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Today I was listening to a Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast (paywalled on Substack, but available with ads on Apple Podcast), with Louise Perry interviewing John Daniel Davidson, and there were a lot of both dubious and interesting things there, but the one that caused an emotional reaction for me was the discussion of "screens," which I've been having with some in person friends, and seeing around Substack lately as well. I don't like the paradigms of the discussion, but have trouble articulating why. Especially when Davidson kept repeating "it rewires their brains" over and over again. My pop neuroscience model is built on a few fluffy books about neuroplasticity from a decade ago, but I thought basically everything required our brains?
There are indeed a lot of things on the internet, and especially social media, that are bad in the way casinos are bad, but calling this "screens" feels like calling slot machines "levers" or something. It's not like I could have accessed the podcast, other than by learning about it online, anyway. Was it more virtuous to listen to Davidson talk than to read him on Substack? Maybe! I was doing work with my hands while I listened.
Jonathan Haidt thinks that children shouldn't be able to post on social media or have smart phones (or internet enabled private devices more generally), and I think that may be reasonable, especially in regards to people posting photos of themselves, sure, everyone should think long and hard about doing that, and usually shouldn't. But at the same time, I don't really trust the enforcers, and do think that the rules wouldn't fall where I would hope.
Louise Perry didn't push back as much as I would have liked against the "demonic, insane, evil" rhetoric in regards to "screens" (by which I think Davidson meant something more like "the unfiltered internet"), but did mention something like that she thinks it's probably alright for her children to watch fairy tales sometimes, but that it's weird and a bit disturbing if they're watching another kid play on Youtube. And I agree that, yes, that's kind of weird, I wouldn't let my children watch that. I didn't let my child watch more than one episode of "Is it Cake," either, because that also seemed a bit weird.
Anyway, is there anyone out there who has an actually useful way of discussing "screens," especially in respect to children, but also in general? If I had more attention to devote to the topic, maybe I'd try reading Heidegger's Simulcrum and Simulation, since at least the title seems like it's heading in an interesting direction.
I would also love to read that book! Maybe AI can write it someday...
Assuming you mean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, it's a great book, but it's also very theoretical and very much of its time, you're not going to get actionable insights from it. What I would recommend, from a Heideggerian perspective, is Matthew Crawford's book The World Beyond Your Head - Crawford is definitely the best writer on this stuff who makes the philosophy accessible, concrete, and practical. Then, if you want to connect that to more academic philosophy, check out Albert Borgmann's Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, which is an attempt to use Heidegger's theory of technology to interpret the situation of modern life.
Just read Baudrillard's as if it were written by Heidegger, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote-style.
And thanks, I will add those two books to my reading pile to potentially one day get to.
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Hah. It's only fair that you make it your life's goal to educate me on Heidegger (without asking for consent, though I probably would have given it anyway), you notice something attributed to Heidegger come up in conversation, and then, with dawning dismay, realize that it was a misattribution. I can imagine the disappointment! I relish in schadenfreude!
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Neuroplasticity, as you probably intuited, is basically the mechanism by which brains work at all. Reading rewires brains. Suffering rewires brains. Learning to juggle demonstrably changes cortical gray matter density in a way you can see on an MRI, and nobody is writing Substack posts about the demonic influence of juggling on children. When someone says "screens rewire brains," the word doing all the actual work is "rewires" in the pejorative sense, meaning "changes in bad ways that are hard to reverse," but that claim is being smuggled in without justification, under cover of a neuroscience fact that's technically true but completely uninformative. Everything that does anything to you rewires your brain. The question is whether the rewiring is bad, and repeating the neuroplasticity point louder doesn't answer that. It's actually worse than uninformative, because it makes the arguer sound scientific while doing no scientific work whatsoever. The neuroplasticity framing is rhetorical judo: it borrows the authority of neuroscience while gesturing vaguely at harm it has not actually demonstrated.
