Not bad, just something that should be understood. Millenials are expected to be “internet natives” and “good with computers”. This didnt translate to Gen Z linearly.
I wonder if this has anything to do with how platforms became locked down at the generational boundary.
Millennials grew up on 90's and 00's internet, where you could download and install anything. It was the most open tech has ever been. Run your own chat software, embed HTML in your MySpace profile, create a forum, etc. Apply patches and cracks to pirated software. Re-skin Winamp. All of it was par for the course for your typical Millennial teenager.
Gen Z has curated experiences in the form of walled silos. Less exposure to the underlying tech.
Granted, some subset will always be attracted to hobbyist pursuit. Game development, app development, Minecraft mods, etc. But it's not as much a part of the day to day experience.
The internet during that era cultivated some incredible heuristics for navigating the internet.
During the era (at 14/15) I:
- Stuck behind a firewall, I downloaded gigabytes of porn from unsecured FTP servers by Google dorking
- Played hours of bootleg Quake3 and SOFII on my old-faithful cracked Windows XP (still remember the key to this day)
- Reinstalled XP about 1,000x everytime I downloaded something I shouldn't have
- Found hundreds of weird documentaries on The Pirate Bay and Smoking in the Rain from all over the planet
- Spent countless hours talking with a bunch of weirdos on IRC
- Had an HTML-only website called 'Science Experimenter'
- Dual-booted FreeBSD
- Played around on my SDF Unix shell
- Played Doom and Wolf3D downloaded from Vetusware on Dos 7.1/Win 3.1
- Newsgroups. Oh man, remember bootlegging movies from newsgroups.
That early internet was just incredible. From wandering through Fravia's Searchlores, to Geocities (where I first discovered the term 'Computer Engineering'), to the early MP3s you could find of HOPE and Defcon talks), to Andre Lamothe's XGameStation kit, to the Homebuilt CPUs Webring (I fell in love with Magic-1), to the OsDev wiki DexOS, MenuetOS, etc.
Today's internet is so convenient. It's like you said, it's 'curated.' It's not a jungle of lost Mayan civilization you can Indiana Jones through.
Edit: I realize today's internet is even more rich than the one I describe, but the nostalgia is just too strong. I prefer to live in my simple world.
Check out (https://neocities.org/).
> dual booting linux is hard on a laptop with stuff being locked down in the boot process
All the major distros should work out of the box with secure boot at this point. UEFI USB sticks are incredibly easy to create since you don't have to worry about magic MBR stuff anymore. (The bootloader can just go in a specific folder and have a specific name.) For that matter, turning secure boot off completely is typically a simple toggle in the firmware. Even the drivers "just work" out of the box these days for all the mainstream laptops I've tried.
> hacking on stuff seems harder then ever if your starting from nothing
This is true if all you have is a locked down mobile device. Otherwise there's really no excuse - a Raspberry Pi can be had for $35.
Didn't seem any harder with Manjaro Linux and Windows 10 to me.
So, last century U.S, the roaring twenties, the great depression, WW2, then I think the 50s were probably seen as something of a return to normalcy after the war but in some ways quite different because now the U.S was really in charge, followed by the 60s, I don't think the 70s was that big a divergence but lots of big thinkers seem to think it was because of the end of Vietnam, the end of Nixon.
I think the last big decade shift were things were significantly different (last century) was the 80s which began the dismantling under Reagan of the New Deal which kept up in the 90s - however by this time the idea that generational shifts were important had taken hold and somewhat trivial things like changes in musical tastes were taken as examples of such a shift.
Then of course there has been a technological change in this century by widespread use of computers and the internet.
Example: My father's generation lived in poverty and had to struggle to get by while the current generation have it easy.
“Hey you are good with electronic devices that I had the same 20 years to understand as you, fix this other unrelated thing”
Means something very different when the users don't understand anything about the device they are using.
It isn’t about inferiority it is about understanding the baseline technical literacy and what areas should still be taught, just like they were taught to prior generations, instead of assuming there is a linear and continued proliferation of technical literacy. Its just a patch work.
There were plenty of "non-geek" people tricking out their MySpace profile.
I don’t miss ripping MP3’s, converting file formats and what the heck is “patching cracked software”? I think I qualify as a true geek, and I’ve never heard of that.
Downloading commercial software, then downloading a tool to alter the binary to remove the license verification check. Alternatively, they would patch the signature check to use some known algorithm, and then you'd generate a key locally that worked.
Skater kids, emo/goth kids, preppy kids. Everybody was doing this to get Photoshop or games or whatever. This wasn't limited to computer nerds.
Kids in the 00s had to learn some skills and read warez instructional text files.
In the 80s, I don’t know where my friends got their cache of cracked software for the Apple //.
I usually experienced much less resistance explaining tasks and problems to people close to my age. Younger people would listen to a point until I saw their eyes gloss over, waiting for me to get to my point. Many older folks were tuned out from the start and just wanted to hear their problem was fixed. I’m sure part of this involves my lack of skill in explaining technical concepts to non-technical people.
Someone else mentioned that the internet changing over the years affected this. I think part of this also has to do with the pranks of our generation:
-“how do I [x] in this game?” “Alt-F4”
-“how do I get rid of this virus?” “Delete System32”
We’d either look it up first and call BS, or follow the instructions with reckless abandon and learn the hard way.
Somewhat recently we had people microwaving iPhones thinking it’d charge them. I saw more news stories about this than I’d have expected, given it’s metal in a microwave. Something that many of us were taught not to do from a young age.
Search for "millennials killed" on Google.
I think this is an important generalization because it undoes an unhealthy generalization by Gen X and Baby Boomers, the idea that everyone younger is literate with computer use and troubleshooting, the younger the better
The older Gen Z are barely graduating college, by the way. Maybe start by looking at the growth of computer science majors.