Billie Eilish, I love you dearly—but what in the world are you talking about when it comes to technology?
In an interview with Rolling Stone ahead of Eilish's third studio album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, the singer went deep on her sexuality, masturbation, and upcoming new songs. That’s all fine and dandy; we love to see a woman confident about sex and her work! Eilish is (and always has been) an icon on that front. But there’s one quote in the interview that is so bizarre, so incorrect, so unsettling, that I have to point it out: Eilish claims that Gen Z doesn’t know how to operate a computer keyboard.
At one point in the profile, Eilish sits at her home studio in Los Feliz, working at her brother Finneas’ laptop. Eilish—who was born in 2001—says she struggles with computers. But it’s not just that; Eilish states that the entirety of Gen Z is lost on the matter.
“I never learned to type because I wasn’t that generation, and now I regret it,” Eilish says. “To be fair, my parents never taught me.”
Having been born in 1999, two years before Eilish, I’d like to set the record straight. In elementary school, the grade above mine piloted the district’s new typing program. To claim that we weren’t part of “that generation” is out of touch.
Gen Z didn’t sit memorizing the finger placement—left hand on ASDF, right on JKL;, thumbs on the space bar—to be told that none of us know anything about typing. We need to stand strong here before older generations see this quote and laugh at our lack of ability to type. Look, I’m typing on my laptop right now! I typed this entire sentence out in under 10 seconds. Please hold your applause.
That said, everyone goes to different schools. Eilish was homeschooled, so her quote that her parents didn’t teach her does add up—that just wasn’t part of her curriculum. (Also, if Finneas owns the keyboard, doesn’t that mean he can type? Did he learn while she didn’t?)
But typing was in the curriculum for most other Gen Z students who attended public and private schools. Not only that, but most of us received iPhones as we were growing up—so if we didn’t learn how to type on computers, we memorized the keyboard on touchscreens, and they’re really not all that much different. So if Eilish wants a quick lesson, I—The Daily Beast Obsessed’s resident member of Gen Z—will gladly teach her the magic of the keyboard.