This matters because it makes the claim unfalsifiable in practice. If a child improves at chess from watching chess videos, that's also rewiring their brain, but presumably Davidson isn't worried about that one. The rewiring point can't distinguish between the two cases, so it isn't doing any of the work it's being credited with. What it's actually doing is priming the listener to accept that harm has been established before the argumentative heavy lifting has begun. I'd rather the harm be argued directly, at which point it would be subject to actual scrutiny, than laundered through the vocabulary of neuroscience.
"Screen time," while far from ideal as terminology, is also far from the worst offense around. The deeper problem is that the category is wildly underdetermined. It seems to matter enormously what the screen displays. A child who spends three hours reading Wikipedia articles about the Byzantine succession crisis, watching a documentary about migratory birds, and then video-calling their grandmother is doing something categorically different from one who has spent those three hours cycling through TikTok thirst traps and casino-mechanic reward loops dressed up as games. Lumping these together under "screens" and then asking whether "screen time" is harmful is a bit like asking whether "food time" is healthy. The answer will depend almost entirely on what food we're talking about, and the aggregate will tell you almost nothing useful.
The medium-is-the-message people have a point that the delivery mechanism shapes the experience in ways content alone doesn't capture. But even granting McLuhan more than he's usually owed, there is still an enormous variance in what screens deliver that gets erased the moment we start talking about "screens" as a unified phenomenon. Calling slot machines "levers" would be a more accurate description than calling all interactive digital media "screens," because at least all levers share the mechanical property of force multiplication. What screens share is a glowing rectangle that displays imagery, which is not doing much analytical work.
A lot of the older empirical literature was also methodologically shabby in ways that should give us pause before crediting its conclusions. Much of it was observational, relied heavily on self-report (or parent-report, which introduces its own distortions), lumped television with TikTok with WhatsApp with gaming with educational apps, and then asked whether the aggregate was good or bad. The effect sizes, when statistically significant at all, were in many cases embarrassingly small. Jean Twenge's widely-cited work was criticized by Andrew Przybylski and Amy Orben, who used the same datasets and found that the association between screen time and adolescent wellbeing was approximately the same magnitude as the association between wearing glasses and adolescent wellbeing. Spectacle-wearing doesn't cause depression; it's a proxy for other things. The same concern applies to screen time, which correlates with socioeconomic status, parenting style, pre-existing behavioral difficulties, and a hundred other things that are doing the actual causal work.
I'd say that it's not worth losing sleep over, except that the most robust and consistent negative findings deal with sleep, specifically that device use near bedtime disrupts both sleep onset and sleep quality, probably through a combination of blue-light effects on melatonin and the obvious fact that you can't scroll and sleep simultaneously. This is worth taking seriously precisely because it's one of the few findings that replicates, has a plausible mechanism, and shows an effect size large enough to matter. The irony, not lost on me, is that "no phones in the bedroom at bedtime" is not a very interesting or monetizable policy conclusion, so it gets lost in the noise of more dramatic claims about societal collapse. Good luck enforcing that for the kids, with how their parents embrace their phones.
Jonathan Haidt thinks children shouldn't be able to post on social media or have smartphone access, and there's something to this if we're being specific about the "posting photos of yourself" piece. The performative identity-construction that social media incentivizes does seem like a weird thing to encourage in adolescents who are in the middle of figuring out who they are, and there's a reasonable case that the particular feedback loops involved are nastier than equivalent analogue experiences of social humiliation, which at least fade from memory. But "no smartphones" as a category encompasses an enormous amount of genuinely useful functionality, and "no posting photos" is a much more targeted and defensible intervention than "no smartphone," which tends to be what people actually mean.
I'm also skeptical of enforcement mechanisms. Not because I think children's online safety doesn't matter, but because I don't trust that the rules will land where the advocates for them seem to expect. Age verification regimes tend to produce either security theater or comprehensive surveillance infrastructure, and comprehensive surveillance infrastructure does not stay narrowly targeted at protecting children for very long. The same legislative sessions that produce "think of the children" bills about social media often produce other bills I would find considerably more alarming. The willingness to build the infrastructure is the thing that should worry us, independent of the stated justification.
