Modern Luddites: On Being a Digital Minimalist Family in a Tech-Saturated World
afterbabel.com
afterbabel.com
[0]: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/rethinking-the-l...
As always the problem wasn't necessarily the machines but that they were controlled by wealthy mill owners who reaped all the profits and left the rest of society to starve. England really was patient zero for the toxic economic system still being used in the US.
Do you think the fired workers wouldn't have attacked the machines? I think they totally would have.
The only labor regime where they wouldn't is where they are maintained in perpetuity even though their labor is useless. Something like Soviet Union with "guaranteed jobs", or NYC construction unions with 5x staffing on the same jobs vs even the European companies... all great examples to emulate for "labor movements"!
If per-worker productivity increases, there are 3 options: 1) output increases; 2) under pretty much any labor rights some workers are going to lose jobs; 3) some former workers have to be maintained for free.
Is this supposed "labor" movement advocating for (3)? Because they are clearly against (2), seeing how they destroy the machines, and they are not considering (1) seeing how they don't plan to just get jobs working on the machines and not trying to compete with machines/go to other industries.
If it's (3) it's at best a "now-useless labor" movement. It's like throwing a tantrum because back in the days your parents gave you some cash to clean your room but at present that no longer obtains.
Very apropos
And if it's not us, it's going to the developing world that picks up that mantle anyways. In a few decades you might find yourself in the same situation as former colonial states. Blocking creative destruction has been cited as one of the major factors in why nations fail.
First, I want to survive the next working years, without me and my family starving. I could not give less f... what they'd be doing 100 years from now, if that means being unemployable now...
Then, to answer your question, in many cases, sure, I want to be doing the same things as today. Even better if we regress in some areas, and we do the same things as 20, 30 or even 50 years ago. I could live in a society without smartphones for example (and without even more addictive and worse replacements)...
I think it just as likely that social media-induced social discohesion tanks the country as lack of innovation (particularly since a large proportion of innovation seems to be taking us further and further from a world where normal human interaction doesn't involve a screen).
The need for security is just as much a force of nature as the need for innovation. Unless you provide a solution for both, the cycle will keep repeating.
The problem was then and has always been capitalism: the owners own the tech. which means that The House (owners) always wins in the end as we approach more and more automation. Meanwhile we bicker about “doing the same thing [like some old-fashioned has-been]” and “losing the competition to the developing world” as if that is relevant to anything.
The tech. was never the focal point of the issue.
I'm reminded of stories in China where parents do similar things for gaming, then once college starts the kids swing in excess to the opposite. Some even die of a heart attack. It's much better if kids find their own limits under a safe environment with parents than alone where there is no one to stop them when things go to far. Plus there's going to be a huge social cost in being excluded from group chats or socializing through common interests.
On the flipside, of course that dosen't mean letting kids go online virtually unsupervised all day, but it's the same issue of parents taking the simple, "easy" route of parenting rather than a more nuanced approach.
Okay but this doesn’t mean anything. It’s fine and meaningful if it just means interacting with each other instead of everyone staring at their own tablets or the same TV.
But sometimes people get this idea that if they just remove something civilizational, they’ll get back to being human. But that’s never how it works. Either the mere exposure to it has tainted you forever or it was never that simple to begin with.
The problem with moving to another country in order to get away from your problems (or whatever) is the constant of you. To simplify a lot: your own habitual thoughts. There’s no modern veneer which is obfuscating the real you. The real you is already there. And that takes more than a vipassana retreat/keto diet/tech diet to unravel.
In this case, I think it is reasonable to believe that training certain skills in the absence of distractions and impediments makes sense.
How well will they deal with SNS, work notifications, scams, dark patterns and addictive stuff thrown at them at every corner ?
This reminds me of Mean Girls, where a kid raised with lions is thrown into the college environment. Except we now have so many other layers of complications to also deal with.
It isn't a perfect analogy, but it is similar to we don't give unlimited junk food to children either, as it can be easier to learn moderation starting with healthy habits than the other way around.
We teach kids to not moderate junk food intake at the earlier age, they get to taste it but also learn about it in a friendly environment. Forbidding it until they're on their own and discover it the wildest way is a recipe for disaster, the same way discovering alcohol for the first time in college during wild parties is one of the worst experience we can imagine.
To really get a handle on this we need to figure out what is going on with helicopter parents, a phenomenon that predates cell phones by decades.
