I 100% agree with you, but as a person who came up in the tail end of the generation we’re discussing (we bought a bargain bin TI-99/4a at K-Mart) and also a faculty member who has been teaching young people how to program for the last ten years, I can tell you that the overwhelming response they have to your exhortation is “WHY?” The current crop of computer users is basically everybody, and the current crop of CS students has primarily been motivated by well-paying jobs [1]. So really, if you want to get through to them, you have to motivate why they should care about bits and bytes in the first place.

Astonishingly, the Jobsian “bicycle for the mind” idea failed. Almost nobody now buys a computer to scratch an itch. They buy a computer (smartphone) to keep in touch with friends and family and to sometimes play games. The idea that software is a service that you pay for has been totally normalized. I find that it takes an entire semester of “imagine if!” scenarios before students start to catch on that WOW THIS IS AN AMAZING MACHINE! Some of them never get it. By analogy it’s like being upset at somebody in the 1970’s for blithely using their telephone without even stopping to consider what a fucking miracle the modern telephone system was. They would just stare at you like you have two heads.

I don’t really know how to change this, but I feel like this is the central battle in the fight us scientists and nerds need to fight in order to get the world to give a shit… about anything.

[1] this may be changing