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.
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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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
Trying to get AI to do anything you want is exactly the same as Tech Priests talking to the Machine Spirits.
Just layers and layers of inscrutable LLMs mimicking the functionality of real programs and system components, running on miniature supercomputers implanted inside empty human skulls so you can legally call them augmented humans instead of thinking machines.
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.
I was a teacher 2010-2018 and witnessed this all first hand. The delapidated computer lab, missing keys on the keyboards, half the computer chairs broken, stolen ram, all the classics.
The laptop cart with 12 sluggish laptops, 6 of which work.
The federal grant spent almost exclusively on Apple products, including a half dozen iPad carts (40 iPads in each). The thousands of student hours spent on garage band and taking pictures of their face.
Followed by the Chromebook revolution. A Chromebook, a googledrive account, shared docs with classmates, a variety of presentation formats, and wikipedia + google actually returning scholarly sources, that was the golden age of student collaboration and using computers to learn. They didn't really learn anything about computers, except the clever ones who sought it out.
I'm glad I didn't have to see what COVID did to the struggling education system and the dedicated teachers who keep it operating. We've all been through so much these last few years but it has been a complete upheaval for students and teachers
I've been on the deployment end of all of these. I have photos of me in a room at our middle school kitterally drowning in Chromebooks during COVID working by myself (we rotated on site early on to get these devices ready) to inventory, assign, and distribute the Chromebooks we had. It was a huge undertaking and resulted in what I think became an unhealthy relationship with devices. Kids went from having Chromebooks at home to being responsible for taking them home very night after the rollback of lockdowns. This has gradually been dialed back and now devices only go home of their is work to do.
Parents are expressing frustration that their kids had been bringing a device into the house that the parents had no control over. Parents who had not thought about parental controls or even house rules about screen time and device use where now building the plane as they flew. It really is this double edged blade.
Kids are more creative then ever at getting around controls so that they can chase robux, victory royals, or the mines. Its an ever escalating war of exploits and interconnected google docs, highlighting shadowy websites offering AI services, "proxy" browsing, and more.
School IT work is interesting stuff to say the least.
The only even marginally valid argument in favor of parental control software is as a training tool for bypassing user-hostile corporate malware.
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?
"What did you do to the e-mails?!"
"What?"
"I'm clicking the button but it's not working, what did you do?"
"Nothing..."
"I really need the e-mails..."
"Okej... I'll take a look."
"When you're in there can you look at the printer."
"What's... never mind I look at it."
5 min later
"Okej, so the wi-fi is on again, it was turned off... for some reason. You're email should be working again and the printer is working but out of inc."
"No it's not, I just refilled it."
"That was like 6 months ago..."
"Did you use all the inc?"
"No.. I don't print stuff.. Anyway, what do you need printed?"
"A thing from the emails..."
"Okej, what file?"
"It's a PDF"
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.
Truth. The boomer way is shaming and saying "well I'm better", the true path lies in saying "yeah I didn't know how to do X till I found this cool guide or forum post here's what I did to fix it and here's a link to a cool tech channel".
The boomer idiocy about cursive, I consider to be distinct from actual core skills of the tools that permiate daily life.
In fairness to cursive, some kind of cursive was the standard form of handwriting for basically all English writings up until probably the 2000s - it is legitimately very useful for anyone who might have to dig through old documentation or letters. And handwriting is an important skill to build, cognitively speaking, it has lots of second order benefits.
Definitely a less important skill than ability to actually understand computers, these days, but it does have its uses and if everybody forgot how to do it a lot of old stuff would suddenly require specialists to decipher - we're basically halfway there already, people of my generation often have to kick cursive up to older people because we were never taught it.
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.
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
LLMs are perfect for this kinda cargo cultism unfortunately
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 don't think it started as that. It was probably "make this idiot proof so we can tap into the boomer market" which became "damn, this is so simplified a toddler can use it" to "oh an actual toddler can use it. How do we monetise this?"
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.
too real.
i just talk out loud using terms from cyberpunk 20xx if I mess with anything outside the walled gardens of my family's laptops or even my own stuff now
using archive.is to get a round a paywall is just breach protocol.
i jack into every phone or tablet i touch.
installing an ad blocker and firefox on my mom's new laptop is netrunning. shit watch out for ICE (two meanings there lol)
it at least makes it a little fun i guess to live in the fantasy of a cyberpunk dystopia but at least we have cool implants and where gender affirming care is like having a wart removed
I was the one that helped my parents upgrade their latest computers and yeah it is pretty much this. Just being able to look into a problem and go "oh I should google this and see if someone else encountered this problem on a rando forum" makes you seem smart and in reality it's like nah I'm just curious especially since my job more or less suppresses that shit (I work in healthcare but not fun research healthcare). My parents aren't exactly rich but I have noticed them sliding from wanting to do things themselves into a more basic way of thinking that's common with boomers sadly that uses a lot more paid labor or dismissive attitude towards skill development. I enjoy a lot of art and tinkering, I was lucky enough to have been able to buy a trio of used thinkcentre minis last year with good storage before the RAMpocolypse went into full spring and have been playing with proxmox and creating home hosted services (mainly just for streaming movies, music and shows), I brought this up to my family on how much it can save money compared to having 5+ streaming services and it's like you've shown fire to a caveman.