Parents spend more time and effort actively parenting kids, much more then previous generations did. And in a put 99% of discussions, there is majority throwing scorn on parents in general. It is simple, parents are internalizing those lessons and do what out current society want from them.
Plus parents are not allowed good time or something for themselves. They have only duties. Note even motivations in this article - parents ts are compassionate toward kids or want easy way for themselves. It is plan to engineer more competitive kid.
If i could have a good filter which really can control my internet usage without giving away my privacy that would be awesome.
But no first of, everything goes through chrome and i do not trust random addons, i can also circumvent it too easily. Then even services like YouTube introduced there shorts. Do i watch them? Sometimes. Do i want to watch them? no
Can i deactivate them? no..
I will continue paying for YouTube premium! But pls give me a personal pseudo budget and not some ass weak timer i can just click away...
On a desktop with a decent browser you should be able to use uBlock Origin (not a random addon by any reasonable measure) and the user-contributed rules from here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube...
(remember this is a fight against interests of the provider vs those of their users, so expect it being a cat-and-mouse game of rules that stop working).
On handheld devices, any system that respects user authority to do as they please (i.e. not an iPhone) can install a patched version of the YouTube {revanced.}app, which ironically attends better to its users' needs, and allows disabling Shorts altogether. Again, it's a bit of an antagonist position, so breakages can happen (VERY rarely, though).
It's like shorts are a brain glitch where you can artificially quench your desire to do stuff with empty filler.
a lot of hot takes, stimulating social disputes, interesting logical constructions, but it is all gone within 5 minutes of getting up.
I know it's an addon. I can't think of anything else other then using a different service.
Sure you can, just click the "x" on the top right of the shorts row and they will be gone. Though, you might have to re-hide them every x days, but still if you don't want to watch them you really don't have to.
This is the domain of your conscience. It notifies you when your actions and values lack alignment.
Yes you can. When I turned off search and watch history the shorts interface was deactivated. It just had a notice saying that I need to enable the haptics to use the feature.
Saying "I just need a good piece of software to control my addiction to software" sounds insane when phrased like that; "I just need another cig to control my addiction to nicotine".
Devices like the litephone, or the recent frontpage post about the Apple Watch iPod case, are kind of missing the point; if you're going out to buy another device to address your problem with using devices, what you're participating in is performance art, not self-improvement. Did you see that the litephone 3 costs $800?! The most digitally minimalist people I know use full-featured smartphones; sometimes rather old, but still fully capable. They just use them far, far less. No one is telling you to get rid of Youtube, but maybe a homepage smattered with ludwig and asmongold videos indicates you have a problem.
I deleted Reddit entirely during the API fiasco, but I still watch YouTube since it's basically what I treat as my TV. However, I have a caveat that I keep myself productive until it's dark outside aside from the occasional 10 minute mental break, and during meals. Once it's about 10pm, then I'll relax.
I don't let any kind of entertainment or news app send my phone notifications. I interact with them exclusively on my own terms.
With how algorthmic content feed is, you've got to be willing to set boundaries for your tech and yourself. Find things you like to do, and replace social media time with that. There's an entire world of information at your fingertips to learn absolutely anything you could ever want to, take advantage of it.
I'm not addicted to software, i'm addicted to entertainmened optimized for grabbing my attention.
And the comparision to cigs is not far away. They have also been designed to be addictive, a lot of people struggle for their whole live to get away from them.
My planning brain can easily see what i don't want to do or have, my doing brain is not strong enough to then just execute on this. Otherwise i would be a rich, supersporty, multilingual expert in multiply fields.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@FredericSchuller
> “Conformity is overrated,” I tell them jokingly, but that is small consolation when you are the only kid going into tenth grade without a smartphone. My oldest son wants a phone badly because everyone else has one, but that’s not a compelling enough reason to buy him one.
It's easy for parents to completely misjudge how the child will be affected by being the only one in their class who has to live by different rules. In some ways, this feels more like a sociological experiment the parent is interested in doing, when really, the parent should be setting up the children for success in adulthood.
> For instance, my son cannot participate in any classroom activity that involves a QR code, a fact I’ve had to point out to his teachers. Sometimes it’s hard for my kids to find information about group projects or extracurricular activities when social media is used to communicate with students, as opposed to updating a website or sending an email.
Come on.
Basically, what you're talking about isn't a long term problem.