I should be honest about my personal stake in this, because it seems relevant. When I was a kid, my ADHD predominantly manifested as inattention. I was notorious for reading novels under the desk in class, reading while walking, compulsively reading every newspaper and the labels on shampoo bottles and the copyright page of books and anything else that had text on it. My parents were extremely conservative about digital affordances during my childhood and adolescence: no broadband internet connection, no smartphone, until late in my teens.
This did nothing good for me. You do not treat ADHD with sensory deprivation. I was not going to pay more attention in class because I didn't have a phone handy; I was just more likely to zone out and stare at a water stain on the ceiling and construct elaborate fantasies about the history of civilizations I'd invented. I was bored, in a persistent and grinding way that I now recognize as one of the more unpleasant features of the condition, and I'm genuinely grateful that advances in technology have made that particular flavor of boredom substantially more optional. ADHD medication improved my academics and my functioning in the world. Austerity did not. The restriction removed a coping mechanism without addressing the underlying issue.
I'm aware that my case doesn't generalize. Plenty of kids are not managing a neurological attention deficit when they're scrolling, they're just enjoying an entertainment product, and there's a reasonable question about whether that entertainment product is well-calibrated for their long-term flourishing. But I'm suspicious of framings that assume the counterfactual to device use is some kind of improving, wholesome activity, rather than the much more realistic counterfactual of staring at the wall, or in my case, reading the back of a cereal box for the fourteenth time.
I've watched a teenage relative of mine scroll through Instagram Reels, and it was not a pleasant experience. None of it was erudite. Most of it was AI-generated, and obviously so to anyone over twenty-five, though apparently not to her. The content was a kind of undifferentiated slurry of dumb pranks, "interesting" facts that were wrong, and videos that seemed designed less to convey anything than to fill attention with sensation. I wanted to say something. I didn't, because it wasn't my call and the headache of saying something would have outweighed the benefit. Also, she isn't a particulay bright kid, as hard as that is to say about your own kin. But I felt, for a moment, what the "screens are demonic" people feel, and I think I understand why they reach for that language.
(Don't get me started on an elderly great-uncle and his consumption of the most ludicrously fake AI-slop on YouTube. I did my best to inform him, but wise words only get you so far at that age.)
The problem is that "demonic" and "insane" and "evil" are not diagnostic, they're expressive. They communicate that the speaker has had a visceral negative reaction, which I also had. What they don't do is tell you anything useful about what the actual harm is, what causes it, how it might be addressed, or how to distinguish between the things that caused the visceral reaction and the much broader category of digital media that gets swept up in the resulting policy proposals. Louise Perry's instinct to distinguish between fairy tales on a screen and watching another child play on YouTube seems right to me, not because one is "screens" and the other isn't, but because they're different things doing different things to a child's attention and social cognition. That distinction is worth making carefully, and the "screens" framing makes it harder rather than easier.
If I were forced to endorse a population-wide intervention, it would be this: device manufacturers and online services should be required to provide genuinely functional parental controls, to be setup at the convenience of the person making the purchase. Not draconian age-restriction policies that produce surveillance infrastructure and don't actually work. Just real tools that let parents do what parents are supposed to do, which is make situated judgments about their specific kid, in their specific circumstances, with their specific needs, rather than relying on either blanket permissiveness or blanket prohibition. A child's use of electronics is something that should be monitored in conjunction with their behavior and academic performance, the same way you'd monitor anything else in their life that was potentially impacting them.
The people most confident that they know the right policy for all children are usually people who have identified a single dimension of risk, optimized hard against it, and are not tracking the costs of their proposed solution. The costs are real. Restriction has costs. Surveillance has costs. Boredom has costs. Social exclusion from peer networks that now largely operate digitally has costs. A child who can't participate in the group chat is not being protected from social life, they're being excluded from it, and that exclusion has downstream consequences that are unlikely to show up in studies asking whether "screen time" correlates with self-reported wellbeing.
