Anon sends a file

theres a generation of kids who don't understand basic directories because of the mobile market and never actually used a pc in a regular usecase.
put in perspective, there are those who are more proficient on a touchscreen keyboard more than an actual keyboard.
- I've also found (I'm a teacher) this generation is far less proficient at search. They (generalisation) type a whole question into Google, and read the Google created text box to get their answer, taking it as gospel - regardless of if Google has completely gone off the mark.
  Contrast this to a generation that grew up with needing to refine search terms with key words, who can find far more relevant info quicker.
  It's hard to get them out of the rut and teach them to be more critical of sources. They're so used to having what they need served straight up for them. LLMs (AI) are feeding into this more - they struggle to believe that AI hallucinations exist until I show them.
  Again all this is generalisation - when I say 'they' I don't mean 'all'.
  
  How do you demonstrate a hallucination?
  
  Couple of years back I used to help this kid with computer related stuff, and it really baffled me how he was nearly computer illiterate. He had no idea what make his laptop was, no idea what OS he was on, or any of the specs.
  He called it a gaming laptop because he played games on it, but it was a pretty decent school/work thing without a dedicated GPU.
  I’d always envisioned the younger generations getting better and better with tech, but it makes sense that won’t be the case as tech moves to be easier to use, more reliable, and less intrusive.
  Modern iPads are nothing like the BS DOS/98 I grew up with.
  
  To play a devil's advocate: could this be them learning how to use a search engine? When I was a young teen learning to use a computer for the first time I would type full on sentences into Google and not get any results.
  
  Another teacher here. Teaching English for the first time. I didn't realise their skills were this bad unless I saw with my eyes. Glad I'm not alone in this battle!
  
  Unfortunately this generation google is getting less proficient at search as well. It’s like it treats the search term as a vague idea and any syntax as a non binding suggestion.
- i can actually type slightly faster on a touchscreen keyboard, despite spending most of my time on my pc.
  typing special characters is painfully slow on touch keyboards tho
- https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
  
  “I open a drawer, and inside that drawer, I have another cabinet with more drawers.”
  Okay Dr. Seuss

This has actually been studied. Turns out, zoomers are so reliant on smart technology like tablets and phones, they never actually learned anything about normal PC file systems or extensions. They literally don't understand what a folder is because they've never been exposed to PC or Mac environments.
- I've seen people comment about needing to teach folder and file hierarchies to young people in CS classes because they grew up with cloud services and auto-save. Dunno how widespread that might be.
  
  I've had to teach folders, file types and extensions to lots of ~18 yo. When I ask them where they saved a files they get confused and generally respond with something like "on the computer".
  
  I am a sophomore computer science student and when I entered freshman year I was very surprised as well. Just last week, I was helping some kid with his intro C++ final and the entire semester, the guy has been saving everything to /downloads. He was wondering why every new program he made in Visual Studio failed to work. It kept messing up because he was in the same directory all the time messing about with the other 5 or so programs he made beforehand.
  
  Cloud services like Drive etc have folders anyway.
- I blame hardware and software manufacturers for locking and dumbing down their devices
- And there are lots who don't understand what the shift key is for. They use capslock to shift...
  
  Stop. You’re all hurting me.
- zoomer programmer here and so glad i have the hobby i do and the dad i so dearly love for introducing me to real technology—the nitty gritty and all
- I've observed this personally but I didn't know it was studied. Can you provide a link to a study about it?
  
  By study, I don't mean in a lab setting, but more so the data has been collected by employers reporting that their Gen Z staff is technologically stunted.
  https://futurism.com/gen-z-baffled-basic-technology
  https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
  https://www.digitaldisrupting.com/gen-z-kids-apparently-dont-understand-how-file-systems-work/
- And Chromebooks!

I call bullshit on this post. Since Windows 10 you can just double click a zip file and it opens up like any other directory (even if it isn't) and shows you the files.
If this zoomer wanted to open it they'd obviously double click.
So calm down boomers, this is fiction.
- If it's an executeable with dependencies in the archive it might not run without being unpacked.
  
