Comment by jjulius
1 day ago
>What a dumbphone doesn't solve is the social tax — opting a kid out of the addictive layer can also opt them out of the group chat. That's the actually-hard part.
It's hard to say how this'll go in the long run. I have two littler children right now, and a lot of the parents of much younger kids, at least in the area we live in, seem to be trying really hard to move in the "dumb phone/don't let them fall into these addictive layers" direction. Many of the parents we meet talk about eventually giving them dumb phones, or getting a landline at home so kids can call each other.
My hope is that with sustained effort from the community, this sort of concern falls by the wayside to a good degree. Who knows how it'll play out in the long-term given how much our culture has structured itself around this bullshit, but it's nice to see folk trying to push back in a more concerted way.
I imagine it’ll be quite socially stratified - upper-middle class parents will be giving their kids dumbphones and keeping them off social media, possibly sending them to ‘tech-free’ schools, while poorer parents won’t.
Unfortunately this seems quite plausible from today’s POV. As the old saying goes if you don’t want to be the product, you’ll have to pay for it. And I see only a silver of people being rich enough to afford and educated enough to care for paying privacy- or sanity-preserving tools and services.
We’ve dug this hole ourselves, without knowing better, over the last decade or so. Most social life / communications happens inside those platforms.
If we want our kids to thrive in the world without being hooked on this attention syphoning machines, we must get the socials out of those walled gardens.
This is a huge challenge, and no one but us will build it. It will require deliberate action in our community.
It's a massive struggle. I'm somewhat thankful that we didn't have kids until after it was apparent what the impact of this sort of ecosystem has on them, and it's refreshing to meet other parents who feel the same way. Who knows what kind of success we'll have, but it's reassuring to know that there's a push from at least some subset of parents with littles.
> We’ve dug this hole ourselves, without knowing better, over the last decade or so.
I tire of hearing this.
We definitely knew better. I definitely did. Lots of people who did not opt into these services did. We were not silent about it.
Everyone else just refused to listen. Willful ignorance is how they got there.