1182
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
1182 points (90.8% liked)
Enshittification
2923 readers
259 users here now
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.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is kinda a bad take imo. I don’t think it’s chrome books that has ruined tech literacy. Maybe it’s younger exposure to even more addictive social media than previous generations?
I’m pretty young. My first mobile device was an iPod touch 4th gen. I figured out how to jailbreak it and I was like 12 at the time. If I ever felt one of these walled garden devices was holding me back, I enjoyed finding a creative solution around that. Since that iPod touch, I jailbroke my Wii and recently a kindle. I also modded a gameboy, but that was different than jailbreaking.
Yeah I've done this too. Beyond easy. There's literally a website with step-by-step instructions. I imagine it's the same for Kindle, etc.
Googling how to jailbreak something is not the same as having an open and functional development environment.
You don't need to have a dev environment in order to be considered "tech literate".
Just as a single example, an issue I've seen is that kids may not even understand what a file system is or how it works, because they're used to apps like Facebook or Google Drive which abstract away from the concept of a hard-drive, a User folder, file extensions, etc. Then they grow up putting photos on instagram, writing essays on Microsoft Word, and to them it's some unexplained internet magic. They never had first-hand experience with creating and modifying files on a local file system, and so they lack the understanding of what's going on behind the scenes.
What's funny is, filesystems, folders, file extensions are already abstractions, there is nothing inherently "right" about those particular abstractions, it's just what we've used for 40 some years... Before that, you might just have blocks on a disk, or a linear stream on a tape, and it was up to you to figure out what went where, and how to find it again. Point being, it's all just a sea of bits, regardless of how you organize them- the goal is to organize them in a way that you can forget the sea of bits.