Comment by janalsncm
16 days ago
I have a friend who is a social worker. Hearing stories from them, I think people severely overestimate the level of involvement that many parents have with their kids. Social workers who are checking in on middle school kids at the hospital with burn marks on their arms or elementary school kids who showed up under the influence of cannabis aren’t also going to have time to enforce online safety.
If this is what it means for a parent to “do their job” then what do you propose happens to parents who are unwilling or unable to police their kids’ Discord account?
For this reason, I think we are seeing the beginning of the end of low-trust social media. They can’t tell if a user is a child or even a human. People will move to things like group chats because they don’t rely on sending your ID to a verification service in the Philippines.
Parents are just burnt out, I think. Online spaces have become so consolidated and enshittified that it’s seriously a choice between basically keeping them offline - which is a very socially isolating thing to be these days - and letting a small number of faux-accountable monopolies ranging from Discord to Google and Meta call the shots. It’s kind of a no-win situation.
I’d love to have my kids in relatively small, intimate online spaces where I can’t necessarily assume they will be perfect (nor do I want them to be - they deserve to have some room to learn to navigate problems for themselves) but I can at least assume they won’t be overwhelmed by the impossibility of successfully navigating life in a globalized fishbowl. But if there’s one thing late stage capitalism abhor, it’s a self-contained community of real humans from which the powers that be can’t extract “value”.
And those burnt out parents are the “good” parents who are even trying. There’s a huge cohort of parents that let iPads parent their kid, unsupervised all day. And that’s not illegal.
> Parents are just burnt out, I think.
I'm sorry but I don't buy this. We have been parenting forever, parents get burnt out. That doesn't mean you just ignore what your kids are doing.
It's your responsibility to be their guardians, not the government.
No one has the ability to monitor the frequency and volume of their children’s social contact on a platform like Discord or Roblox. It would be a full-time job for me.
Can we normalize “it takes a village” again? After all, we do let bars and liquor stores get a slap on the wrist for selling to minors. If you let a child into an adult movie theater you’d be in jail. Why do we pretend we don’t live in a world with laws and standard conduct the second we connect to a modem?
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Theoretically we shouldn’t need speed limits in school zones. Personal responsibility should be enough, since no reasonable person wants to run kids over. And yet, we have speed limits in school zones.
Laws do not prevent crimes. Neither does personal responsibility. What laws can do that personal responsibility cannot do is convert moral guilt into legal guilt. You might feel bad for running a kid over. You’ll feel even worse after being punished for it.
Also, corporations are legal entities. They do not have personal responsibility. They respond to regulations.
Since when is pointing out one of the many ways that oligarch capitalism makes life unnecessarily hard for everyday people, and wishing that antitrust laws were actually enforced so that, among other things, we could have more options for taking care of our kids without resorting to authoritarian power moves like this new Discord policy (or, to take another example, YouTube making it hard for media critics to talk about cartoons without getting age restricted) asking the government to take care of my kids for me?
Believe it or not, the current neoliberal hellscape actually empowers the people who want to parent my kids for me. Because when everything is run by massive and centralized powers, most people (quite understandably) stop being able to conceive of handling things in a way that isn’t yet another massive centralized power move.