You make some good points there. I remember LAN parties in high school where we would spend hours troubleshooting network problems and calling older brothers for advice. I learned a lot from those experiences, because I was forced to. I think a big part of the changes we are seeing in computer literacy is what I would call the Apple philosophy: if a toddler can't use it, we need to simplify. Basically, as you said, things are getting simpler with less granular control. Of course, Apple is far from the only company doing this stuff, but they seem to be industry leaders in the sense of 'dumbing down' tech.

I recently had a friend say that privacy is a luxury these days. My first thought was that there is nothing luxurious about it. It takes hard work, inconvenience and savvy. And I'm not even close to Stallman levels of privacy paranoia. I know just enough to acknowledge that I know nothing. I feel similarly about tech in general. I have been using Linux for ten years, I use VPNs, I have played around with DNS settings, et cetera. But I realize that I have barely scratched the surface of what is possible and available to those willing to spend the time and get it done.

Anyway, I'll shut up now. Thanks for replying thoughtfully, and thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

It's really not a generational thing. Every generation has their nerds and they always are just a tiny minority.

The late Gen X/early millennials may have been an outlier because they were forced to learn to get anything working but also from those years most don't care about tech.

This is quite a few years old now, but I think the main points are still valid. As you said, everything is so polished, kids don't need to figure out how it works.

http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/

Im surprised that a lot of people that are my age, even if they are using computers a lot, dont know how to search the solution for a problem or follow some instructions on how to do something

Then said tools were made a lot simpler with a lot less control over them

Which needs to be reversed if we're to remain free in Western democracies. Access to and control of computing - general purpose computing in particular - is practically a civil liberty now. I look at legislators in my own country, and I'd wager 50% of them don't understand this, 40% kind of grasp the problems but are apathetic, and 10% are on the enemies' payrolls.

I'm Gen Z and I still know all this stuff because that's just what I'm interested in. I don't think it's a huge issue that those things were made simpler for the average person and that they don't know how it works. It's not like you can or need to know everything.

The weird thing is I know a lot of millennials that could use a dos computer just fine but struggle with anything modern

Remember that story about Gen Z students not understanding file systems?