Some of us know these kids are cash cows and are behaving like the anti-gun-regulation lobby of the tech world.
I am not an app developer and derive no income from the sale or usage of smartphones or their software.
I have every intention of raising my kids as far away from smartphones as possible, ideally until they're at least teenagers. My fiance and I have already discussed keeping the household as de-screened as possible, it's something we consider a lot.
It's interesting you'd suggest that an app developer would have a conflict of interest that other engineers might not. In my experience, engineers who work with mobile apps, especially ones in the social space, are way, _way_ more likely to understand and be wary about the dangers in overexposing kids to a life of feeds. Colloquially, we call this "seeing how the sausage gets made".
Having said that, I’m still an app dev (personal finance & budgeting) and I’m excited to onboard my kid into that world.
You can set the phone to only run an approved list of apps (like Phone and Messages, and that’s it, no App Store)
Screentime control are absolutely lackluster
iOS controls have worked well enough so far but the school chromebooks have nada.
Social media at the start may have been neutral to slightly negative, but once creators started optimizing and the various "algorithms" were installed and A/B tested, what came out the end is some pretty nasty stuff mentally. Junk food for the soul.
A programmer keeps an axe on the wall next to the electric kettle.
The only mobile phone app I did is a boring industrial thing that reads some sensors and massages the data however the user directs it. It's so boring I bet no one ever starts it except during work hours.
I admire your personal dedication to making it as hard as possible to be exploited, but we really can't expect non-tech people to go to the same lengths. And at one point, we might have to admit that parents who spend 99% of their time struggling to even get by and do the basics for their kids need schools and other resources to help out by doing things such as banning phones.
Here in Europe, phone is necessary for daily life - even as a kid. And it makes it so much easier, better - and interesting, if you teach your kids that. My kids use their phone like a Star Trek tricorder, using various apps and tools to learn about the world around them. Something I wished was possible when I was a kid but it was a pure scifi - now it's here and I'm not going to take that away from them just because some bureaucrat thinks parents can't control their kids enough.
What if we swapped this out for "not taking edibles during class", would that infringe on your kids personal freedom too much?
In a world where parents feed their children fast food all the time, and let them play mindless Ipad games from an early age, I have lower faith in every parent reading the relevant literature and implementing best practices than I have in academic institutions figuring out how to optimize learning (not that I have a huge amount of faith in that either, just more)
But lets say they do find that smart phones during class _are_ good, but just social media is bad, then it also sounds reasonable to me that a kids phone might be required to have some type of block on social media app during class time. Just like it sounds reasonable for a school to ban papers _with porn printed on them_ during class time. There's no issue besides on a practical level with getting more fine grained and isolating the impact.
Or do you also oppose that later, is your kid printing porn on paper and bringing it to school part of the personal freedom you want control over and which the school should not have to authority to ban?
I’ve never heard anybody say this, but I think one of their goals is to teach appropriate use of phones.
What frustrates me about these discussions is the same pro-libertine knee jerk individualist response is parroted for it, even though this choice is not impacting you, or at least, not only and for the purposes of the topic, any impact on you is ancillary. These decisions impact your children, and not just now, but for the rest of their lives. If all goes to plan, the ripple effects from these choices will be in motion still long after you are dead.
It's the same kind of irritated I get when parents are advocating for themselves having say over school curricula, testing standards, sports programs, what have you over trained professionals who's entire careers are centered on getting kids the best outcomes possible, but who must argue as though the opinions of Bernadette Peters, who has never left Blenheim, South Carolina in her 37 years on this planet, also has input to offer.
And like, this isn't a criticism of you, it sounds like you're doing it as close to right as one can manage. And also, what about all the kids at the school who's parents don't know what you know? What about all the ones who lack the knowledge to pass on, let alone the will to? What about ones who's kiddos struggle with tech in general, either because of ignorance, or because of neuro-divergence, or because of accessibility issues, or any number of other problems?