  The greentext says "he asks for some files", that doesn't sound like an executable, which usually gets blocked by the mail system anyway (even in a zip, if there's no password on it).
  But yeah, that is one way to have it broken, besides Windows refusing to run a random .exe
  
  Can't email executables.
- They may have emailed it to the zoomer, and the zoomer attempted to open it on their iphone or something that doesn't have native zip compatibility.
  
  iOS supports zip by default.
- Maybe it was actually a .7z
- Maybe they downloaded the zip and then immediately tried to open it in a specific program through the open dialog giving them an error. I see similar mistakes with my parents - they have no concept of where files are, it's just "on the computer" because they rely so heavily on "smart" file picker dialogs that show you everything recent or by a file type no matter where it's actually located.
- Not super tech literare... Is there even a reason to unzip the files if you just want to grab one of them? I kust assumed windows is unzipping it into some weird temporary memory anyway to show me them, so a file is a file?
  
  I mean the file is zipped, as in compressed. So it might just look like a file, but if you open it inside the zip (with file explorer) Windows does have to decompress the file in the background to show it to you.
  Which is obviously slightly slower than if you unzip the file and put it somewhere and then open it, but you won't really notice the difference except we're talking about massive files.
  And of course if you make changes to the file you can't save it (except to a new file) as it gets opened up as read only.
  If you just want to store the file and view it every now and then I don't see a reason to unzip it. And you can always do that later anyway.
  
  It makes the file smaller, making it easier to send over networks.
- I call bullshit on this post. Since Windows 10 you can just double click a zip file and it opens up like any other directory (even if it isn’t) and shows you the files.
  Just the other day I had to tell someone to unzip first before they could patch the rom (they were going to play some romhack on an emulator); I don't know how old they were but clearly there can be scenarios where someone has a zip file and don't know what to do with it or use it.
  I don't even know what the rom was or which emulator they were using, because I just told them if they google Rom Patcher JS that's going to work for whatever file type it is, because according to them the problem was that the patcher they had didn't work...
  But as it turns out they were trying to use the .zip archive as the patch file, so I then had to explain to them that they need to extract it first.
  And afterwards the patcher they had did work so I don't think they even used Rom Patcher JS in the end.
  
  That's also more of a Windows issue than a user issue. I absolutely hate that file types are hidden by default in file explorer, makes the whole thing feel unusable. First option I change whenever I touch a Windows PC.
  So besides the icon you can't see at first glance as a casual user that it's a zip file. And a ROM most likely had an icon the user wasn't used to, so they didn't notice something was wrong :-/
- Administrators can disable this, so I think the larger point is: if a tech literate person receives a zip file, they understand that it is in fact a compressed archive that can contain one or more files and directories, and that you need an archive tool to extract the contents, whereas a tech illiterate person doesn't understand this and expects it to just be handled magically when they double click on it and are stumped when that doesn't work.
  
  Double clicking works for 99% of file types. So if I send you a pair of Excel files in a zip and you double click it under Windows 10 or 11, it will just show you the Excel files and you can even open them. Not sure what your point is here.

It's Chromebooks, phones, and tablets that you don't ever have exposure to actual files. Chromebooks especially now that they're so common in schools because they're cheap.
- I so wish Linux phones were actually a usable thing so that we could have functional pocket computers.
  The attempts made so far weren't very convincing.
  
  I still have one of these bad boys
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900
  
  Hey, you appreciate your monkey’s paw wish and enjoy your android.
  
  Honestly we probably can just somehow shove Linux components like flatpak and other stuff like the terminal into android, make them apks somehow so they can work whenever
  Of course this would be hard AF to do but I just want to run tik tok in a sealed off VM using flatseal goddamnit (I don't trust it with my phone but I want to access the videos on it)
  
  There is this
  https://ubuntu-touch.io/
  But I'm not sure it's up-to-snuff. Never touched it myself.
- Good point.. they're welcomed to tech with the same consumer goods and social media brain melting content as boomers. There's no reason they would be more technical, if even on par.

Sample size of 1 person
ZOOMERS
- Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/385/
- Millenials are just passing on the abuse they got from the boomers for enjoying avocado toast 10 years ago.
  At least making fun of someone’s tech skills is rather harmless compared to questioning the basic desire to eat something other than ramen every now and then.
  
  We should destroy the economy next that would be hilarious
- I have seen multiple "zoomers" struggle with zip files. Probably because they dont know those from their smartphones.
  
  How is it possible to struggle with them, pretty much all desktop OSes have built-in support for those and Windows even lets you treat them like folders.
  