Maybe 2 of out 3 kids will have a happy "digitally minimalist" childhood and the 3rd one will be absolutely miserable. Could easily happen. Kids have their own personalities after all. How will these parents respond? My bet is the unhappy child will get blamed for being unhappy and the happy siblings will be used as proof that the parents are right.
Lack of social engagement in childhood damages those skills forever. You may learn to get along and answer politely, but learn ing to belong, to know when and how ask for what is your right and when and how step back is massively harder in adulthood.
But the thing is, we’ve replaced the time he would spend on the iPad with social activities. Minecraft becomes nights at the playground. Amongus becomes fishing at the pier.
And as you would suspect, he has no social problems. He’s constantly socializing. You don’t get good at talking to people by turning your personality into just the right shade of beige or by getting the true neutral human experience. You get good by practice.
I'm not a parent so don't have much of a saying on how to educate kids. But I wholeheartedly agree on pushing back against wrong usages of technologies.
My bar for "wrong" is using a private, foreign, unofficial platform like a social network to communicate official stuff. Schools should have or buy access to a custom platform that is concerned only with teacher-student communications, and not with harvesting everybody's personal information.
Some people consider that Instagram is a fine way to convey group projects or activities. But that's because they already got used to using it. How about TikTok then? let's move to a school that requires children to use TikTok or Snapchat because that's where they decided to publish their info! Sounds ridiculous to me, well, because it is. Same for requiring other networks.
So thenceforth she stuck out and was hard to relate to I suppose all the way through high school. No, our family wasn't a crammer family, and she didn't seem too psychologically damaged then or now, working on a food science PhD (why? asks her overly practical father) at UCD.
Fitting in to the giant mode of the mediocre self damaging but socially favored crowd has costs too.
I was flabbergasted
In adulthood, the only thing I really need the phone for is Duo, and my work offers to provide yubikeys as an alternative. I've just been too lazy to get one. It's also nice to have a crappy camera on hand when I don't have the real camera with me. That's about it.
"Come on" seems like a crazy reaction to me to schools making it mandatory to use services that spy on kids and show them ads. That's actually a huge motivator for me to want to home school my kids. It is completely unacceptable to require kids be exposed to that. It's unacceptable to allow them to be exposed to that while they're in the school's care.
When I have checked my Facebook on occasion, it appears to be a ghost town with maybe ~3 people I know that use it. Or maybe Facebook simply does a poor job now of showing you your friends' posts so it only appears to be abandoned at a glance. Hard to tell without putting in a bunch of work to go mine my friends' profiles.
In any case, school business just like any government business should not require agreeing to a company's ToS. Especially not one in the spying/advertising business.
The beautiful thing about being a contrarian is you can only win: either they agree with you, so you must've gotten through to them, or they don't, so you must've gotten through to them.
> The rest of the population can eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch and drink Coke if that's what they want, but it's not going to be in our house.
And then the nutritionist and psychologist will beat into you that there is no such thing as junk food, it is just a food, and drinking coke wont harm you or your kid.
You don't have to give a kid an eating disorder to explain that candy for breakfast isn't acceptable, and we don't drink dissolved sugar (except perhaps as an extremely rare treat, like cake). Just set an example of a normal life where we don't do those things. Let them see the results speak for themselves as they observe society, and let them eventually ponder if everyone is wrong about something so obvious, how good could society (including, apparently, credentialed 'experts') possibly be at other judgements it makes?
A can of coke won't harm you in the slightest.
Especially for teenagers, they would had to eat super massive amount of potatoes, so actually getting calories only from that would be spectacularly bad idea.
Currently nutritionists work really hard to undo damage the sort of things you are saying are causing.
A can of Coke will not harm you in any meaningful way, but people do not have a can of Coke. They have 1+ cans of Coke every day. That absolutely will harm you.
I don't know how you took me to suggest someone eat only potatoes. I said a potato (anything, really) is a better source of calories than a Coke for pretty much all purposes. Pretty much no person anywhere needs an extra 39 g sugar with no nutrients at all in their diet.
