Why old people limit technology then ask for help using it
Do you really not know how to turn on HDMI2?
I’m a member of what’s called Zillenials: the last members of Gen Z to have a large part of childhood before the highly-digitalized modern age. We used VHS tapes, CDs, and flip phones. But we were also the first generation to be introduced to smartphones, tablets, and social media as children.
One thing I remember vividly from that transitionary time was watching teachers struggle with the newly-implemented Smartboard.
After decades of chalkboards and markers, these modern devices were much closer in logic to iPhones and tablets than paper and pencil. They’d tap it, nothing would happen. Tap again, wrong response. Can’t find the settings. Forgot what she did last time. Eventually she’d look up and ask a student, who’d fix it in about fifteen seconds. This happened constantly even though we weren’t allowed to use the smartboard.
That’s the part that always irked me. The whole point of the device was to make teaching more efficient—and it would have, for someone who understood it.
But I think teachers, like many older people today, weren’t really trying to understand it but simply trying to manage it. Those are different things.
Understanding a technology means learning how it works, sitting with it long enough to get it wrong a few times and adjust. Managing it means getting it to do the one thing you need it to do for this specific task, and avoiding what everyone else does with it. The teachers who struggled most treated the Smartboard like a slightly complicated whiteboard. We students treated it like a slightly simpler version of everything we were already using.
Management and understanding are also inherently opposing approaches to learning. Management is an attempt to prevent error; understanding is what’s learned in the process of correcting them. You can’t really do both at once. So when older folks have to choose, particularly for those who they want to protect the most (young people) they almost always choose management. Which means they almost always fall behind in understanding.
Almost everyone under the age of 30 has seen this play out in real life. Kids helping parents maneuver settings, teenagers showing grandparents how to get emails, students fixing the Smartboard. I wondered why it’s almost never the other way around.
One of the explanations I’ve come up with is that there’s a tendency to pull back the moment something goes wrong, which prevents the repetitive attempts to create and correct that actually builds understanding. And since they have less understanding of the technology, they must have less understanding of its potential harms. I think it’s that lack of understanding that produces the fear necessary to go so far as to limit other people’s usage and then beg for their assistance when using it.
Public to private access
One question I had while thinking about this is: shouldn’t we expect those with the most wealth and resources (older people) to be the ones most equipped to utilize the latest technology? And yet there’s at least one Vietnam war vet trusting his ten-year-old great-grandchild with his bank app.
My best guess is that older people are concerned that younger people will be exposed to and influenced by the many evils of the online world. That fear becomes a desire to control it.
But one thing no one ever discusses is how controlling someone else’s technology-use requires a bunch of energy, time, and consistency—leaving even less freedom to actually learn the thing they’re trying to regulate. So they stay ignorant of the technology. And when they inevitably run into a problem while using it, they turn to the very person they’re actively restricting.
I think we all know, on some level, that using technology to solve problems you find interesting puts you ahead of those who don’t. And yet older people try to control it knowing full well how useful the technology is in real-world applications. Why else would they be asking you to get into their Netflix account?
A big part of why management has escalated in the modern digital age is due to legibility—or lack thereof.
When I was a kid asking for a CD, the whole process was out in the open. I’d have to explain the product to older people, we’d find the physical disc, they’d looking it over and deliberate on whether it was permissible, they’d ask other older people if they found it permissible, we’d bring it home, I’d put it in the player in the living room. Everyone knew what you had. The technology was public and hard to access, and because of that, it was more manageable.
Solutions for those looking to manage the technology then go from an old process of step-by-step gatekeeping to one consisting of inaccurate oversight and arbitrary enforcement post-hoc.
In the modern age, the product is fully accessible and almost entirely private. And AI is even further down that road. You can’t glance at a screen and know whether a kid is using it to cheat on an essay or to finally understand the thing their teacher couldn’t explain. It all looks the same from the outside: a young person locked to their screen. But this focus on ‘screen time’ is all wrong. In fact, we would expect those using technology to learn to have more extreme ‘screen times’ compared to those who don’t.
Meaning older people are primarily concerned with access to content. And that overt concern for someone else’s access to content has harmed their own ability to evaluate the content people are accessing.
Old people should learn about AI-slop
This pattern of older people attempting to manage younger people’s technology-use isn’t new. Comics, novels, radio, television, video games, computers, phones—all arrived with a wave of panic and a round of restrictions. Each of them a battle between the younger and older generations, who, ironically, dealt with the same panic just to turn around and panic over something else.
Though I want to stay more or less universal when it comes to pointing old older people’s fears of technology, I began writing this article with solely AI in mind. I was heavily-influenced by Richard Hanania’s insights, where he tested whether readers could distinguish AI-generated content from human writing.
Older respondents were consistently less accurate and more confident (that combination is its own problem). The conclusion was essentially that people most likely to be wrong about what AI is doing are also the least likely to realize it: older people.
Younger people performed significantly better in recognizing AI-content and in their confidence in distinguishing them. What might be even more telling is that Hanania’s older readers are almost certainly more technologically engaged than average. If those more-online boomers are still failing these tests, just imagine what the typical geezer thinks when scrolling through Facebook’s AI slop.
I always hear from older people that young people need to prepare for the real world, but the real world is using the latest technology—and will contain technologies not yet created. So while its reasonable to still think it should be limited for younger people, you must acknowledge its usefulness as a tool for problem-solving.
Therefore to use it the ‘right’ way requires access.
The alternative of enforcing a limit of access isn’t free. Restricting technology requires constant monitoring, constant catch-up when young people inevitably find workarounds because they understand the technology better than those trying to control it. All of that effort is solving a problem that didn’t have to be a problem.
There’s a simpler version of this where older people ask younger people what they are actually doing with it, sit down and try it themselves, and approach it with curiosity instead of suspicion. That version costs a lot less and produces a lot more.
My prescription for readers is modest: try to avoid becoming the old-fart begging teenagers to help you with McDonald’s drink machines as you yearn for a time we will never see again.