  Interestingly enough, the youngest zoomer is now 11. I've never seen an 11 year old struggle with a zip

I have yet to meet the braindead skibidy rizz zip file zoomers everyone keeps talking about. I assume I'll find them with the latte avocado toast millennials.
- You'd be surprised.
  The thing is they tend to be in the same avenues as where you'd encounter tech illiterate people of every other generation too.
  While there is a degree to which there's age barriers, it was more a thing going from no computers at all to computers.
  Nowadays age means less in terms of tech competency than things like socioeconomic background, professional background, and general interest.
  Sports kids in HS who grow up to go into a nepotistic position at a construction business doing sales have roughly the same tech competency if they were born in 1970 or 2000.
- I've met them. But I've also met tech illiterate millennials. And genius boomers.
  I don't have enough data to conclude yet, so options are open. I do believe zoomers use computers less than millennials do tho, in favor of smartphones.
  
  As far as I can tell boomers know how a computer works and don't know how to do this weird thing they need to do for some reason or they break it in a weird way. Zoomers seem to be a mixed bag of no IT knowledge or never needing help. Everyone else just drops the laptop and lies about it.
  
  I worked as tech support for a patient portal at a previous job and found that a lot of both boomers and zoomers use their smartphones exclusively. The bulk of our calls were from boomers and trying to teach them to navigate a smartphone over the phone was one of the most frustrating things I've ever had to do.
- I work in tech and all of the recent hires (Gen Z) are domain-general smart: they have great critical thinking skills, can reason through a problem abstractly, and pick things up fast.
  But damn can some of them not use a computer in an efficient manner. Having to walk them through changing display settings or how to set up Outlook rules or basic keyboard shortcuts is a little painful.
  As someone who, nowadays, uses his phone for pretty much 98% of all computing tasks, I get it. But it's still painful
- I know a few. Some of the younger people we've hired recently as more computer illiterate than my 93 year old grandfather.

- This isn’t just people whining cause they’re old, Gen Z really is less technically adept than Gen X and Millennials. I don’t know if anybody is sure exactly why, but articles I’ve read tend to attribute it to the tech we use being so easy to use that they don’t need to learn how to do things that would seem trivial to their elders.
  Take archiving, like in the example above. These days, you don’t usually need to archive things. Everything is in the cloud, and sharing files is as easy as airdropping them, or sending access to a contact. Most people would look at how easy it is to do that, and not bother learning the manual way, because why would they? They have no idea how to use something like 7-zip or FTP, because all of their digital lives are carried with them everywhere they go, and are synced across all their devices. There’s no technical knowledge required.
  
  The lack of curiosity is what kills me though. The amount of effort it took to figure things out that I didn’t know was far and away more effort than it would take to search with google how to open the associated archive. This has been something I’ve read up on also and I wonder if the intuitive spoon feeding of technology also impedes one’s willingness to tackle the easiest obstacles even if the solution is a literal search away. It feels like offloading their ignorance which rubs me wrong.
  
  They're also on average more creative/adept with the tech they do use though. Lots of youngins are great at making little edited videos and stuff with their phones and tablets and programs they have on hand.
  
  Explains why my sister actually falls for phishing scams
- The previous generation: "We use to go out and beat up n#####s for fun on a Friday night."
  My generation: "Maybe stop calling them that."
  
  snowflake generation smh /s
  
  but atill beating them up is fine?
  /s
- lol you are a clown

Gen Z at uni here. Most of my fellow zoomers know what a zip file is. But some people just don't computer that much so they simply don't know.
However if you're doing a computer job and you don't know that's ridiculous.
- Some intro college CS courses have had to start teaching things like how folder structures work because enough students are missing that basic information.
  
  I used to balk at this, but after much thought, it actually makes sense. Phones, tablets, and much of the user experience with personal computers is very far removed from file management these days (if you can even do that on your phone).
  Back before 2010, we could conflate the idea of "computer owner" with "computer literate". And even for smart phones of the time, that was mostly true. Now, not so much.
- Someone doing one of those computer jobs here. In the office i work we are 13 people. six zoomers, five boomers and two millennials. 12 out of these 13 people struggle to understand basic computer things such as archives even when I explane them. the same for family and some friends. I live and work germany. From my small sample i'd read its not a zoomer or boomer thing in germany at least.
  It is a missed duty of politics to bring the country into tune with this. For example the "IT class" back in school was teached from people who had to google the stuff they had to teach... if the'd knew how to google. I had to listen to many calls mid lesson where the teacher had to ask other people how stuffs done. And just as germany has failed to do this, there are isolated groups or bubbles all over the world that simply do not want or are able to learn it. and that's just spreading slowly since there is no need to learn on most systems anymore.
  But that is just an observation of me with like I said just a smal sample in my close area. I could totaly be wrong.

