AI successfully obfuscates the scary technology behind enough layers of scams and customer service voice that it appeals to boomers. The youth have grown up in a world where if a stranger is being nice to them, it’s probably a scam, so they’re naturally suspicious of the new technology.

Also much easier to be pro-AI, the thing the media is saying will replace all jobs within the next few years when you’re already retired, much harder to be pro-the thing that will make you permanently unemployable when you’re just entering the workforce.

I have a foot in both camps. On the one hand I do like technology; I’m a tool maker and I like building stuff that’s useful to others. What I don’t like is when technology exploits people or actively gets in their way from being useful.

To zoom in on your question, I think GenZ (and younger Millenials) are the first generation to see all of this technological progress systematically turned against them. If you look at individual technological progress, especially as it’s presented in propaganda, it was taken as a given that technology would make life easier and more convenient for consumers. This largely held from World War II until fairly recently. In the 90s and into the 00s there was a sense of techno-optimism where information wants to be free and we should build on-ramps to the information superhighway^[1]. It came at a time when the Internet was small, connections were slow, and most work was still centered around the individual’s computer. This meant central control was very difficult to establish. It’s hard to imagine now, but we used to think the Internet was infinite, and the best you could do was have your own island of a website that could talk to other websites.

All of this began to change as networks became faster and online advertising took off. This is the world many younger people grew up in. During the 2010s Silicon Valley discovered that the internet was in fact not infinite. Facebook crossed 1 billion users in 2012 and it seemed like you could actually take over the internet. At the same time post-2008 bailout money and Zero interest-rate policy meant that money was firehosed at Silicon Valley^[2]. You also had the mainstreaming of smartphones that put massive amounts of data in the hands of advertisers as long as you installed an app^[3]. All the incentives aligned against users and towards investors and companies. During this time computers slipped into just about everything too. Back in the 90s/00s, if something wonky happened on your computer^[4] it was just the machine in the Den corner. Now computers are everywhere, so broken computers are everywhere now! Its very tiring interacting with yet another shitty touchscreen when knobs worked for 50 years without problems.

Battling with surveillance while fighting with your electronics is exhausting. I see why kids these days want to chuck them all into the river, and I don’t blame them.

Seems like there was just a specific time period (maybe 40 years) where technology was in its infancy at the same time as us, and we grew up at the same time as the industry.

Now everything is mindless touch screens and nobody learns the underlying computing concepts we had to learn through use. We learned to keep track of things and how computers actually work. None of that is explained by using the computer anymore (especially if you’re just using an iPad or Chromebook), so we’re the only generational cohort who got to teach ourselves the basics of computer science.

Boomers never bothered learning any of this stuff, and now Gen Alphas aren’t able to learn through trial and error. Are children still skeptical of tech, or are they as deluded as our elders?

The boomers who like AI like it because it’s sycophantic, not because it’s useful.

Recently we had neighbors over who are in their 60s and they would constantly talk to the Google voice assistant to look shit up and it didn’t work correctly a single time. Every single time the keyword got mangled by the voice recognition and replaced by a similar sounding word.

Not sure about savvy but they seem to like it.

any company that puts a touch screen in a car should be literally nuked

Boomers invest in tech, anyone younger than a boomer is exploited by boomers via tech. It’s the boomergeoisie.

old people don’t like to (and largely cannot) learn and want to be more convenienced, searching appropriate meme on the interwebs to express emotion is hard, especially if your memory gone, but you can say grok, make meme and be done with it.

same for ipad cars, instead of learning myriad of knobs, it’s same interface as amazon browsing machine at home

Older people, especially baby boomers, while still bad with technology, are really quite into new tech, AI especially.

Being easily fooled by and addicted to the brave new world skinner box slop machine isn’t quite my idea of what tech savvy means.

and none of this accounts for the last decade’s rise in dark patterns before AI.

Boomers dont like tech, they like shiny toys they cand bend to their will

Savvy is not the right word for what’s happening here. The young are still more savvy which is why they have learned to view tech “innovation” with suspicion where older people are not yet wise to the scam. If you’ve lived most of your adult life in the post 08 era of shrinking pie, enshitification, and race to the bottom then it seems obvious and natural that any benefit of technological improvement will be monopolized by rich sex cultists in silicon valley while we experience them mainly as new ways for porky to take from and impose on us. Boomers are still high from the concessions made to appease would be communists almost a hundred years ago. It gave them the mistaken impression that the game was more than zero sum.

I agree with you but I do wonder if this is just classic generational fashion.

The boomers love screens, they always will - that was the trendy tech of their era. More screens = better.

Computers are the tech of our era, when they become absracted behind a screen we feel loss while a boomer feels nuetral or good.

Also, millenials take “buttons and knobs” for granted in cars - these “vintage” attributes are abstractions/improvements upon original motor vehicles with manual window cranks and without power steering.

I think what we are discussing is how a new technology is at first managed by proletarians and capitalists but as time progresses more and more of it is harnessed and repurposed by the capitalist class.

Being tech-savvy also means having the knowledge and discernment to reject certain technologies. If you are not tech-savvy you’ll use what’s in front of you.

I think it depends on how you approach technology and what you show young people. One of my kids is almost 4 and has taken to games pretty well. They can navigate a handheld and control a character in a game alright. I also taught them how to use the printer to scan the pictures they draw at care. It was so exciting for them to learn they could press a few buttons and make a machine do something. We also don’t just give our kids phones to look at, and the TV is for communal viewing

Pulling it outta my butt wisdom:

The very young and the very old might have the liberty to view techno-widgets in a positive light. Those in between find those techno-widgets so ingrained in our everyday lives that they become a barrier to getting things done or an extension of being a “worker”.