They really don’t. They grew up on tablets and phones and other closed systems that are completely different and much more simplified then a personal computer. They don’t have the knowledge because it wasn’t taught to them and they never used it in day to day life.
I work in tech support and I can back this up with personal experience; they’re as bad as boomers are only instead of not understanding tech at all, they refuse to learn or dig into the tech. They can use it but they don’t have the curiosity to understand it. And when tech breaks, they don’t have the know-how to fix it on their own or to even look for how to fix it (a task made all the harder by the enshitification of the internet and AI articles that litter search results)
They consistently act surprised when ‘turn it off and back on again’ actually works because that’s become a meme and not understood to be a valid first troubleshooting step.
The blame lies with the big tech companies, and how strongly they’ve pushed hardware and software that has been designed to be obtuse at best.
That last part is important, because killing tech literacy has been an explicit goal for electronics manufacturers for 20 years now.
Apple found that if you create a walled and impervious garden where the company can control all aspects of how the technology works, you can nickel-and-dime the customer for unspeakable billions of dollars, and if you make your devices literally impossible to repair for the layman and charge an obscene premium at your own vertically integrated specialized repair stores, then you can either make bank off people insisting on repairing their broken devices, or you can incentivize them to replace and replace and replace, to get used to buying an entirely new phone every 12-14 months. They started doing that long before the iPhone, but the proliferation of smart devices kickstarted the avalanche.
And there’s MONEY in that, baby, so the entire electronics industry immediately rushed to follow. That’s WHY your fridge and your lightbulb and your washing machine and your car comes with a smart app and an integrated processing unit with proprietary firmware now. It allows the companies to absolutely butcher to death the concept of independent repair, and allows them to shepherd the customer away from ever engaging with their own devices, away from understanding their inner workings, away from modifying or adapting them, and towards paying a premium for every single function they would like to have access to.
You know how some car manufacturers have started trying to sell subscriptions to unlock the heating in their car seats?
Yeah.
Zoomers and Alphas aren’t stupid, they’ve just grown up in a technological environment where there very often quite literally isn’t a point to engaging with tech beyond the surface level, because the companies have built walled gardens, and set up bear traps for anyone who tries to venture beyond them.
And it’s not like our educations systems have done jack shit to try and keep up or teach tech literacy, so literally how are these kids supposed to have learned?
