this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
340 points (94.3% liked)
4chan
4877 readers
320 users here now
Greentexts, memes, everything 4chan.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
When did Millennials get Boomer Brain anyway? If you took Boomers at their word thirty years ago, nobody under the age of 70 would know how to fix a car today .
Now these "Young people don't understand technology" memes are spreading like a nasty STD. Just endless posts of the most heinous ignorant horseshit.
Meanwhile, I've got kids flying homemade drones down at the park. I've got to fight through gaggles of teenagers on the way to robotics competitions and hack a thons when I'm downtown for lunch. My local Microprose is stuffed full of people under 30. All the active Linux geeks are practically in diapers, while millennials cling to Microsoft and fucking Apple.
But nobody is using the shitty VR that Zuckerberg is shilling, so Zoomers can't code? FFS, it's GenX that's forcing AI down all our throats.
Don't give me that "young people can't use computers" shit.
I worked IT for two different school districts. The kids tech skills are seriously lacking.
It's seriously basic stuff like not knowing what a url, folder, directory or path is, not knowing that files are on the computer in a folder someplace instead of in "such-and-such app", no concept of how to even begin troubleshooting and something like a genuine fear of anything that is not an Apple interface.
The kids had windows laptops that they would use for school work but then I would find them composing everything on their iPhones only to email it to themselves and then submit it from their Windows laptops.
Things like attaching files were a real chore for people that don't understand file systems or sizes, and it doesn't help that many of their teachers are similarly lacking the computer skills necessary to understand where these kids are falling off.
I worked in the IT department, but I spent a lot of time talking to teachers. Several of them brought me into their classrooms to teach 'curiosity skills' since I think the computer can often teach you how to use it if you're just curious enough to try.
Oh, they can use them alright, limited to the ways they've seen. That's short version, here is a longer one:
Well, I don't have kids flying homemade drones at the park, and highly doubt that, say, devs behind Lutris are in diapers. But what I do have is this: https://lemmy.world/comment/17328375 (browse down to @Lightor comment). That goes along with continuously degrading UI (hello, the marginal user tyranny https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user), the fact that Microsoft and Apple are still not sued to the ground with all the bullshit they pull off. These wildly unrelated points all fall in line with my personal feeling and general sentiment that percentage of people who know some very basic things about computers is going down. Don't give me that "I don't see it in my surroundings, so that's not happening" shit
Us millenials are going to become the next boomers. The other generations around us like genX, zoomers and genA are comparatively smaller than the millenial generation, substantially so in the UK where I live.
Can't wait until my peers and I capture the legislators and start redirecting all of society's resources into our interests.
Edit: Already drafting comments to leave on the comments section of major newspaper articles about how genA need to pull themselves up by their bootraps, stop enjoying avocados, and cultivate some "stick-tuitiveness" (sub in other made-up phrase here).
You're a billionaire?
I was thinking of doing it how the boomers have done. Old people make up a majority of the voters, especially if their generation makes up a plurality of the society's demographics. So basically boomers were able to demand all the assistance in terms of acquiring assets (including low taxes) and now they've got them they are demanding all the social security goes their way despite it being less than they paid in initially.
Millenials need to make up for lost time though. Maybe we can tell the politicians we'll only vote for parties that exempt over 60s from any form of taxation and demand that the state retirement payments triple. Just for a start... then we can live another 20-40 years and gradually claw more each year.
Edit: Another idea, we could start building affordable housing again but earmark them as only being for millenials. This is going to be sweet!
But they're not aligned on policy. They go whichever way local news and the regional cultural touchstones tell them to go.
Boomers up in Portland and Seattle have very different politics than the retirees out in Savannah and Boco Raton.
I was just shitposting really. It might be UK-specific since the boomer old folks here are all aligned on big policies like "the triple lock" (state pension rising with avg earnings, inflation or 2.5% each year).
Keeping pensions above CoL is generally good for everyone, always, as you're eventually going to be on the receiving end of those benefits. I'm in my late-30s and I'd support that.
What I'm less enthusiastic about is the defunding of public education, mass transit, and social services in exchange for more and more and more cops. But the UK doesn't really have that problem. Y'all defund everything.
https://www.microprose.com/
?