Currently, 74% of the US is overweight or obese by BMI, which is likely an under-estimate of excess bodyfat: another 10% or so may have Normal Weight Obesity (i.e. skinnyfat), which is an understudied but increasingly recognized problem. Even without the issue of excess bodyfat, regularly creating large blood sugar spikes like that is not good for you. If nutritionists are working really hard to combat the idea that drinking literal sugar water is inappropriate for anyone to be doing with any regularity, then they are dropping the ball. In fact, you can find plenty of resources for the general public from the CDC about the deleterious effects of sugary beverages[0], and encouragement to reduce consumption of added sugars[1], specifically sugary beverages[2], the leading source of excess sugar in American diets.
Saying that candy is not food is not fear based nutrition. It is saying that candy is not food. We're not "afraid" of sugar or carbs; we just know "Skittles" aren't a food group, and have no purpose in any meal plan. Part of teaching kids how to be healthy is teaching them that we eat a variety of foods which each contribute different necessary nutrients with an appropriate calorie budget for our activity levels so that they understand how to one day develop their own plans. In that context, it ought to be obvious why our diet doesn't include pure sugar.
The competent thing to do is to teach people not to have emotional attachments to food. "This is not good for me (in fact injures me) and serves me no purpose, so I will not eat/drink it, and I will not buy it." That's it. The disorder is getting emotional about it and thinking it's somehow "damaging" to exclude junk food from one's diet.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/data-statistics/sugar-sweetene...
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/healthy-weight-growth/be-sugar-smart/ind...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/healthy-weight-growth/rethink-your-drink...
It sux
As a parent you have to make decisions with your child’s best interests at heart even when you know they conflict with the child’s desires. Doing this is not narcissistic it’s just good parenting.
The list of things that are conceivably harmful to a child or teenager is practically infinite. It includes almost all sports, most hobbies, travel, and most food and drink. If you're going to ban everything that might be harmful of out an abundance of caution you will do tremendous harm to your kid. Yes, a smartphone might harm your kid but so might the absence of a smartphone. That's why it's good to look at the actions of other dedicated and thoughtful parents. If they all decide to give their kid a smartphone despite the known downsides it's not neglect, but the result of a thoughtful evaluation of the pros and cons. Demanding that a smartphone must be proven safe (impossible) is an absurd standard of evidence you don't apply to other areas of your life.
Suspecting drinking from lead pipes was bad would make you look crazy to your contemporaries fifty years ago. Avoiding them would require huge amounts of behavioral change and investigation. But with perfect information very few parents would consciously choose to let their children damage their brains.
When it’s technology, and we’re starting to see the indicators, why is it different?
Using your kids as a social experiment to sell your blog posts while preventing them to access any online content seems quite narcissistic to me.
Allowing your kids in-pocket access to adversarial forms of entertainment, each competing to maximize time on platform, seems like a riskier bet to me. The experiment is forced. We’re all a part of this brave new world.
Most people against device use that I’ve talked to have a distinction between consumption and creation. Writing a blog is a creative activity. Consuming TikTok is not, even if you are a “creator” on the platform. Kids are not responsible enough to care about the difference or think about the long term impacts.
And instead of teaching your kids to live in this world you're trying to create a world for them which does not exist anymore.
> distinction between consumption and creation
You can not become a creator if you are not a consumer first.
> Kids are not responsible enough to care about the difference or think about the long term impacts.
That's where your role as a parent comes in handy - teach them with the best of your abilities, don't give up on them.
Much like you don’t need to have any experience with computers to become a programmer, you don’t need experience with TikTok to swipe or messenger to text.
But avoiding making these behaviors entrenched from a young age is important. I suspect that like starting to drink young had bad average outcomes, so does having a phone, social media, etc.
So far the data seems to pan out. Time will tell. But at this point there’s mainly intuition and critical thought. Mine has led me here and yours has led you somewhere else.
I’m not going to judge you for it. I just don’t agree with you.
That's a good analogy. In my experience, most alcoholics/gamblers/dangerous substance abusers never had parents which taught them how to deal with a given addiction - they just brush off the subject strictly forbidding their kids to do any of them.
My 3 year old daughter picks up my guitar and strums it and makes up a song about not wanting to do bed time. She doesn't need exposure to consumer culture to create; it's innate. In fact she's already got some Wesley Willis vibes going without ever having heard him.
Sure you can keep your kids away in a farm away from any human interactions too. Or in a basement if you live in a city.
