The tech upbringing

Millenials. Gen Z. Alpha. All of us get lumped together as the “tech generation”, most often by Boomers looking to slap a quick label on the entire populous of new kids entering the workforce having grown up with and accustomed to technology. The truth is, as always, far more nuanced than that. Millenials grew up with computers. Gen Z grew up with the internet. The alpha generation is growing up with social media. And there’s a big difference in worldviews, perspectives, and technical familiarity between all the groups.

Millenials can be segmented even further, with the older millenials likely having grown up with desktop computers and dial-up internet, whereas the tail-end of the millenial generation likely had some faster version of dial-up internet and the gradual adoption of laptops into their households. For most millenials (myself included), computers were a fun pastime outside of school. I vividly recall coming home from school and spending hours creating PowerPoint slideshows in Windows 2000 animating pokémon evolution and Excel spreadsheets listing out car make & models. A few years in, I started getting into video games and spent most of my “computer time” at home playing Zoo Tycoon or the Command & Conquer games.

The computer and the “web” in the late 90’s and early 2000s was mostly seen as a utilitarian tool. People sent emails, checked up on news, and utilized Microsoft Office in…the office. I remember my school proclaiming that “computer skills” were going to be essential in the future and they spent hours teaching us how to click the Start button in Windows and navigating menus. Dial-up internet wasn’t accessible to everyone and its usage was heavily interdependent on the availability of an open phone line in the house. I personally spent most of my “internet browsing” time reading up on php bulletin board forums (primarily Harry Potter fanfiction) and learning Adobe Photoshop. The computer wasn’t really widely integrated into school or college workflows all while feeling like a powerful yet inaccessible toy to most people.

The millenial tech product stack was a flip phone and a small MP3 player. We marveled at the advancement of technology, scoffing at the large and clunky form of the Walkman and Discman. We wondered why our parents bothered haggling the car salesman for 6-disc CD changers in the stereo system when you could get all the songs you’d want in a tiny USB stick, only to then receive a twenty minute lecture on the wonder of creating mixtapes and how they thought CDs were here to stay forever (in hindsight, this made sense, as they had recently witnessed their victory over cassette tapes).

We’d be amazed at how entire video game worlds could fit in just two discs instead of several floppies. We speedily adopted every new invention, from the T9 typing to the swipe keyboard, stunning everyone with our lightning-fast typing speed on our phones. We’d laugh when our teachers pulled up a CRT TV on a cart and inserted a VHS tape to view a documentary. We’d groan at every time we had to fax something or print something, wishing that it could be done on the internet instead. It truly felt like we had significantly advanced consumer electronics to their zenith, and there was no possible invention that could be made to better the current state of things.

By the time Gen Z was in their adolescent years, the iPhone was out and thriving, but many still clung to their trusty iPods and iPod Nanos. Most households started adding WiFi to their home tech stack. YouTube was becoming so popular that most teenagers had abandoned cable TV and solely binge-watched YouTube creators, propelling them to new levels of fame and creating entirely new opportunities to become a content creator on the internet. Gen Z had touchscreen phones in school and frequently experimented with new apps. Having a Facebook account was commonplace by this point, with a lot of event planning and co-ordination happening directly on the site.

And this was all happening when Gen Z was in still in middle school and high school. Schools started assigning virtual assignments and students began becoming comfortable with virtual classes or sessions. College applications had moved to be entirely online and students were expected to have a baseline degree of familiarity with computers and the internet. Almost all “research” for school essays was done purely online, with Gen Z having more and easier access to the vast array of human knowledge than any past generation in history. This also meant, in turn, that they were equally susceptible to fake information, scams, and untrustworthy parties. As a whole, Gen Z became very proficient in leveraging the power of the internet for everything, from doing homework to planning events to figuring out their love life.

It can’t be understated enough how unprepared Gen Z’s parents were for this. For the most part, they ignored what their kids were doing on their phones, assuming that they were texting their friends while they were exploring some new app or reading up on a topic they were curious about. Gen Z found it incredibly easy to form and build online communities with like-minded people. If you were a Boomer and you were queer person living in a suburban white neighborhood, you would’ve easily given into the peer pressure and hid this entire aspect of your personality. But if you were a queer Gen Z person, you’d easily be able to find validation of this side of your identity online and find the confidence to stand up for yourself.

It wasn’t until the late 2010 that the evils of tech and continual engagement with social media was widely popularized as dangerous. Parents started enforcing screen time restrictions and disallowed their kids from spending too much time online. Sexual predators and identity theft made it all the more concerning for the Gen Z parents to try their best and shield their kids from the “online threats”. All of this was happening while these parents’ workplaces were slowly transitioning over to everything happening online in a world completely unprepared for it. Governments, hospitals, transit agencies, cities, and retailers were struggling to adopt new technologies for a generation that had grown up to expect ordering a cab on their phone, streaming a new song entirely online, or booking a stay at a stranger’s place. These were the kids that were about to turn into consumers, after all.