Not to mention, that if childhood and adolescence is treated as a sort of preparatory phase for adult life: are the adults doing anything different? We live on our phones, there are few facets of modern living not mediated by transistors, light emitting diodes and the internet. And I think that's great: I have a device in my hands that, for about my weekly wage, allows access to nearly the sum total of human knowledge and the ability to interact with people across the globe with milliseconds of latency. I use it to learn more, say more, do more, and yes, entertain myself. If you can't manage to use such capabilities in an ennobling manner, I'm tempted to declare a skill-issue. Don't try and dictate terms for the rest of us, mind your own kids.
Who's to say grandma can't also be a thirst trap?
Cookies sate hunger, not thirst.
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I'm not competent enough a psychiatrist to answer that question.
Sounds like a perfect time for “[awkward silence]”.
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I think you might need to be a priest.
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I remain amused that I've lived long enough to see the zeitgeist shift from "poor communities are disadvantaged because they don't have computers and Internet access" --- see One Laptop Per Child as an example that people put real money behind to "fix" this --- to "poor communities are disadvantaged because they don't keep their kids off screens and the Internet". It's quite the vibe shift. And it only took a decade or so.
That said, I don't think kids should be given unfettered Internet access. I know what can happen: I was there, and the Internet was in many ways a less scary place back then. Although it's also where I learned a lot about the tech industry and programming and such.
Some of it is a general problem of the double-edge sword of (knowledge is) power. The Screen puts it all at your finger tips, any time, anywhere. How do we empower people to use this power for constructive purposes? More Khan Academy videos, less porn. Big picture stuff like that is easy, but I often find myself wondering about details like if another WWII history podcast is really the best use of my time. "I'm not wasting time Motteposting, I'm sharpening my witty and persuasive debating skills!" (X to doubt).
Hmm, I'd argue the opposite. Sure, there's more bad stuff out there, but there's more ANY stuff out there, and the bad stuff is a much smaller percentage and guarded by things like "safe search" and browser/site warnings, so it's harder to stumble across inadvertently. In the old days it was trivial to just get trolled by somebody and end up at goatse or lemonparty or the Anarchist's Cookbook, and that was just the common stuff. I stumbled across hentai """porn""" that I'd shudder to even describe - I honestly don't think I would even know how to find stuff that fucked up, nowadays. It might not even exist outside of an Onion link.
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Has it shifted?
I personally see a lot more concerns about our communities, our kids. Maybe it’s metastasized, but the idea started out with parents.
I’m obviously biased: my cohort is old enough to have kids, but young enough that most of them aren’t in school. Peak iPad risk.
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I just listened to the episode myself. He wasn't a great guest, nor did he go into the depth about 'screens' that the subject really merited. If you want that, Jonathan Haidt has done a million interviews.
But I think it's reasonable to use 'screens' as a substitute for 'increasingly addictive technology'. Even tiny, black and white TVs showing linear programming were powerful enough to begin the process of disengagement described in Bowling Alone. But massive, HD colour TVs with infinite TV and video games, plus smartphones with addictive apps and social media have supercharged it. I don't think it's too unreasonable to use 'screens' as shorthand for atomisation, digital addiction and social disengagement, even if something like podcasts and Spotify contributed.
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I think of it in terms of "passive entertainment". That is, anything that you can do that keeps you entertained in some form while requiring minimal input from the user. This also includes reading, watching television, and listening to the radio. Anything where you can sit down and vegetate, stop interacting with the world and still find yourself entertained by someone else. The reason why "screens" are particularly bad, is that the content you can now consume lasts forever. Compared to a book that ends after a few hundred pages and you then have to buy a new one, or Saturday morning cartoons that only lasts until Saturday morning is over, the internet produces content faster than you can consume it. Especially if you don't care that much about the quality (as is often the case with children). Now add all the ways in which online content is designed to capture and hold on to your attention for as long as possible, and I think the problem starts to reveal itself.
You have an eternal source of easy stimulation that is much easier to engage with than anything else, because every other thing you could be doing requires more effort. Even pulling yourself off the screen to go to the bathroom can be hard. This creates a habit of spending as much time on the computer as possible, which then results in spending less time on healthy activities, such as moving your body around or interacting with other people in person. As you neglect those real-world skills, they start to atrophy (or in the case of children, never develop) which makes it even more difficult to do anything but sit with your iPad.
