Kids (With Phones) Are Alright

Yeah on one hand phones are great security mechanisms and connectivity tools. Arguments against the physical phone itself and its base hardware functionality, like cameras, phone calling, GPS etc... Are silly. The phone is really useful.

The general argument against modern internet / smartphone usage I really resonate with is algorithmic content. Specifically ones that are not simple filters a user can control. Like "Most viewed past week" Its a huge dark pattern to have content shown to a user because they watched a prior video 2 standard deviations from their norm and the next video shown is "closely related" in a graph theory sense. Mainly because it creates these silos of content for people to continuously watch content, and not see things that are outside of their local "graph" of data unless explictly shown it.

Yesterday's trillion and a half dollars counter-argument:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48817191