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Google fucked a whole generation with Chromebooks, and now they're fucking the next generation with AI
(slrpnk.net)
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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Boomers and Gen X often handed tech problems to their kids, assuming young people just get it. That mindset stuck—tech as an innate skill, not something learned.
Millennials did learn, but by messing around—customizing MySpace, bypassing school filters, using forums. We had to figure it out. Now, everything's simplified and locked down. Because we're the ones making a lot of the tech and we've figured it out for them. You don’t need to understand the tech we make to use it.
The problem? Older generations think kids will “just get it,” like we did. But no one’s teaching them. We’re giving them phones and tablets, not skills or understanding. We assume either they just get it, or that they're tinkering around like "we" did.
How old do you think GenX is?! We had the first home computers, learned the PC as it hit the market.
Not OP, but wanted to chime in.
I get the sentiment Some Gen Xers did grow up with home computers. However, I suspect those people are outliers due to both the cost and general user friendlyness. In the late 90s it seemed like everyone had a home computer, even the normies. This let their kids grow up messing around
It almost seems like we're heading back in this direction, where normies have moved on to phones and tablets because they "just work". I don't think the average kid will grow up as immersed in computers as I did unless their parents are intentionally about making that introduction. I bought my kid a used Thinkpad for Christmas last year. Most of his peers have tablets or just stick to their smartphone.