All this is before we get into how a specific piece of content might be bad for you. Just limiting what kind of online content children can watch (like YouTube kids, or requiring ID to access porn sites), I think misses the mark. If children (or anyone, really) spent the majority of their free time watching TV or reading fiction, I would think that is also really bad. But home computers, with social media and video games, are really the first thing to be so engaging as to make this extreme mass consumption viable on a large scale, where it consumes both free time, work, and school. The people spending all day passively reading or in front of the telly, used to be either weird loners or mentally ill. Due to phones and computers, this has now changed to be an increasing amount of the population, and something that starts in childhood. I think that is legitimately a real problem that should be dealt with.
You seem to me to have a set of implicit standards about the Good which I'm not necessarily disagreeing with but would like to lay out in more detail when we are, ultimately, discussing banning things people like doing.
To me, you seem to be saying broadly:
As a former and still-occasional weirdo loner whose idea of paradise is still often a big library and a lifetime to spend in it, I guess my first question is whether you see inherent value in passive entertainment that needs to be traded off against health, instrumental goals, and long-term sources of satisfaction/happiness, and/or whether you are suspicious of passivity and consider strenuousness and discomfort as a moral good in and of itself?
I correlate a good life with a healthy mind and body. The healthier you are, the better your life is likely to be. I order to achieve good physical and mental health, there are certain needs which must be met. I will highlight three, that I believe the current state of entertainment interferes with:
In your example of a paradise, I assume you also won't have to work. If so, you may not have these problems. You could spend 10 hours a day exploring your library, and still have ample time left to handle your needs. But when more than eight hours a day is spent on commuting and work, the equation changes. Even just four hours spent on the internet means you will likely have to make sacrifices elsewhere (sleep, socializing, exercise, and so on).
I don't consider strenuousness and discomfort as moral goods, but I do believe that some amount of adversity is probably necessary to live a good life. Consider an extreme example, where you have a button that you can press which floods your brain with pleassure hormones, for a short time making you feel intense bliss and removing any pain or negative emotions you may have. You do not build a tolerance, and there are no side effects in the classical sense. Only, pressing the button will at any time be the most pleasurable thing you could do. Let us also say that in this world, you can replace your job with pushing the button. So if you want, every push also transfers money into your bank account, which can be used to purchase whatever necessities you may need.
This sounds horrifying to me. Even though there is an argument to be made that a society of button pushers would be heaven on earth, I just can't buy that this would be good. So while discomfort is not itself a good thing, it is probably necessary in some amount.
In my experience, the four hours of internet happens during the eight hours of work surprisingly often.
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Reading is a bit different from the others in that it is a useful and valuable real world skill in itself.
Sure, reading is a useful and valuable real world skill. It is also less addictive than watching content on a screen, as the reader generally has to pay attention and extent some amount of effort. Reading is not as mindless as watching TikTok or YouTube. There is also a bit of friction involved, as once you finish one book you have to put effort into finding a new one, and content is produced more slowly, so you don't get the same effect of never-ending scrolling that social media gives. Provided you stick to physical books that is.
But it seems to me that the mass production of fiction was the first step towards the entertainment landscape we see today. Compared to most activities, it is fairly passive, and when you have access to enough fiction, it is tempting to just spend all your free time reading, losing track of the real world in the process. As a means of easy escapism it can be harmful in similar ways to a smartphone with internet access, even if the amount of harm that reading causes is less.
Observation: Part of the objections to the emergence of "romantasy" is that it is addictive, low-consumption-effort smut and that the fanfiction world has put out a functionally infinite amount of it. And the objections around the way a certain type of woman relates to that sort of writing mirrors the way a certain type of man relates to video pornography. So I think reading isn't as far removed as it might first appear.
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You can make that complaint about any non-commercial activity. It's so generalised that it becomes useless.
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At 115+ IQ, probably true. But the 100-average masses were watching TV for n hours a day for large enough values of n to support a moral panic back in the 1980's.
