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.
Chromebooks fucked a generation of kids? Kids got cheap, hard to break, up to date, easy to replace laptops which ran a full desktop and even offered a Linux and android subsystem. Certainly not perfect but better than alternatives like the iPad or Windows S.
I agree, and I think it takes almost MAGA level self-absorption to contrive this interpretation of events. What actually happened was somebldy wanted to sell products and came up with products people wanted. And that's not an all-encompassing endorsement of Google and everything Google has ever done because I'm "on Google's side", it's a criticism of OP's imagination.
I don't believe that.
It's likely because the market has consolidated to a small number of companies who can dictate the means of production and how their consumers interact with their product.
When the personal computer market was young, entries from all sorts of manufacturers flooded in. Some failed, some succeeded. Everything had to be configured by the user because universal standards hadn't been developed yet. This allowed for some people to be exposed to the back end, which have them some understanding of how their technology worked. It enhanced problem solving skills.
If anything, 'Plug and Play" probably had more involvement in enshittification than Google. Taking out the problem solving and moving the goal to consumption.
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.
Yeah it's a fucking abysmal take. More kids had access to the internet and computers because of Chromebooks, without them they'd have had nothing - maybe once an hour in the computer lab each week, assuming they even had one.
Prior to Chromebooks, the most a school could do was "a computer in every classroom". That was it, that was the ambition in the early 2000's and even then most schools failed.
What happened was tech companies made computers easier to use by hiding a lot of that complexity. And average humans were fine with that because shit should just work.
The arguments being raised here about a loss of skills are the same arguments boomers used against millennials because they didn't know how to do DIY and shit like that.
The blame is always squarely on the education system. That system is supposed to set kids up with the skills they need to make it in the wold and tech literacy is one of many, many areas that is hugely underserved.
This is an incredibly dumb take. Tech isn't one dimensional and there isn't a "right" path to tech literacy. I grew up on Windows and I learned a lot of what I know by exploring my laptops and learning new things out of necessity. I ended majoring in CS in working in tech. My sister, who's 5 years younger than me, had Chromebooks growing up both at home and at school, yet she's also a very proficient CS major. Using Chromebooks doesn't show that someone is bad at tech, that's just a baseless assumption.
Chromebooks are just another branch of tech, and there's really nothing wrong with them. They're basically Android tablets in laptop form. Google giving them to schools at a deeply discounted price is not a bad thing. Without them, many schools wouldn't have any sort of tech for their kids to work with. Chromebooks are incredibly useful tools that can enable teachers to incorporate material from the internet into their lessons and help streamline their work.
Hating on things for the sake of hating on them is just lazy and counterproductive. There's a lot to criticize Google for, Chromebooks are not one of them.
I am pretty confident it's the smartphone OSs (Android and iOS) that are more at fault. I remember having to install a file browser on my smartphone. Kids grown up with smartphones may not even know there are files and folder structures.
This seems silly. Lots of kids never learned about computers even when they were available. A chromebook was just an electronic school aid. If the interest was in computers they would learn about computers.
I think this is a fairly dumb take. In the schools that I saw that had chromebooks a kid might be taking English, Math, AND computing. It really was up to the school (and parents) to introduce computing, not the machine that was the general replacement for books.
Anecdotally: a high school near us requires every student to have a computer. They do not hand out chromebooks and the requirement specs are a higher end Mac or PC laptop that the kids are required to bring to classes. These kids use blender, maya 3d, office suite, video and music editing software for example. They absolutely do not know any more about computers then chromebook kids (with a few exceptions). Having access to a computer doesnt magically make them know about how computers work.
The real take is to get kids into PC gaming from a young age. Kids are super patient with each other and now my kid is doing things like installing mods for games that he plays. It's also massively improved his reading which is mostly how I learned English myself.
