Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Remember that story about Gen Z students not understanding file systems?

Then said tools were made a lot simpler with a lot less control over them

Which needs to be reversed if we're to remain free in Western democracies. Access to and control of computing - general purpose computing in particular - is practically a civil liberty now. I look at legislators in my own country, and I'd wager 50% of them don't understand this, 40% kind of grasp the problems but are apathetic, and 10% are on the enemies' payrolls.

The weird thing is I know a lot of millennials that could use a dos computer just fine but struggle with anything modern

It's really not a generational thing. Every generation has their nerds and they always are just a tiny minority.

The late Gen X/early millennials may have been an outlier because they were forced to learn to get anything working but also from those years most don't care about tech.

I'm Gen Z and I still know all this stuff because that's just what I'm interested in. I don't think it's a huge issue that those things were made simpler for the average person and that they don't know how it works. It's not like you can or need to know everything.

In my country, this generational divide doesn't make much sense. But comparing those born in the 90s and early 2000s with those born from the late 2000s onwards, there is a fundamental difference: there was, even in the public education system, a variety of computer courses available to many people. With the arrival and hegemony of the app model, which is designed with the idea that it is intuitive and does not require anyone to be taught how to use it, computer courses have been disappearing. As a result, millions of young people use computers daily and have no knowledge of simple concepts such as shortcuts Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, let alone advanced features of Office suites, not to mention that they have no idea what LATEX and Markdown are.

Im surprised that a lot of people that are my age, even if they are using computers a lot, dont know how to search the solution for a problem or follow some instructions on how to do something

This is quite a few years old now, but I think the main points are still valid. As you said, everything is so polished, kids don't need to figure out how it works.

http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/

You make some good points there. I remember LAN parties in high school where we would spend hours troubleshooting network problems and calling older brothers for advice. I learned a lot from those experiences, because I was forced to. I think a big part of the changes we are seeing in computer literacy is what I would call the Apple philosophy: if a toddler can't use it, we need to simplify. Basically, as you said, things are getting simpler with less granular control. Of course, Apple is far from the only company doing this stuff, but they seem to be industry leaders in the sense of 'dumbing down' tech.

I recently had a friend say that privacy is a luxury these days. My first thought was that there is nothing luxurious about it. It takes hard work, inconvenience and savvy. And I'm not even close to Stallman levels of privacy paranoia. I know just enough to acknowledge that I know nothing. I feel similarly about tech in general. I have been using Linux for ten years, I use VPNs, I have played around with DNS settings, et cetera. But I realize that I have barely scratched the surface of what is possible and available to those willing to spend the time and get it done.

Anyway, I'll shut up now. Thanks for replying thoughtfully, and thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

I think so too. My kids are around the age I was when I first started tinkering with PCs, but they don't have any awareness of what's going on under the hood, (to be frank, nor do they seem to need it, as everything is so polished these days).

I'm thinking of asking their teachers if I can take them out of school for a day each and bring them to work with me for educational purposes so they get some perspective in the form of networks and servers.

Sure, they're mostly interested in gaming, but I want them to see what kind of infrastructure is needed for a multiplayer game, specifically the hardware that they never get to see.

I'm building a new server stack in a couple of months, and most of it will be used for testing, so I'd like for them to help build and connect it.