> it's innate
Playing guitar is innate to your 3 year old daughter? Hope one day I'll listen to her album with chords & rhythms no one has ever heard before! /s
Obviously she's not going to go through life having never heard any music, but I don't think you'd really need to hear someone else to be able to walk up to a piano, press some keys (perhaps even simultaneously), and think "hey, that sounds nice". It's pretty easy to discover a bunch of chords by accident. Rhythm is even easier to make up your own thing. Whether no one has ever heard it is irrelevant to whether you need to have heard someone else to make it up.
She doesn't need to make an album for you. She can create for her and for us. You and the people in your life can create for you. That's kind of the point of not buying into consumer culture.
Nobody exists in a vacuum, we're all consumers of the culture which surrounds us. I think you're confusing consumption and mass consumption.
Quote of the century. I couldn't agree more.
As someone who makes a living from tech, I want it less and less in my life in my spare time. That doesn't mean it's not important, useful and gives us boundless opportunities.
Playing video games on the TV during the afternoons in our summer holidays are some of my favourite memories. As an introvert and nerd, it gave me time to decompress and practice some skills, while it gave my parents some time to nap and have kid-free time after a morning of playing on the beach in the sun.
Video games were also one of the things I could bond over and practice some comptetition with my dad and much-older sibling.
Balance is key.
Also, article makes it like that's almost an unique behavior, while where we live (Switzerland), its more like default of good parenting, definitely a majority of our peers do it similarly.
Doctors went through cancelling their FB accounts, we know number around us (wife is a doctor so I mean tens of various doctors mostly with smaller kids). Instagram was never a thing for them, neither for us. Raising their kids without digital screens either altogether or in a minimal fashion, till teenage years. It gets harder for parents, but anybody can see how much additional quality this brings into parenting.
But this goes with the example parents set - if they are half-present and glued to screens themselves, don't expect miracles from those poor kids which imitate everything they see, and are very vulnerable to addictive behavioral patterns. When I compare such parenting with allowing screens almost infinitely due to laziness/exhaustion of parents, its heartbreaking how kids often end up later in life.
Not even bread, it's digital sugar
That includes any means of communicating with other kids other then face to face.
Note she’s not anti-tech but pro childhood & the time & space & innocence you need to develop yourself.
The device access my kiddos had was not an enrichment. I see that now. I like her compromise of tech in the common area but no individual social accounts until 18.
[1] Lichenpedia: A Brief Compendium
I tend to say that some are Luddite because even if they perfectly can they refuse to operate autonomously from their desktops, they choose not to care their digital life, they choose to stick with deprecated solutions, who cost them more money and trouble than choosing the current tech.
Long story short: I think we should describe a bit more the meaning of Luddite, because as a mere tag seems to be a bit too much versatile...
Even among HN readers on this thread, there seems to be a lot of conflating "technology" with the spyware and attention kidnapping products of surveillance capitalism.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s with plenty of technology for the era; sure, we had a lot less of it than the rich kids did, but that was mostly just jealousy that my friends could play "better" games than I could. Technology was a thing you used when you sat down and intended to use it. It wasn't a thing that told you that you were missing out every second you weren't using it, and it wasn't a thing that gatekept access to conversations with people you knew or even basic commercial needs like transportation or food delivery.
The problem isn't tech, it's carrying around dozens of corporations in your pocket.
Older generations experienced often very little emotional intelligence, men were told from very early age to man-up, men don't cry, you don't discuss your feelings because that would be / make you gay. Women were raised from small girls to be obedient wives and mothers and not strive for much else in lives, just shut up and listen.
I can see this massive EQ (or whatever is more appropriate term) difference myself, even me vs my dad, if you know what to look for its in plain sight and its massive. Now some folks from current generation didn't 'escape' this and are still like that, pushing this to their own kids, I somehow did and further I went away the clearer the picture was. I don't blame previous generation, this is how literally everybody functioned and how they were raised. But overall they had more freedom to play and also way more restriction and punishment.
Lets see how today's young will fare in retirement, I don't think it will be a nice picture, definitely not for new generation of young.
I prefer a digital balance over digital minimalism.
The article says nothing of the sort. Nor does it advocate "avoiding Tech as much as possible".
Your comment is completely disconnected from the content of the article.
BUT i dont want my kids using recreational drugs till their prefrontal cortex has matured (or as close to that time as possible)
> I’m not anti-tech. My entire career as a writer and editor has been enabled by the Internet, and I wouldn’t want to go back to a time without it. But great tools don’t automatically make great toys, and I want my kids to learn the difference.