I can thank Minecraft for making me learn how to use the computer because I wanted to install mods and for learning English because Minecraft let's plays were like crack to 10 year old me and basically all of them were in English
That's awesome, I love hearing stories like this. I was lucky to have access to a PC since I was about 8 years old and computer literacy is probably the most useful skill I have. Nothing teaches PC literacy better than pirating software with complex readmes lol or having to fix the family computer because you infected it with a virus. Had me stressing, looking at the task manager and searching for the origins of every .exe to find the culprit
So the argument is that because Chromebooks just work and don't need troubleshooting unlike windows so this is Googles fault
OK
A certain group of Boomer-brains are heavily invested in the idea that Millennials are the only generation that knows how to use computers.
So we've been seeing a lot of "blame the X for the Y" agitprop that's increasingly divorced from reality. It's just the next generation of outrage porn, tailored towards the current generation of 40 year olds.
FOX News ran the same bullshit content for GenXers and Boomers.
No, the argument is that Chromebooks are so limited in what they can offer that kids never learned to do anything out of using the chrome browser.
Turns out you don't need to worry about troubleshooting something if you just remove that functionality lol
Most Chromebooks offered Linux on them. Even Linus Torvalds used a Chromebook when travelling to develop via it. Presumably because he was sick to death of "troubleshooting" when he had other, better things to do. And presumably schools and teachers also have better things to do than deal with bs like conflicting packages, missing drivers, viruses or whatever on every kid's device.
You are correct that most chromebooks can have Linux installed on them.
I don't think that's relevant in a discussion about Chromebooks in a school setting - were schools encouraging their students to install Linux?
Nah
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of big corporations, but Schools are gonna have to be using Device Management programs regardless of what OS they use (so that kids don't play video games, or use social media, or watch adult videos, in the classroom). Giving kids a Managed Windows Laptop with tons of restrictions does nothing to "improve tech literacy" either, so just as bad as a chrombook.
Also, wealth is also a factor. If you only have money for one device, and everyone has a smartphone, and you kids are gonna get socially ostricized in school for not having one, of course you're gonna prioritize giving them a smartphone first, which in turn, delays them learning how to use a computer, and I mean like a computer you actually own and can modify however you want, as opposed to the school-owned managed device. (Its harder to learn that when you're older)
Eh, I don't really agree.
To want to learn something starts with curiosity and the willingness to learn. I was always trying to fuck around with games and programs before I knew that modding was even a thing. When I was met with restrictions I always tried breaking them. I got around admin protection on school computers that literally only had access to the desktop.
My youngest brother on my dad's side (my family is complicated) is a shut-in who barely acts like the adult he's supposed to be, never owned a chromebook, and sits in front of the computer more than I even do. He is incredibly tech illiterate.
Yeah it's a pretty bad take IMHO. When I was a kid we had one 386 desktop computer running MS-DOS. No laptops, phones or tablet. I always liked computers and when I went to high school I noticed a bunch of old broken computers in a storage room one day. Asked the computer teacher (we had computer classes learned MS Word and (blind) typing) if I could try to fix them. Me and a friend spend many luch breaks swapping parts, until about half of them worked again. Learning about something is mostly your willingness to learn. As a highschool kid I would have loved to get a laptop. If I had a Chromebook I'm fairly sure I would have tried to run a custom OS on it or see what else non standard thing I could have unlocked.
I feel like this has way more to do with smartphones and apple than chromebooks but sure.
I work in education. The chromebooks at my school replaced the convential computer lab where kids would learn how to actually use the computer.
It’s this and it’s not. Chromebooks don’t give kids anywhere to explore outside of chrome and handheld devices provide a controlled environment. A lot of kids (and adults!) are operating with a tablet in place of a computer because the most intensive thing they need to do if they’re not gaming is word processing. It’s big tech overall and the internet shrinking down into like 3 companies.
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.
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.
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).
Back in my day we brought our own MS-DOS boot disks to school to circumvent all the limitations.
For me it was Backtrack Linux on a bootable CD-RW. Set the Windows wallpaper as my background and nobody ever noticed. Man those were the days!
I think my kids are more accepting of Linux on the family PC because of their school chrome books. We'll see how it plays out when they start purchasing their own devices though.
They're all to blame