Microcenter, excuse me
https://www.microcenter.com/
I mean if you work in the industry you would absolutely see a rise, a significant one, in people generally inept at the technical requirements of their jobs that’s factual not “ignorant horseshit” - it’s not that young people can’t learn this stuff it’s that young people grew up in, and are still in, an environment that doesn’t foster learning of these skills or independence at a more personal level so those learning through traditional education are being failed by the system while simultaneously being given tools to make self sabotage easier than ever before and the values that tell people to seek out and do things on your own are quickly going extinct. If someone can’t do something, especially at a wide scale not like one individual who didn’t pick up a skill or something, this is a system problem and yes there are significant systemic problems young people are being faced with in their personal and professional/student lives acting like “that’s ignorant horseshit” is just denying something is wrong, it’s advocating for the status quo, something is wrong, young people are being failed and unless we acknowledge this problem we can’t address it
The divide is that zoomers don't NEED to understand technology. They instead default to learning the fluffy user interfaces. Older users were required to know the basics of file systems, and even touch on command line operations just to get by.
Modern kids aren't required to learn that. They are perfectly able to, but no longer required to. We currently have a lot of newer "mechanics" that are perfectly good at driving, but didn't really notice there as an engine thing up front to look at.
It creates a binomial split. Many don't notice the youngsters quietly getting good. They do notice the increase in idiots out of their depth due to overconfidence.
Actually, that has always been true.
Yes the UI has become fluffier. But users have always just used first and most convenient way to do something.
The subset of tech savvy users may be slightly bigger, but the majority never learned how computers worked beyond clicking around. That is in every generation. Our vision is just skewed because we grew up in a tech heavy environment.
But if you ever worked in IT support, you'd know that not knowing how computers work is the default in every generation.
I work with college students all day. They are computer illiterate. It’s like working with the old. Generalizations are sometimes kinda true.
Cool, I ALSO work with college age kids all day and they navigate/troubleshoot our software fine.
I guess our two completely useless anecdotes will now cancel out into irrelevance.
Navigating software is a hell of a lot different from troubleshooting, as OP/ The image was saying.
No rat in this race just pointing it out. (But everyone i know who's my age couldn't tell you shit about computers, why they work, how they work, and how to fix even the simplest of problems)
I work with new hires all day and they're doing great.
I have multiple people at my job who claim to be tech savvy but don’t know how to type on a keyboard and constantly have tech issues when the rest of us don’t. …they’re older than the rest of us though. They just lied on their resumes so it’s okay.
The youngest workers at my org have no issues.
I’m not sure why you find it controversial to observe that older people, who grew up without computers, and younger people, who’re also not using computers, are two groups that tend to suck at using computers. This is not surprising.
This kind of generalization matters. For instance, when designing education policy.
It's not controversial, just inaccurate.
Again, like doggedly insisting nobody born after 1980 knows how to fix a car.
You've bought into a dogmatic piece of online propaganda. You're not living in the real world.
Perhaps you’re right and the widespread use of iPads and smartphones isn’t interfering with computer literacy. My impression as someone who works in education is that it’s interfering with computer literacy.
I also want to point out that my generation, millennials, were indeed much less inclined to fix their own cars (understandably).
I see that hypothesis, but it glazes over the more glaring transition - widespread adoption of cheap electronics, generally speaking.
The iPhone premiered in 2007 at something like $300-500. Most people couldn't afford that. It was another five years before you started seeing rudimentary budget brand smartphones.
We've got far more tech literates today thanks to the abundance of cheap hardware. The expectation for tech literacy has risen with this proliferation.
And that's why auto shops no longer exist or are run exclusively by geriatrics? :-p
Quite a few millennial age auto mechanics exist today. Quite a few GenZ/Alpha aspiring mechanics exist.
You just don't find them in the upper class suburbs or state university campuses.
Why would auto shops cease to exist if a generation of people became less inclined to fix their own cars? You think ALL millennials stopped fixing cars?
Tech adoption is not tech literacy.
We can ask research questions like, “of those who have access to computers, what percentage can use a mouse?” Zoomers who use iPads and phones struggle to use a mouse. This problem is as common as it is amusing. Just an example.
And on top of that I have enough millennial colleagues who don't know shit about anything in regards to tech.
Maybe people just reinforce their cliques in their 40s and just think everyone in their age group is like them.
And especially nerdy autists like to gravitate towards technology and ignore all the other people around them.
Simplification of UI. Or abstraction of the system via apps.
I work for a MSP and we genuinely had a junior tech not know how to use file explorer. I get they are junior and don't know Active Directory or group policies but not knowing explorer sould make them unhireable as a tech worker.
Microsoft's done an infuriating job of hiding it to the point where you increasingly need 3rd party tools to manage your desktop.
But the solution is for GenX/Millennial managers to get their enterprise applications off Windows and onto Linux. Not to just get mad at the least sophisticated entry level staffer and blame an entire generation for not growing up on DOS.
The dude didn't know how to get the size of a folder or get the file count in a directory.
So sit him down and teach him.
Should take five minutes.