It goes beyond even tech. Home repair especially. The pragmatic knowledge had by my grandparents generation was just astounding to me. My grandpa was so damn smart. He was an engineer for Alcoa working with drafting tables and a slide rule. His brain was just rooted in mathmatics. One time we had a roll of some tar paper for a project and we needed to figure out how many feet we had left on the roll to see if we should buy another roll. He just put a ruler across the diameter, stared at it for a while, stared at the sky with his mouth open for a second, then he had the correct length. Blew my mind when I went home and looked up the formula he worked out correctly in his head in about 30 seconds: 𝐿=𝜋∗(𝑅2−𝑟2)/𝑇

I'd need to pull out a calculator to do anything with pi.

I've been wondering why that is, why this older generation was so much more focused so to speak. It makes sense when you consider the cultural influences surrounding that. My grandpa grew up in the great depression and rebuilt china after the japanese occupation during WWII. It was a matter of survival and pride to focus and improve yourself for your family. My fathers generation, it was popular to ditch class to smoke weed in the woods rather than pay attention in class. My generation, it was popular to be on your phone all day rather than pay attention in class. If all the generations since my grandfathers were as focused as his was on learning things, my word, maybe their now wild predictions on the glorious would be future in the atomic age would have actually materialized.

Just because this is an older problem doesn't mean it's not a problem.

Yes, people that loved fixing up cars would have complained about "kids these days" not knowing how to fix a car. I was certainly one of those kids.

However seeing this happen with a field I know makes me realize those people complaining about people not knowing how to take care of their cars were right.

And while this is true of "any new tech", it's a relatively recent phenomenon as tech has only been advancing this rapidly in last 100 years or so.

It is a bad thing to be increasingly alienated from the tools you rely on for your day-to-day existence. Of course it's in part because cars and computers have both been increasingly designed by their manufactures to be difficult to take apart and understand. Tools that you don't understand increasingly control you rather than the other way around and I personally think this is a trend worth resisting.

It's good to point out that this is an issue and even better to encourage more people to be curious, and learn how things work. Another example that I'm surprised of is people's homes. I know a shocking number of home owners that cannot fix a single thing in their own home without calling a "professional" (and it's increasingly surprising how many professionals also don't understand what they're doing!) This was extremely evident during the freezing temperatures in Texas where many people didn't know how to shut off the water to their homes.

One of the best parts of the "hacker" mentality is to encourage people to not be scared of their tools and the things they own. While things have gotten more complicated, you can do a large amount of repair and modification on your own for almost everything. It honestly feels very liberating (not to mention saving you a lot of money) to snake a clog 12 ft deep in your drain, replace your car's serpentine belt, restore old hardwood floors, repair broken refrigerators from parts, etc.

Hi fellow hacker here!

I agree this is what a "hacker" truly means. We should "hack" more and gain back more control.

The term DIY does seem to appear less these days.

Yes, it is different. With a car, no matter how modern, you still (used to) command where it drives you. In a smartphone, someone else makes this decision for you. (Or at least someone else limits your options.)

There is obviously a difference between not knowing what a URL is and not being able to read assembly. Both could be seen as "arcane details of computer knowledge" that enhance your autonomy when using a computer, but one is in principle accessible to 95% of the world's population without much effort, the other is a highly specialized technical skill.

There's also a weird thing with computers where people are a lot less willing to think a problem through.

If you put someone in an unfamiliar car and ask them to drive it somewhere, the most trouble they're likely to have is if they need to figure out how to turn on the wipers in the dark. The controls may vary but they're close enough that people figure it out.

Put that same person in front of their work computer, but rearrange all the desktop icons and change the color scheme. There's a non-zero chance that they immediately freeze up and act like there's no possible way for them to do anything. They act like human macros, any slight change throws everything off.

I don't think that metaphor works. On roads, other people already limited your options: where you can go, how fast, where you can park, etc.

The issue is, cars used to be all analog. You pull this wire that thing moves. But nowadays cars are more digital than analog.

Not exactly analogous though. They didn't need to know how to fix their cars to get through high school assignments. How the hell did kids turn in essays and whatnot? I doubt they were printing them. Or was literally everything done in Google Docs?

I have a kid in HS and everything is google docs now. She does not know what a file or a directory is.

From my experience most non-IT workers were the same pre cloud.

They just do things by rote and save everything to a single folder or their desktop - its why a lot of office workers hate change to new application or operating system versions, they don't understand how it works they have just memorized a bunch of steps to follow to get a task done.

When Chromebooks came out, Google made schools a major target for those devices. Looks like it worked.

And meanwhile, the 'directory structure' of Google docs remains one of the worst I've seen. Haven't opened a document in 6 months? Good luck finding it without using the search bar.

Why not? A doc is a file, and GDrive still has directories, or folders. Not everything is a doc, there are sheets, pdfs, pics, among others

Usually when turning in it's either a document already created in google clasroom, so you just click a button and it turns in, or it's found via the list of "recently opened documents."

I don't think she knows the difference between those document types other than she can type into one but not the others. A PDF and a read-only google text document are essentially the same thing as far as she is concerned.

Well, except if you took auto shop class during high school :)

Wouldn't it be the other way around?

As cars became more popular for transportation, people stopped learning how to take care of horses.

OP is referring to the improvement in cars over time. Something I just barely remember the tail end of (and I'm not old). Over the 20th century, cars went from something you basically had to be a mechanic to own and drive, to machines where you push a button and steer.

Until modern engines under computer control (1980s) it wasn't guaranteed your car would start when you turned the key. Especially in a cold place like here. Pop the hood, fiddle with the carburetor, fiddle with the fuel ratio, apply a heating pad. Something like that was the morning routine for my father's old pickup truck.

Such unreliability would immediately result in such a vehicle being discarded as defective today, but it was pretty normal back then. I seem to recall far more "sorry I'm late, but the car wouldn't start" even in the 90s than today. Of course, getting rid of the handcrank to start was probably the biggest improvement but that was before my time :)

The nostalgia for old cars being simple and reliable is baffling, I guess because they were always cantankerous a bigger failure wasn't as jarring, whereas modern cars are like appliances that work reliably all the time until something big happens like a timing belt or transmission fails.

Smartphones are basically computers with training wheels. People who never stop using training wheels do not know how to ride a bike.