That's because all they know how to use are iPads. They don't actually understand how real computers work.
Plus of course there is this attitude that if it doesn't immediately work on its own you should give up and just pray to the nebulous entity that is "IT people".
You wouldn't believe how many people get annoyed that I don't know what their password for something is.
- For me it's recovering my boss's files from his broken mac.
  I have decades of experience in Linux. I can invoke the recovery shell and rsync his files onto a USB stick. But save that locked down OS? No idea. I'd have to watch a video and hope I don't make a mistake.
  
  The thing with Mac is, it's easy if you set it up correctly and if you haven't set it up correctly (as in you have left it in default mode), it's borderline impossible.

We Millennials were born in a sweet spot where PCs were widespread enough to be virtually in every house since childhood but also not too streamlined and simplified.
We had a pc that sometimes didn't work properly, we had to use the command line from time to time, troubleshoot and look up errors. When something fails we try to find out why and only after a while we give up and claim it's an error or look for help.
Also you know, stupid people are in every generation.

There are tech illiterate people in every generation, but they definitely seemed more prevalent in the boomer generation. In my experience it's Boomers > Gen X > Zoomers > Millenials in terms of most to least technologically incompetent. Always suspected millennials are usually more comfortable with tech because they grew up with it, and it grew up with them.
For older generations, especially boomers, I figure they were more set in their ways and for many (but not all, obviously) it was hard to adapt. For Zoomers, I think it was just assumed that they'd just be inherently good so there were many things they were never actually taught (though many of them learned for themselves because they are nerds, which is pretty great if you ask me). Anyways, that's my theory on generational tech literacy.
- I'm a xennial, and i think one of the key characteristics of my generation is that we grew up with tech becoming omnipresent, but it was also non user friendly tech.
  We started having PCs young, but we really had to know how to build our systems, it was much less plug and play. We grew up with visual OSs, but configuring that shit was not intuitive at all. Or outright broken (looking at you Win ME). We had to troubleshoot, fix, learn, read and test just to get our tech working.
  Younger generations grew up with tech omnipresent yes, but tech that mostly works intuitively - you barely ever have to really figure shit out, fix it or reconfigure it.
  Just my 2 cents!
  
  Yeah, once we had invented proper tablets and smartphones, those things are so intuitive that I have seen videos of monkeys figuring out how to use them.
  We got the sweet spot. Having to know how to program the VCR and cable boxes gave us a leg up on troubleshooting, and DOS just sealed the deal. Never thought I would be thankful for all those frustrating days.
  
  To add in to it, a lot of the experience during the formative years was with desktop computers. Consoles were there, but had far less capabilities. Handheld devices were generally more expensive compared to today and worse to use.
  So you've got a case where young adults today have to work on a computer platform completely foreign to them while young adults 20 years ago usually had 5 - 10 years experience as a user on that platform.
  
  Sounds like a pretty accurate take to me.
  
  A lot of current users aren't ever exposed to the underlying tech. They only use a few applications. The ideal device for them is a tablet (or a ChromeBook). They know next to nothing about files, networks, most aspects of hardware (except the bling factor, maybe).
  It's both a good and a bad thing.
  
  I have two older siblings that are xennials, and I would say people born from about the late 70’s to the early 90’s represent the peak of technological literacy. It’s almost like a bell curve… the further you get away from each end of that range, the more technologically incompetent (on average) people are.
- In my social circle, none of the 15-25 hav the slightest idea how to work a computer (no, wait, there's one out of the six or seven). So they all come to the nearly 60 year old me that has to explain to them again what a directory is.
  
  Yeah, not being able to touch-type on a keyboard seems to be a skill many don't develop/aren't taught too. Basic stuff just gets skipped over because it's just assumed young people are good with tech (probably a holdover from raising millennials)
- I'm Gen X and credit playing video games for most of my self-taught knowledge on how computers work. My first computer was an Apple IIe, which didn't require much more than putting disks in and typing startup commands, but when we got a Windows 3.1 PC next, I had to learn about file systems and troubleshooting when things inevitably went wrong. To this day, most of the computer stuff I've learned was from trying to get games working.
  