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The whole tech industry has spent every second since the creation of the general purpose computer trying to destroy it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 
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.
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.
I know a lot of people better at coding then most And the likes. However the problems I've ran into are.
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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
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Absolutely no time, money, or energy to get into 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 think something that has largely been forgotten in the modern day but is 100% true is that one of the biggest parts of being a good parent is not giving your kids all the things they want. It's like eating vegetables instead of candy. You can have a little candy if you want sure, but you need to be mostly eating healthy. Even if you hate it. Kids are blank slates. You as the parent are not just telling them what to do you are literally engraining habits in them that will follow them into adulthood. If you teach them good habits and they grow into healthy adults they might not even realize what a favor you did for them, but their lives will certainly be better for it.
I agree with you somewhat, but i gotta say most of my peers who grew up pre smartphones/tablets being ubiquitous (late 2000s) with parents that were strict around screen time etc. “for their own good” didn’t really end up being thankful for the great habits that reinforced. Most just became resentful that they were excluded from partaking in their favorite activities with their friends (i.e. hanging out with irl friends in runescape or whatever you did in 2009)
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.
other than typing i didn't learn any of the computer shit i'm cursed with from school or parents.
having to double-click an exe to run a game exposed me to the other files in the folders and out of curiosity you click on shit and learn that an .ini file is just text and you can change numbers around if you want.
i run into grown adults that use a computer every day and don't know what files or folders are
I find it very odd for adults (at least older ones) not knowing what files and folders are when there's an analog equivalent
yeah there's some things i can explain to my elderly mother that are harder to explain to 22 year olds because she's used the things that are the basis for the skeuomorphism while people under 30 often don't know what floppy discs were.
Look at this 4yo, he knows how to use an ipad, grown to be a 18yo that doesn't know how to alt+tab
Omg every grandparent amazed that an infant can use a touchscreen is one of the most annoying things
Thats pretty much it yeah. It doesnt work well because the only sorta tech literacy it teaches is how to do what the teacher says rather than any real understanding of what a web browser or a file is
I was in a grade 3 classroom last term and all the 8 year olds were expected to know how to open their chromebooks, log in, etc, so my impression is they probably start using them in grade two or grade one
A grim realisation I had is the reason my grandmother (and others older relatives) keeps falling for so many scam ads isnt that they are uniquely guilible; its that they havent been on the internet seeing and ignoring "you web browser is out of date" "urgent antivirus announcement" "new pills for curing cancer" popping up. The kids in modern classrooms are seeing these sorts of ads almost all day from the time they get to school.
THE MACHINE GOD HAS ABANDONED US!
That's surprising honestly, I would have thought it was just the boomers who were tech illiterate.
In a different way. Boomers are tech illiterate in the way that many don't know how to use the physical device (as well as the software inside). Gen X had to get a passing understanding to get by.
Gen Z are tech illiterate in the way that they're extremely fluent in the apps they regularly use but are clueless re: applications that aren't those specific ones, let alone a website. I've heard that zoomers struggle to use Microsoft Office, navigate a desktop site, a work email that's not the iOS mail app they've used since 14, etc.
I've seen a 21 year old struggle to download a torrent, because they kept clicking the fake download buttons on the ads. Me explaining that you can hover a cursor over a hyperlink to see where it leads and if it's not a magnet link or another link on the current website you're on, it's leading you off site blew his mind. He's gotten better since, but man. The kid spends like 6-10 hours a day on computers but can't navigate a website. Also keyboard shortcuts. Outside of ctrl+c and ctrl+v, he had no idea about any of the common ones. Maybe Alt + F4 due to cultural osmosis and he plays a lot of video games, but man. He accidentally closed a tab and his first instinct was to google the exact same phrase that led him to the website to navigate back to the page. Not 'start typing the url and see if autocomplete gets you back', not 'check the history tab', and especially not 'press ctrl+alt+z'
If it's in terms of language, it's like boomers are trying to understand a language they don't speak, Gen X are conversational in the language due to necessity, Millenials tend to be the most fluent due to growing up with it, and Gen Z grew up after the Machine God did a 9/11 on the Tower of Babel and they speak variations of the successor languages with low mutual intelligibility.
I can't get fdroid to install on my legacy android. It downloaded, but it's locked and I can't afford another.
Necessity is the mother of ~~invention~~ learning, soon they’ll be speaking about vless tunnels to vps in lima and rdns 
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