this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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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.
tech went from requiring you to know how it worked to use it, to being simple enough that toddlers and the elderly could use them, to deliberately concealing how it works from the user.
when steve jobs was dying of fruit juice as a cancer treatment i hope he suffered.
Speaking of 40k, this has become a problem in the hobby space I've noticed since covid brought more people in. I learned a lot about how to paint and build stuff from the older people at the shop. All our terrain was scratch built from foam, balsawood, plaster, etc. Most people had scratch built models, often because there were no official kits or because kits didn't come with enough doohickies.
Flash forward to today. New people don't know understand any of the basics, like dry brushing or glazing. Scratch building and conversions make you look like some kind of sorcerer. I've had trouble teaching newcomers because there's a serious lack of institutional knowledge being passed down. They often don't know you're allowed to chop up and paint your models however you want. I suspect cuts to school art programs hasn't helped, either.
I've noticed similar things with Magic. I was in a top 4 match and one of my opponents had never heard of card advantage. She obviously wasn't a bad player, but like this is such a fundamental concept to playing the game. And this happens a lot.
Some of it has to do with older players moving on, a lot of it has to do with companies not nurturing these ideas because they want you to buy newest thing, and even more of it is the hyperindividualist bullshit that puts everyone on a deserted island where they're expected to save themselves.
did mtg article culture die? i remember reading Who's the Beatdown and shit in school instead of whatever we were supposed to be doing. everyone has phones now if anything theory should be more accessible.
Pretty much, with the proliferation of EDH as the game's primary format. Mothership only has announcements, Maro's Making Magic, and then a bunch of ads for spoilers as their main articles. They don't even post MODO results like they used to. There's nothing about strategy at all. Other sites, like Starcity Games and MtG Goldfish, are light on strategy articles. Mostly, they talk about decklists. Their EDH content, where most people flock to, are just videos of 4-player games between staff.
Like the place still delving into Magic theory is TappedOut, with user-submitted stuff. They aren't getting the traffic, though. And if you're a new player or not familiar with the site, it's just randoms. How do you know it's worth the read or someone worse than you writing some rage essay?
The two formats new players should be introduced to are Standard and Limited. But Standard is a hot mess and has been for years. It's basically dead on paper in most areas. New articles written about Limited aren't in the most obvious places. If you don't know Channel Fireball is a site, how are you supposed to find their articles going over each set?
And then there's reddit, which of course is infested with people who are flat-out wrong but comment the most anyway. Assuming it's not completely astroturfed by WotC.
I think you're right on the money with this analysis.
And there's also a strong undercurrent of shaming people for not knowing something, so they don't ask for help learning it, and people acting like teaching someone is a horrible chore, so people don't want to teach and they don't want to learn.
And I feel you on the "parents didn't want to teach anything" side of things, mine were the same. More than happy to get mad at me for not knowing things they never taught me though.
Computers were expensive back then, too, which is why knowing how to repair them was critical. Even something as simple as a removable battery or floppy drive was something standard that people I grew up alongside knew how to replace.
Oh man now I feel bad for breaking so many PCs as a kid.
You gotta break an egg to make an owlmelette
Besides the harms you listed, it's also just toxic af. I still have trouble approaching people who are more knowledgeable about a subject than I am without feeling the need to prove myself or one-up them (or just avoid learning about something at all if there's no chance I'll be one of the best at it). This has made me incredibly stupid and disinclined to learn about anything.
I think a big problem is that we're taught that skill is something you're born with instead of something everyone has to suck at before they get better. The whole way science and discovery happens is by failing until you get it right. If people aren't allowed to safely fail, if failure becomes dangerous socially or economically, we aren't going to learn.
Sounds like individualism strikes again. With no community support for growth, failure is a hit to the ego and can single you out as the "loser". Of course people aren't going to try things when the risk of failure outweighs the benefits of growing from that failure!
Wow I can't imagine that. Sounds horrible.