old one you returned.

all my friends and chosen-family are tinkerers. i don't know how to relate to the incurious.

By the will of the Omnissiah, I beseech the oh machine spirit, grant me the factori multi for mine authentication to thine great troves of communications

As anyone in IT will tell you, the most tech savvy generation are xennials, so people in their mid-late 40s, with average tech literacy decreasing the further you move away from xennials.

When I was in school we had kids hacking the IT systems which was extremely funny. We figured out how to get admin on any machine we wanted and the result was so we could play games on them… among other exploits including getting onto school servers n such. IT team were actually rather chill about it since nobody did anything nefarious we just wanted to run Minecraft.

KIDS these DAYS and their PHONES and their TOKTIK storing all they FILES in the DOWNLOADS folder. BACK IN MY DAY i used to watch the windows 95 DEFRAGGER for fun. What do kids these days even know? Their gender! 😆 😆 😆 😆

I don't know I kind of feel like tech literacy is exactly the same as always, but since tech is way more integrated into our lives it's just more visible than it used to be. I mean who else remembers updating Adobe Acrobat on their parents computer?

LLMs are perfect for this kinda cargo cultism unfortunately

From my very limited experience, this seems to happen with basically any industrial equipment after about 20 years. Once the last person who was around for installation has retired, it's all guesswork.

I know a lot of people better at coding then most And the likes. However the problems I've ran into are.

1. The school they went to for a degree in tech beat the independence and creativity out of them to the point where they need their hand for everything in fear of getting in trouble. They also have horrible

2. Absolutely no time, money, or energy to get into it.

Necessity is the mother of ~~invention~~ learning, soon they’ll be speaking about vless tunnels to vps in lima and rdns

That's surprising honestly, I would have thought it was just the boomers who were tech illiterate.