And finally, we get to the alpha generation. The generation born in the start of the 2010s to mid 2025, the early portion of which are already entering their teenage years. This generation is going to have an even crazier relationship with technology. Primarily parented by older millenials, the alpha generation will be raised entirely online. Their baby pictures are already all over the internet without their consent. They will be able to scroll back on their mother’s Instagram account and learn about how their mom really felt about her pregnancy while they were still in the womb. They’ll be able to see the life their parents lived before the pregnancy and before their parents even met, all through their social media. They’ve already been using the latest smartphones and gadgets from when they were toddlers. They expect information to be sent and received instantly with no delays. They expect visa applications, flight bookings, taxes, job applications, and payment transactions to happen immediately and instantaneously. All the industries that previously were known for gatekeeping newcomers will succumb to the always-on nature of the alpha generation that can learn anything and everything in a whim. The alpha generation has literally been conditioned from birth to access any piece of information they need.

It’s difficult to say where technology will go from here in the next decade, but the acceleration to online services has only intensified. The pandemic has already pushed us some twelve years forward to try and adopt services that don’t require in-person interaction, so the alpha generation is normalizing that too. It’s going to be interesting to see how this generation impacts the social dynamics we’ve come to expect everywhere, from common places to the workplace to educational spaces. They’ve spent two years of their formative upbringing wearing masks and avoiding people. They’ve spent most of their childhoods being exposed to new perspectives and worldviews from around the world (unlike past generations, who relied heavily on their parents in these years to educate them about life and the world). They’ve opened bank accounts entirely online and have only used Apple Pay to pay for everything while authenticating with FaceID. They might fundamentally change the foundational aspects of our society, from food consumption to parenting to transportation to interpersonal communication.

So yeah, growing up the technology can mean very different things based on which of these generations you’re from. I’m taking a very US-centric approach in this post, but this can be condensed even further in other cultures. Many countries jumped or skipped phases of this technological evolution, going from no internet to WiFi real quick by skipping the dial-up phase, going from desktop computers to smartphones skipping the laptop phase entirely, or going from cash payments to Apple Pay while completely skipping the credit card phase of payment technologies. Growing up in these cultures is even more radically transformative, since the start of these (the millenials) were even further technologically separated from the newest generation (the alphas) growing up now.

There are still things these generations have in common though. For one, widespread access to information was true to some degree for all of these generations. The millenials had it in the dial-up internet era of their childhoods while Gen Z had it in easily available WiFi and the alpha generation had it in their pockets. This has caused large trends overall, like a decline in religious beliefs worldwide. While past generations relied heavily on parenting and cultural upbringing to “indoctrinate” the kids into their religion, the new generations can easily search online to discover that there’s a lot of religions out there, all with their own beliefs and Gods. And when they ask their parents about this, they don’t get a good answer. Why is this the “correct” religion? Are the others wrong? How do we know this? What evidence do we have? The parents never have a way of answering this, so most of us end up not practicing any religion and being agnostic.

Another common element might be relationships. All these generations are accustomed to first meeting someone online and then setting up a time to meet in-person, with many early millenials and late Gen Z’ers claiming to have found their significant other online on a website or a dating app. It used to be tabboo to meet anyone online in the previous century, but it seems incredibly commonplace now to first see someone’s profile online, get curious about them and want to learn more, and then meet them in-person. Despite the grievances and frustrations with online dating, this has been a net positive to allow people to find better matches for themselves rather than settle for someone just because they were in the same neighborhood.

The final commonality might be a general distaste for the “old” way of doing things, which might be true to a certain degree for all new generations. We all collectively sigh in frustration when a company or workplace refuses to adopt online services or when we have to wait in line at the DMV using their antiquated take-a-number appointment system. Having grown up with some form of instant gratification through software most of our lives, we get extremely annoyed at inefficiencies or wasted time. Anything that doesn’t provide an immediate result is bad or poorly designed. That being said, we’re seeing a gradual acceptance of “slow tech” or taking it easy now, with delayed gratification being prioritized by many as a way to mentally deal with the ongoing stress of the world.

Millenials. Gen Z. Alphas. As all of us meld into the workplace and the world together, my hope is that we unite around the commonalities rather than the differences. There’s a lot of nuance in the differences, and it’s easy to get tribalistic about the specific technologies that we all grew up with. Instead, I hope we can pass on knowledge to each other about things like iconography conventions, software standards, the evolution of user input, and the psychology of human-computer interaction as we step into a future that seems to be increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and a co-existence with robotic machines. Most of the Boomers don’t quite get it yet, but the world ten years from now feels poised to be dramatically different than the world from two years ago, and I’m cautiously optimistic to see how our collective upbringing with different phases of technology contributes to it all.