seananmcguire:

prokopetz:

Like, it’s 100% true that Kids These Days tend to be less computer literate than my generation was at that age, but that isn’t because they’re lazy.

It’s because consumer software has been growing steadily more user-hostile for the last twenty solid years, and this is a deliberate tactic on the part of major software vendors in order to manipulate people into paying money and/or installing adware in order to access functionality that their systems were already perfectly capable of.

Basically, big software vendors have realised that you can charge people for access to things they already have if you can prevent them from realising that they have it; this is now a major plank of their business model.

This is why the Right to Repair movement is incomplete without taking software into consideration: having direct, unencumbered, and unobfuscated access to the guts of your software is just as essential to sustainable computing as not having to piss around with eight different sizes of screws with four different proprietary screw-head designs in order to crack open your smartphone.

I complain regularly about how I used to be really computer smart, and now I can’t even find my system folder half the time.

This is absolutely intentional.