You're effectively arguing that because you've taught your kids how to consume alcohol in a healthy way that they should be able to carry booze to school. However true that might be for your kids, there are also other kids around too, and the school admin is responsible for all of them, not just yours.
You raised an interesting point while talking about the professionals at school vs some backwater person. I wish I had your trust in their good intentions and abilities, but where I live these supposed professionals don't even speak English, and they're pushing their conservative agendas. It isn't unusual that my kid googles some bullshit a teacher says and it's proven wrong by a fact checking organization. For example, if my kids couldn't fact check all the shit they said during covid, I would be very unhappy.
I chuckled at this. The "carefully planning nerds" are being ruthlessly called out here, and I for one did not see it coming.
They are also joint owners of our bank accounts. We've told them if they ever get the news that we have died, they should go withdraw a bunch of money to carry them over until all the estate stuff settles.
Seems like your kids are being raised well.
Even if you play Roblox for free, you're a) still critical to the developer (whale economics require many peasants for the whales to feel comfortable spending themselves to higher status), and you're still trading off activities that benefit you long term (reading, learning, actually interacting with the non toxic world)
You said it best - the currency is eyeballs - even if you aren’t spending they want your attention without a single regard for the consequences.
One of those things that seems benign for any given app, but in aggregate has negative effects after hours/days/weeks/years of screen time and interactions with all the attention stealing content.
The problem isn’t the phone per se. It’s the apps, which is why I don’t have that shit on my phone and use screen time and app approval with kids.
Not only do these companies addict and drain peoples’ wallets, but I largely blame them for the sorry state of political discourse. I watched it happen. When the algorithmic timelines hit around 2010-ish and everything started to be engagement-maxxed everyone (IMO across the political spectrum not just one side) lost their mind.
Sane well reasoned ideas and nuance don’t maximize engagement. Trolling, controversy baiting lunacy, tabloid and conspiranoid trash, hate, fear, and lynch mobs maximize engagement.
We’ve kind of known since the dawn of media that trash maximizes engagement and that if you engagement-max you get trash, but at this point it should be considered proven.
It’s not unprecedented. China threw off the yoke of opium for one example.
I’m all for free speech and I am against drug criminalization— as long as in both cases the stuff is not particularly addictive.
The deliberate use of addiction to ensnare, monetize, or control other people whether through substances, tech, or other media should be a crime. It could be considered a form of assault.
It would be a crime to implant a chip in someone while they slept that could be used to remotely regulate their emotions somehow, right? How is deliberate deployment of addiction different? Instead of implanting something you are exploiting what amounts to a CVE in the human brain. It’s a crime to break into your computer using a zero day, but it’s okay for me to hack your brain?
This is the “Butlerian Jihad” we need — not against technology but against addiction. “Thou shalt not exploit security vulnerabilities in the human mind.”
We know enough about the mechanisms of addiction that I think we can be reasonably objective about identifying it.
A first step might be to make it civilly actionable. If you can prove that someone deliberately worked to make their product addictive they can be the target of a class action lawsuit. You could, for example, sue social media companies for the hours of lost time resulting from their addictive designs.
I share concerns about this but I feel like eventually it won’t matter. We are getting so good at addicting each other and it’s getting so ubiquitous that eventually I think there will be a crusade with a lot of collateral damage.
Either that or we will just accept a society with a massive Matrix-like addict slave class. Maybe that’s the outcome.
It's also very refreshing to see the the link between social degeneration and these "addictionware companies" being highlighted. I also watched it happen! And sometimes you'd think you were imagining the whole thing, watching people dance around and explain away the situation.
It can be hard to even make the point in the first place, as any sort of metacomment on politics is inevitably taken as a sneaky argument for one side or the other. It's hard to see a way out of the situation (barring some major technological or social shift, provoked by who knows what).
(I've had people scream at me because I am not a parent. When they found out what I do professionally, they were immediately humbled.)