The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
Steve jobs is mot blameless here.
But yes.
This is kinda a bad take imo. I don’t think it’s chrome books that has ruined tech literacy. Maybe it’s younger exposure to even more addictive social media than previous generations?
I’m pretty young. My first mobile device was an iPod touch 4th gen. I figured out how to jailbreak it and I was like 12 at the time. If I ever felt one of these walled garden devices was holding me back, I enjoyed finding a creative solution around that. Since that iPod touch, I jailbroke my Wii and recently a kindle. I also modded a gameboy, but that was different than jailbreaking.
Are you suggesting to go back to days when every single little thing required a driver on a floppy disk? You buy a Chromebook, you install Denian on it with a few keypresses, your videocard magically works, your soundcard works, your WiFi just connects with no issues whatsoever, you ignore the fingerprint scanner hardware as usual because who even needs that shit when your password is 14 symbols long, and done, you are ready to install a gigabyte of NPM packages to create your single-page web app. Don't tell me Windows 95 was somehow better, it only made your life slower and miserable, just like your Intel i486SX which could not run Quake because it lacked FPU.
Google provided Chromebooks below cost to schools... for profit. Gotcha screenshot person, great point.
My sibling in Talos, are you entirely unfamiliar with the concepts of 'loss leaders', 'rent seeking/Software as a Service' and 'hooking them while they're young'?
Every single one of those is common place in the digital world these days, and this is no exception. By getting these devices in the hands of kids for less than the cost of the device, you can affect what services they choose to use in the future (by making them already familiar with your product by the time they can choose for themselves) and setting them up to live in your walled garden and making them pay a premium to stay in (see also, the Apple model).
Oh yes, because without the Chromebook, people would stop Googling stuff. Are you familiar with the concepts of "context" and "numbers matter"?
Also, Google doesn't even have a walled garden, in fact their products barely work together.
Chromebooks very intentionally push people toward Google drive and Google one for subscription services, and all of the rest of gsuite for data mining. I'm not saying chromebooks are inherently this evil master plan, but don't discount just how much they do push profitable services for Google.
Who cares about any of that? I didn’t see a single problem.
Boomers and Gen X often handed tech problems to their kids, assuming young people just get it. That mindset stuck—tech as an innate skill, not something learned.
Millennials did learn, but by messing around—customizing MySpace, bypassing school filters, using forums. We had to figure it out. Now, everything's simplified and locked down. Because we're the ones making a lot of the tech and we've figured it out for them. You don’t need to understand the tech we make to use it.
The problem? Older generations think kids will “just get it,” like we did. But no one’s teaching them. We’re giving them phones and tablets, not skills or understanding. We assume either they just get it, or that they're tinkering around like "we" did.
How old do you think GenX is?! We had the first home computers, learned the PC as it hit the market.
I've found that with my "pre gen x" (born in the 60s, does that make her a boomer?) mother, she seems to have really bought in to all the old "computers make everything easy!" marketing, so when whatever she wants to do isn't she just kind of gives up. Also ties into her not understanding the value of my career (sysadmin).
To her, computers aren't complex tools that may take some skills and training to utilize properly, they're "press the button to make it do exactly what I want" and when that doesn't work she gets very frustrated.
That, plus she has had just enough exposure to computers in the 90s that she still on some level sees them as very easy to irreperably break expensive luxury items, so when she is rarely willing to work for it then she's afraid to poke around in menus because she thinks she could break it permanently.
And to be fair, if you don't set up your laptop using "cattle, not pets" strategies, it can be easy to get four levels deep in a menu and tweak some shit that fucks up an entire program. Then your option is to remember what you did to revert it, or just blow the damn thing out and reinstall (if it actually clears settings on uninstall, not a given).
This has very little to do with Chromebooks. It's happening in countries where they are rare as well. The main cause is the fact that things for the most part just... work now. The experience on PCs and especially smartphones has become so streamlined that it doesn't require that much knowledge to be able to use them at a sufficient level. Plus smartphones have become the default device for most people so they almost never have to interact with stuff like the file system or anything complex. Most people don't care about understanding how computers work more than what they need them for, and that's fine.
This is kind of like blaming car manufacturers for people not knowing how to drive manual and how cars work under the hood, because they made cars reliable and simple to use.
There's always an incentive to make things more accessible. Skills always become outdated because of that. How many of us know how to skin game and cook it on naked fire? Not many, I presume.
Chromebook for all its flaws and limitations still let children, who would not have otherwise used any computing device, at least use one.
I feel like this analogy is perfect, but not just for the reason you used it.
Car manufacturers making cars easier to use and require less maintenance is great. Your point in regards to people just not needing the old skills because of that is spot on.
But car manufacturers have also been making intentional design decisions to make accessing things under the hood require speciality tools or needlessly complex when it is needed. There are cars where you can't replace headlights without removing the whole front bumper assembly. That isn't the fault of the owner/user, and it's not a case of "improvements make old skills obsolete". It's design intentionally hostile to the goal of allowing owners to even attempt it themselves. Scummy as hell, and we should be holding these companies responsible.