  Yeah, PC gaming was a pretty significant motivator for me to learn all sorts of tech related skills.
- GenXer here. I’m not tech illiterate, except when it comes to social media. Then it’s more of a Luddite thing, because in 2007-8, I worked with early Facebook APIs (graph bullshit) and developed a deep hatred for Zuckerberg and his shitty website.
  I think the nerdy Gen X are a lot more technical than the nerdy Zoomers because we had to know more to use early PCs as kids. But it also meant a lot of us didn’t get into it until a bit later in life (or to make a Buck before the various don’ dot-com bubbles burst).
  
  I'm gen z and I've noticed the same thing. Nearly all gen z use computers, but because its so accessible and simplified they are nearly all tech illiterate.
  The people most knowledgeable about tech that I've met have been gen x. A lot of them are unfortunately some of the least knowledgeable though because they had no experience with computers until later in life.
  
  GenXer here. I’m not tech illiterate, except when it comes to social media.
  Same. It's funny that the things that come naturally to Zoomers are intimidating to me and vice-versa. Of course, a big part of that is that I didn't grow up with social media and therefore have no interest in it (except for message board style things like Lemmy.)
- I don't know, I had my dad on the phone the other day. He was explaining his backup routine and rotation between two different location. He is 65, worked most of his life with unreliable OS. Sensitive hard drives, floppies etc. He know how to make sure his data is safe.
  
  There are absolutely boomers who are well versed in tech, shit some of them helped invent it, but there's definitely a trend of boomers in general being tech illiterate.

This really bugs me at work sometimes. I'm a designer and I often have to split up images in several mails because others don't understand the concept of archives. Or even worse: send the photos as "excel image file" (slapping them all in a excel sheet). I even once had a printery tell me my file was corrupt because it was (accidentally on my part) compressed as 7z. Oh how I would love to send files more often as 7zip... But that's black magic apparently.
- I used to work in a camera shop back in the day. Alot of people came in with a thumb drive of some sorts, and wanted pictures printed of images in a word-document. They were baffeled when we said we can't print it with our lab. "But it is right there on the screen!"
- I mean Excel files are zips, so that kinda checks out.
- Well at least windows just treats archives as folders as infæ you can just double click on them. Don't even have to extract anything to work with the files
  Windows 11 also supports rar and 7zip natively

Behold the difference between the generation growing with Win98, where everything was manual and accessible and doing it wrong could mean a manual install, and the generation growing up with iPhones, where you're not allowed to change anything whatsoever.
- Ease of use. Don't worry about the man behind the curtain. Just stare at your tik tok
  
  I've been teaching my gen Z coworkers about stuff. They are good kids, we should try and learn them a thing or two ❤️ They're not all lazy brain dead kids. They kind of look up to us elder millennials.

im a gardener. some apprentice who has never owned a computer, not bcs they couldnt afford it, but bcs due to mobile phones there simply is no need for it, asked me how to shut down a computer. not kidding. it wasnt even some obscure gnu/linux distro, it was bog-standard windows 10.
- See, there is a bit of nuance to this. Windows has multiple shutdown states that make the computer appear off, but actually put the computer to sleep. The apprentice probably didn’t know that but this is lemmy and if I can’t “actually” someone with worthless information here, where can I?
  
  This reminded me so much of Reddit comments that my blood pressure went up for a sec.
  
  Hey boss, I want to shut down the computer, should I turn it off completely or do you prefer sleep, if yes which sleep state?
- Pre Win98, you could just flip the power switch.

I work with a couple guys that basically aim to do as little as possible in as much time as possible.
I'm a millenial and it seems i've become a boomer, telling these guys to stop building cardboard towers as everyone notices and will tell their supervisor. Then they get angry with me for some weird ass reason while they just spent 3 days doing one hour worth of work.
Our supervisor wants me to get them to work better, but it's 4 of them and one of me.
I understand the mindset that it's the employers task to supply you with work, but there's plenty y'all just refuse to pick it up and get at it.
- are you the manager? if not it ain't your problem, and now you have a valid excuse if your stuff doesn't get done. My work tried that shut with me, I just do my work, then leave, if everything isn't done that's a management problem.
- Either you're their manager/supervisor and it's your job to figure it out, or you aren't, and you shouldn't give a shit.
- Our supervisor wants me to get them to work better
  That's nice. Not going to happen but he can want it as much as he wishes.
  I have a manager who is a bit like this and expects me to do a lot of his job for him (I mean he is useless), but the thing is if he doesn't do his job, he gets in trouble. If I don't do his job bugger all happens to me.
- What incentivises them to do more work in less time? How much autonomy or input do they have on deciding what tasks need to be done, and when?

