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Comment by causality0 | Hacker News Reader

more computer literate than the generations both preceding and, to the confusion of the aforementioned pundits, succeeding us.

This is the most terrifying thing to me. I spent my early adulthood watching all my leisure activity interests like sci-fi, videogames, superheroes, the web, etc go far more mainstream than I could've imagined without bringing along the behaviors they fostered. How can someone spend five hours a day online without caring how it works? It's like being a professional chef without knowing what a farm is. I expected the youth of today to be technological wizards, not a bunch of trained monkeys.

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How many pieces of civil infrastructure, bridges, roads, walkways, gutters, buildings, etc do you use but not understand? Life is very complicated and most people only bother understanding the parts that they care about. It may be software for you, but it isn't for everyone.

> How many pieces of civil infrastructure, bridges, roads, walkways, gutters, buildings, etc do you use but not understand?

The question rather was:

> How can someone spend five hours a day online without caring how it works?

Thus: How many pieces of civil infrastructure, bridges, roads, walkways, gutters, buildings, etc. that you use would you love to understand if you had sufficient times for learning?

Answer: Nearly all of them.

Exactly. I'm not a civil engineer but I know a concrete bridge is composed of hardened slurry and that its shape transmits the weight of objects on it into its columns or to its anchored ends. The level of ignorance we're approaching is like kids not knowing why they only drive on one side of the road and someone saying "that's ok because the car won't let them cross over the center line".

> Answer: Nearly all of them.

For you maybe, but I don't think most people even care. Despite many Americans spending hours driving for their commutes, I don't think most even understand what goes into classifying the difference between an arterial, a state highway, and an Interstate. Despite many Tokyo residents using a myriad of trains to get around, most have only a dim understanding of how their rail system works.

But they can care about other things and that's fine. Maybe they're passionate about making art, writing books, or cooking food.

Before smartphones, people just sat five hours a day in front of a TV without caring how it works. Many older people still do.

People who are curious about this sort of stuff, and want to tear open black boxes (sometimes literally), are a minority, and have always been. And there’s nothing inherently wrong about that.

I'm an older millennial, aka Home Computer Generation. The overwhelming majority of my peers have and had no interest in how computers work, even though they grew up with desktop PCs. I had no problem paying for beer in college by fixing basic issues with personal computers. That expertise has never been widespread. It just peaked in concentration before the move to mobile.

Consider that the people pushing that mobile first world are themselves the Home Computer Generation. The Boomers built the PC. Gen X and the Millennials are the ones that built the mobile-first world.

Millennials are NOT the "home computer generation", per the article. You've missed the point; the home computer generation were the ZX81/Atari people, who had to work out how the equipment worked.

The "mobile first" people are developers; honestly, users don't give a shit whether developers want to prioritise mobile. And developers aren't users; on the whole, developers understand the tech in ways that modern users don't have the first clue about. That's the same as it always was: the "home computer generation" wasn't a generation; it was a subculture. Most people knew nothing.

Now everyone has multiple computing devices, annd they have no idea how they work. Back then, you HAD TO figure out how they worked, or they were useless.

From TFA:

> Scores of people owned what was then called a home computer - those very special machines produced between the late 1970s and late 1990s aimed specifically at the consumer market: ZX Spectrum, C64, Amiga, Atari, and, overlapping with the business side of things, PC:s and Macs. A lot of us used our machines for little more than playing video games, but even in doing so, many of us developed a very special relationship to our machine in particular and digital technology in general. I believe this relationship to be unique to this particular period in time and that it resulted in a very particular kind of computer user.

> We love naming generations and ascribing vices and virtues to them. Boomers. Millenials. Zoomers. I propose that in the overlap between Generation X and Millenials, there is a home computer generation.

I was born in the first 20% of the Millennial generation according to Wikipedia. We didn't always have cable and we didn't have a Nintendo until the late 90s but we always had a desktop PC. The first PC I remember using was a 486 that my parents bought from my uncle. He was running a little custom computer shop named after a Clapton album. My first PC memory is playing Pharaoh's Tomb with my Dad and wondering what the incantations on the post-it really meant. I remember how excited Mom was when we got our first computer with a whole encyclopedia on CD-ROM and a hard drive big enough to "hold a library". I got my own PC in the mid 90s. A no-name Pentium. It was a hand me down from Dad's coworker, he made me promise I'd learn something with it. That was my first experience with Linux. Mandrake as I recall. I wasn't old enough to drive. In high school I took a computer tech class, learned HTML, how to build PCs, helped wire the building for Ethernet, and then inherited the journalism lab for my junior and senior years. One of my first jobs was in a local computer shop. I worked for the IT desk at my college. After graduation I did onsite tech support for Dell before starting my career in data engineering. Which is a path that was suggested to me by one of my gaming buddies.

A millennial is someone who came of age around 2000-2010. I did, turned 18 in 1999, and I grew up with home computers. Early millennial/late gen-X grew up with home micros, later millennial grew up with Windows 95+ PCs (which are plenty complex enough to force you to learn a lot about computers).

And yes, it's true not everyone in this generation learned anything about computers. Even in middle school in the nineties in a very developed country, I reckon less than half of my class had a computer at home.

But those who had, even outside the "subculture", learned a lot which people generally don't know today.

All humans are trained monkeys. Some of those monkeys are self-trained on technological wizardry.

Why are you comparing hobbies to professional cooking? I'm glad I can cook without having to farm, and I'd expect most people to be glad they can browse the web without expert knowledge in HTTP.

Yes, but you know what a farm is. You know that animals reproduce, that their infants grow by eating vegetable matter. I can't write HTML either, but I know that it's text which describes the content and layout of a web page. I have younger relatives who don't know what a file is. They don't comprehend that a document and a picture and a video and an audio track are all same sort of thing interpreted in a different way.

Most people's (in the US's) mental image of a farm is probably way different from the likely-very-industrialized farms that are actually producing most of their food.

Strikes me as fairly similar to the surface-level of understanding they have about "apps" and "operating systems" and "memory," actually.

To understand the difference between a manual and a highly industrialised process doesn’t matter here. It’s about the underlying principles that define how things work.

> Why are you comparing hobbies to professional cooking?

I can't tell whether you really don't understand or if you're straw manning an analogy and pretending innocence; trolling.

It's called a simile. It doesn't require all aspects of the two things being compared to be equivalent.

The things are not being compared on the basis of the professional status of the "trained monkey," but on the understanding they have of the sources of the things they use.

The mobile- and social-centric Web is the new TV. Do you care how your TV works? Most people aren't using it for anything important, they've got no reason to care.

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