Google has done and is doing the same thing with Chromebooks and Android. File system? Folders to organize my files? What?
And now we have people who don't know how to operate their car's headlights, and people who can't find files if they aren't in the "recent documents" list.
Yup. I'm teaching my son CAD/CAM with a 3d printer, low level programming and electronics with Arduino, he helps with mechanical and electrical repairs. Linux with the home server. Fishing, hunting, and camping. Wasn't ready this year for steers or chickens but hopefully will next year. Wife is teaching him how to cook, (I'm a decent cook, but she is amazing). Simple sewing. Basic carpentry. And so on.
School isn't going to teach him much of this, but we will.
Chromebooks didn't do shit.
It was tablets and phones replacing the home computer. Apple are equally complicit in this.
google practically kinda gave up on improving thier pixel, its just a over-glorified AI phone, which they are obsessed, they dont even compete with the other flagship phones anymore. now alot of tech companies are moving towards Datamining/AI instead of developing.
Most people suck with computers, no matter their age. There may or may not have been a time frame which resulted in a higher percentage of people knowing more basic computer stuff. Kids on computers tended to pick up more basic computer knowledge than kids only interacting with gaming consoles for the past 40 years. If you want to blame one thing for decreasing basic computer knowledge, kids being glued to their smartphones and not touching computers (laptops/towers) at all is the much more obvious candidate. Like kids playing on their N64 (insert arbitrary gaming console here) and not touching computers before. I think, OP, you're falling into a trap of over-projection, where you project yourself and your peers as a standard onto a generation/age-group, when most of us here on lemmy have always been the outliers. People are not "tech savvy"; never have been. Trying to put the blame on one company and product (no matter how evil and bad both are) for select age groups is ridiculous.
No, really, it was corporate social media, and also the smartphone (iphone particularly). They don't need to know anything anymore thanks to those two. I mean even MySpace had kids learning CSS at least.
"We used to make our own webpages...!"
Good, I’m glad nobody is learning these things anymore. I couldn’t care less if someone doesn’t learn HTML and CSS.
I use the old chrome book I have for writing. It was pretty easy to throw Linux on there. Was cheap when I bought it years ago, and still has like 10 hours of battery life. Just don't expect it to do much other than text processing and simple Web stuff.
If I remember correctly, they're all core-boot-able, which is neat. Can't do that with most other laptops.
Like, I see the problem, but my school actually gave out iPads, which I feel was worse. On the chrome book, you can at least access the file system and Linux.
When I was in school they had Apple II's and pretended using LOGO was learning how to use a computer. Chromebooks are closer to real world computer usage than we've typically had, barring whatever ten-to-fifteen year period where school computers were Windows PCs, which may or may not have happened at all depending on where you live.
The loss of literacy has way more to do with moving from old CLI-based OSs and to GUI OSs and eventually phone and tablet OSs. Not that I'd want to go back to MS-DOS, but the only reason anybody had any understanding of where every part of the OS went and what it did is having to navigate it from memory and it being built from two sticks and three rocks.
as a kid in middle school I had one, got annoyed enough with it to figure out how to sidload a Linux distro via the command line and just used that (just before Chromebooks had the line thing built in).
Probably what got me more into the more decentralized focused part of the internet
Like this wasn't Apple's fault. Remember that ad where the kid doesn't know what a "computer" was?
Apple famously worked very hard to put iMacs into elementary schools. Back before laptops were cheap and schools still had "computer labs."
The Chromebook does exactly what it says on the tin. It is a cheap notebook which runs Chrome. And it's fairly competent at that task. It's exactly as advertised. The problem only arises when people think that the ability to use a Chromebook is acceptable as a substitute for the ability to use a normal computer.
The laptops in 2026 will all have AI integrated into the hardware. It will be dependent on the AI in the cloud servers.
First of all, this isn't enshitification as defined by Corey Doctorow. This has nothing to do with an internet platform getting worse because the priorities of the proprietors changed.
I don't think it's entirely fair to blame Google for this. None of these companies do this for entirely altruistic reasons. At the core of the problem is funding in education. Google saw an opportunity and jumped on it. When given a choice that kids get no computer hardware vs. dumping price Chromebooks I would still vote Chromebook. Get your politicians to set aside less money for tanks and more money for education.
Besides, no one is stopping kids from exploring other platforms. Google is looking for an infrastructure lock-in, get them locked in while they are young, but you can go do other stuff. It's also a question of financial means and interests. And they don't need to do LAN parties because they already have Fortnite and stuff. Life moves on. Your childhood was also markedly different from your parents'.
The Chromebook does exactly what it says on the tin. It is a cheap notebook which runs Chrome. And it's fairly competent at that task. It's exactly as advertised. The problem only arises when people think that the ability to use a Chromebook is acceptable as a substitute for the ability to use a normal computer.
This reads like someone who has a base level understanding of how a chromebook works in an educational environment. Also reads like someone (I'm assuming American) who doesn't know what CIPA is.