Why is the default ZIP method disabled in their os? Fake
- It's at work...
  
  Why would workplaces disable the OS's free ability to use a zip?

They grew up on iPads and phones.

Meh. Being young, ignorant and willing to learn in a new job is very different that being old, proudly ignorant and refusing to adapt to how your current job evolved.

wut is (z, b)oomer. all users are usually dumb. if you are average half are dumber than you

It's a work PC. And for the users work PCs operate entirely different from all other similar OS machines they know from private life.

Interestingly I heard that it's not that they're less technology skilled exactly (I'm not commenting that I'd or isn't the case), but instead grown up on a different platform, notably iPhone/iPad/android instead of a PC.
This has meant a big push by companies to develop mobile first. So much so, some companies don't even have a browser version of their system anymore.
- Growing up with iPhones that don't let you change anything will absolutely make you less technologically skilled.
- Most of the time mobile apps are just browsers in disguise
- Yeah they've always been able to just long press on a file to mark a batch of files to be sent. Any use cases for archives they had were solved adequately by this. However, those aren't better solutions. There are other use cases for archives which those systems can't solve. The companies you point out that develop mobile-only, are hamstringing themselves IMO. I can think of a couple of occasions where I've disengaged with a company specifically because they pushed all possible interactions through their app with no redundancy, and then some function in the app didn't work

I'm mostly afraid of these people will end up being teachers, mentors and managers for my future kids... I'll need to do so much home schooling but at least that'll hopefully only make me bond better with my kids.

💀

Bro...

I'm on the flip side. I know what a zip is and I can't stand you using closed source suck-your-soul.
- Sometimes I send .tar.zst's on purpose to keep people on their feet. They need to stay up to date on their compression algorithms

We asked an intern to write a lettre for a RMA, and he printed the letter, we tell him what he has to modify. He is like "I have to type all this again" "What do you mean lil intern?!?". Intern deleted his file after printing it. O.o
- Even then they could've used Google lens or some other OCR thing. Hell, today I might even ask chatgpt to do that

Annon accidentally a 93mb zip file. is this dangerous?

Weird, right? I feel like I grew up in the perfect generation, where I started with MS-DOS and Windows ‘95. We had to KNOW how things worked in order to get games and other software running. Had to know how to install, how to fix driver issues, how to configure things, etc. Even (re)install a complete OS.
But tech these days ‘just works’. A lot of software is one click installs, with no real user interaction needed. And everything else is easily accessed on the web or a phone app. Windows itself is also much more reliable, so even that doesn’t require much knowledge.
It’s made everything available to a much wider audience, but it also means people don’t need to develop actual skills in this area. A good example is my dad. He never figured out how to do things on our Windows ‘95 PC, but he loves his iPad because it’s so easy toddlers can use it.
- That's why everyone should use Linux.
  
  As someone who isn't technologically ignorant: I'd rather have things that "just work" over things that I spend 3 days trying to make work and it still doesn't.
  
  To not get anything done except setting up the OS till 3am

That’s partially fault of IT isn’t it. They didn’t set the computer up with an unzipper.
- Unless they are on a super old ass version of Windows: Zip and Unzip functionality is built directly into the OS. They would open like any other folder.
  Microsoft also just announced not too long ago that native .rar file support is being added.
- Windows supports zip files natively

They don't know how to program in assembly because they don't have to know. Same is true for WinRAR, rotary phones, stick shifts, and all the other cruft that prior generations had to deal with.
Hardship makes you hardy but reducing hardship is progress.
- The industrious among us just find other frontiers to push and hardships to subject ourselves to.
- Zips aren't "cruft". Many new formats are zips with another name, like all the office OOXML formats (docx,xlsx,...), 3mf and so on.

Maybe he's telling you something here though. Like how zip is a shitty format to send anything with?

We have gygabites of storage on our phones and on the cloud, it makes sense that zoomers don't know what a zip file is. It's like chastising me, an early millenial, because I don't know Morse code.
- Ridiculous take. Zip is used not just for compression but also for bundeling files. If you've used the internet beyond social media you've probably encountered a zip file. It's just incompetence regardless of age.
  
  Especially since even if you didn't know about zip files at all for some reason, you could just look it up before declaring nothing works.
  The real incompetence isn't what you don't know, it's the lack of problem solving
  
  But they don't use the internet beyond social media. And chastising them for that is like getting mad at cows because they eat out of a manger.