intercal:
I think there’s a certain technical knowledge gap between people whose first computer was a Windows XP machine and people whose first computer was an iPad. On a mobile device like that, even the filesystem is abstracted away from you, so if that’s all you’ve used your whole life, you may not know what a “folder” or a “file” is. If you don’t know what those are, how could you be expected to understand something like torrenting? Then add the layer of a VPN, which is basically a necessity when torrenting lest you get a love letter from your ISP, and I’d say it’s all but impenetrable for our strawman.
Idk man. Torrenting isn’t hard, but there’s a barrier to entry that a lot of people who grew up using smartphones aren’t equipped to handle. There are plenty of millenials who don’t know how to torrent either, and plenty of zoomers who do. It’s just a technological generation gap.
a big reason is that zoomers are terrified of “viruses”, an amorphous threat they’ve heard about their whole lives in association with piracy but don’t actually understand. I run a discord specifically geared towards helping newbies learn to pirate things and generally be more independent on their devices and this is usually the first bit of misinformation (that viruses are omnipresent and all-powerful and impossible to avoid) we have to debunk for people.
in working with people on this project I’m finding that fear in general is a major generational culture difference. zoomers are terrified of everything. they have a good reason to be, don’t get me wrong, but most of them have been taught no coping skills or resiliency whatsoever, they’ve just been raised to be scared of everything all the time without any lessons on how to do things that scare them and manage risk, and a lot of them only have avoidance as a coping tool.
they especially have not been taught to critically think about supposed threats or research the truth about rumors or stories they’ve heard, and “researching” anything on Google is now such a dicey proposition I’m not sure you can even really debunk things for yourself anymore unless you’ve already grown up without Web 3. this isn’t their fault, their parents and teachers have done this intentionally, but it really makes me angry that so many young people are being needlessly made to suffer like this.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so much zoomer horror, especially creepypasta, is based on the ideas of ghosts in the machine, malevolent third party or “rogue” software, mind controlling corporate software projects, etc. millennials wrote most of these stories but zoomers are the primary audience and their consumption of the genre reflects their anxieties about technology
