> And now that I say that out loud -- that's a difference. When I was a kid, the older generations of hackers went out of their way to encourage and support budding young hackers. That's how I got my start. Maybe there's not enough of that these days?
It's different now. I'm guessing from your comments you're in your 40s-60s. I'm younger, but from a micro-generation that actually saw how this changed - the adults I talked to at computer shows, game shops, through email/chat/IRC/etc. in the early to mid 90s and before were generally just thrilled when anybody showed any interest in what they were doing because it was so uncommon and not understood that any kindred spirit evoked at least some kind of desire to connect. As the dot-com boom swelled, though, there were a new class of adults who became interested in us and what we were doing: Those who saw us as a way to make money/the wunderkids who 'got' this new hip thing. These are the adults who put together programs for us and wooed our parents with talks about how participating would set us up in life and whose advice all seemed to center around our ambitions rather than our joys. They were panning for gold. Lots of investment on getting us to buy into the business world and puffing up our egos. 'Our' here meaning those of us who were at the intersection of identified as 'gifted' (I tested in the top 0.01 percent in middle school which brought attention) and had some aptitude/desire/knowledge of computers and programming. I found it offputting; I couldn't articulate it then but I'd figured out that those adults saw me as a resource, not a peer/future peer. Now most of the adults techie kids have access to for mentorship are the second kind, not the first.
Now there were drawbacks to the old method and people have good reason to be wary about people wanting to interact with their kids: I'm female and got a really large dose of creepiness once I passed about 11 years old, but I was lucky enough to be a.) gay (so no luring me into just making shit choices/bamboozling me about how 'mature' I was because ew dick) and b.) have parents + an entire extended family of nerd adults to back me up and make sure I knew I didn't have to put up with it.
It's harder to interact with strangers' children now and we're far more risk averse so mentorship in the old way is a huge risk for the older person. Unless said older person is a family member, but tech has grown so much in the past 30 years that most kids who need this kind of mentorship don't come from culturally hacker families.
Which relates to another problem with the transmission of the mindset and cultural knowledge: The numbers are very, very skewed. I had an interesting conversation with one of my cousins last year - he'd just had his first kid a couple of years ago and now he and his siblings are wrestling with an interesting problem: None of them went into tech but they're frequently the only parent in a given group who understands how much of anything works or have any sense of what the recent history of tech looks like. His sister is a hardcore Catholic who runs a farm and homeschools her 9 kids; I guarantee you her kids are the only ones in that community that are given laptops to take apart and are taught at least some basic tech literacy and history.
Even taking something as basic as 'how to grow up online and not lose your mind': I'm 34 and I'm probably one of the first people in the world to have a claim to a true digital childhood. Generously there might be 1000 of us in our 30s with that experience ('true' digital childhood in that digital structures and communities were available and accessible to the same degree or more than analogue ones and that had that access + were able to use the tools young enough to build our heuristics and mental schemas around them as opposed to just grafting them on later). Assuming a conservative estimate of current children who can use the Internet/Web independently is 80% of the population born since the adoption of the smartphone, that's still tens of millions of people. And the oldest of us are still 'baby adults' to the rest of the world: we're barely old enough to be listened to on the basis of our life experience. The ratio of people who have the cultural knowledge to people who could benefit from it is really skewed since the skills have exploded into use but all the cultural and social context was left behind. (Or is turning into some weird post-modern mythos).
Sort of rambling, but I have strong feelings about the experiences of the next generations.