The other day, my dad forwarded me a screenshot of a Google Gemini-generated summary: some way, somehow, the capital gains tax rate for people over 55 can be 0%. Now, I’ll grant that much of his excitement is anchored on motivated thinking—who doesn’t want to avoid as much taxation as possible as their income-earning years dwindle—but it was a revealing interaction in how he wholly believed in its legitimacy because it came from a Google search.
Sure, there’s the bit where LLM-generated results proved unreliable, yet come with the unearned confidence of a college freshman. But my takeaway is that there’s a level of tech savviness, perhaps earned at one point in time, that we identify with within ourselves. Yet, the pace of technology and its associated norms continue to evolve, and quickly outpace these assumptions about our technical competencies. There’s certainly the “I’m too old for this [music]/[app]/[slang]” that we all recognize to some degree, but this is more insidious: we often don’t fully recognize that we’ve been lapped on the technological track and wrongly believe that we’re in the know when this false confidence turns into a vector for scams and harms.
As I’m a child of the consumer web and mobile revolution, it’s easier for me to point out how tech savviness of a previous generation has failed to keep up with advancements since the 2000s. Things like:
- Generating and storing passwords;
- Email and web browsing norms, particularly around spam messages, ads, bookmarks, and tools that were available on the web circa 2000;
- Managing apps and their accounts;
- Online articles and publications, particularly reviews and opinions
Were introduced and brought to the consumer mainstream two decades ago, but have undergone technological shifts—what’s considered best practice for securing an account, what’s an ad versus a search result or post, and how articles are now optimized for SEO with LLMs—which make those early introductions remnants of a bygone era.
And scammers often prey on their victims’ passing familiarity with more innocent times. It used to be that password best practice was to set different passwords per online account, and rotate them regularly. Yet, people found this hard to maintain, so the unintended second-order effect was weak passwords, sometimes written down, sometimes just shifted by a letter or 2, which would be easy to guess or break—so much so that the official US NIST guidance removed this recommendation almost a decade ago. Similarly, what used to be trusted App Store and Play Store ecosystems have been infiltrated with bad actors that trick their users into in-app purchases and subscriptions, even as the mobile OS makers tout the safety of their storefronts.
Similarly, I’m sure that there are blind spots in my understanding of technology and its 2020s norms, and it’s near impossible for me to introspect enough to discover these mental gaps. For instance, the entire apparatus around likes and subscribes and competing YouTube channels is foreign to me; my preference is stale old text and old-school RSS feeds and channeling my thoughts through text instead of video. I still carry cash and write checks, even as all the young’uns migrate en masse to payment services1. I only recently started to use my phone for plane tickets, having printed them out at the airport kiosk for most of my life. And this is the stuff I notice.
Perhaps this is another instance of where a strength eventually becomes a weakness. Our ingrained habits and expertise on how technology works—and nowadays, it’s embedded in every facet of life—provide confidence, even as that experience starts lagging behind further technical advancements. As someone who’s both a nerd and works in this industry for a living, it’s already hard to keep up with state-of-the-art advances in fast-moving fields like AI; regular people have no shot at sustaining their tech savviness.
Even if they don’t know it yet.
It’s particularly ironic given that I helped build two of them in the past decade.↩
