What the mentality of the dotcom era can teach the AI generation

IMO, the landscape has shifted. "Back in the day", before we could use computers, we had to build them. Technology was new and we were growing with it. It was enormously liberative, but not all use cases were. A couple of us wanted to open source and give away a school information system database schema so that anyone could built upon it, and there could be data portability between proprietary silos that locked people in and stifled innovation. That didn't work out.

Young people have great tools as a foundation, and it's my hope that they focus on use cases to liberate people instead of trapping them in walled gardens.

"There's investors to be fleeced!"

I don't think the "AI generation" missed the lesson, tho.

Posted this because I want to get HNs take on it. On the one hand, I did grow up steeped in the tech Utopia thinking, drank the Kool aid distilled in such product marketing tools as the Windows XP Tour, namely that this was a tech movement and by bringing in this technology we could make our work go so much further.

The collective We haven't had that attitude for tech since 2015 or so as the costs of "free" services has come due.

Meanwhile I do see people entering tech who are not nerds for a given technology. I started in Windows (and still have a bucket list to program a non toy application in Win32) and have landed in at least MPL and sometimes going to AGPL style FOSS works on Debian KDE, preferring offline things that I can actually own, physical media, self hosting, all that digital homesteader stuff.

So I see people my age and younger not knowing how to use filesystems (not a fault) and (here is where I want to judge) being totally disinterested in trying to learn, even though we have books and the web to teach us many many things for free.

So I'm conflicted on this article. On the one hand I see the call for one to have enough initiative to work towards a goal, not assume life will be handed to you on a silver platter.

On the the other hand, this article reads like a submarine Boomer mentality. You young people should be glad to have the job I deign to give you, be glad you work the job of a CMO for a decade before we actually get around to acknowledging you and paying you appropriately. Oh and a side order of RTO virtue signalling.

So. Am I too cynical about this article, or does it really have some merit?