Heck - there are middle-aged women with >100 IQs who could spend 4+ hours a day reading romance novels and Readers' Digest short fiction if they had access to enough of it - which is almost as passive as TV-watching. The moral panic about housewives reading novels instead of engaging in the types of community-building activities housewives with free time engaged in was also real - my mother-in-law was not allowed to read novels as a child except when set by the school.
I think the word "moral panic" makes it sound made up. Like people were manufacturing concern for their own gain when none was warranted. I think current internet usage makes it clear there was good reason to be worried about tv watching and reading novels. Like, spending 4 hours a day (28 a week) watching soap operas is probably bad for you. At the time, there was enough friction that people would eventually get back to their daily life. Besides, as long as the activities are done in moderation, there are certainly worse ways to spend your time. But in excess, it turns into vegetating and losing your life to escapism. In the modern day, content has been optimized for engagement, so moderation is becoming increasingly rare. I believe this has very real negative impacts on people that result in negative consequences for society.
Less socializing means less dating and fewer children. People become isolated and easy to manipulate. Their physical condition worsens, which results in worse health, thus more time spent sick, which puts pressure on health care, and reduces quality of life. Your military worsens as an increasing amount of recruits are couch potatoes with no emotional resilience, as they have always been able to escape their problems on the internet. The list goes on.
I don't know how to solve this without resolving to extreme measures, but I think it is overall a good thing that people are noticing the problems.
Are you sure you don't mean it the other way around? Most of your arguments are examples of negative externalities for society, not of things that are primarily negative for the individual. I'll grant you worsening health from lack of physical activity, but what else? At the end of the day, I think if you're concerned about the consequences of excess of a pleasurable activity on society, you should bite the bullet that what you really care about is society, and you would support moderating it even if it genuinely made the individual happy with no personal downsides. The fact that staying in front of the TV all day turns you into a diabetic couch potato is incidental; you would still see negative effects on society if people were spending too much time on a more photogenic, healthy or #inspirational hobby, just because they'd be doing that when they could be working, raising families, etc.
And looked at it this way, I think it becomes important to emphasize that human beings are not ants. Pleasurable leisure pursuits are not some annoying cost-sink that screws up functioning societies, they're what a functioning society exists to provide for its citizens. The central trade-off of civilization is the question of how much painful drudge-work we are willing to undertake today so as to buy ourselves leisure time tomorrow. Of course, maybe we're currently living beyond our means in this sense - maybe the amount of fun TV-watching we're cashing in is outstripping our ability to maintain that standard of living. But in and of itself, four hours of leisure out of twenty-four don't seem trivially unsustainable.
I would think the negative consequences for the individual are obvious: Worse physical health due to a sedentary lifestyle. Vitamin D deficiency when too little time is spent outside. Worse social skills and fewer friends due to not socializing. Worse mental health due to not not socializing and being constantly bombarded with viral posts and articles that are often emotionally charged, leading to compassion fatigue. This all leads to lowering the quality of life. These all seem fairly obvious and pretty serious.
I did say I granted you "worsening health from lack of physical activity".
Not necessarily a negative in and of itself, except in the trivial sense whee spending your time on one hobby will prevent you from getting very good at another. If people prefer television - and/or online interaction - to having real-life friends, that might genuinely be what makes them happy! It's not the case that hanging out IRL is inherently preferable to watching TV and people only do otherwise because TV hacks the addiction centers in their brain, it all depends on the quality of television and the quality of friends. Lack of socialization might be a problem for society, but it's not inherently a problem for the individual.
Well, I was mostly talking about fiction - TV binging, gaming, even reading novels or comics - as distinct from real-world-politics-oriented social media. That's what I took you to be talking about as per "losing your life to escapism"; I will more readily call doomscrolling an inherently negative experience, but it seems kind of the opposite of escapism.
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I'd go much, much broader than that. It's like calling slot machines, toasters, forklifts, and home gyms "levers". Sure, they all have the same basic interface, but they're wildly different than each other in every way that matters.
"Screens" covers direct communication with IRL friends, pseudonymous (or real-name-but-it-doesn't-matter) social media like Twitter/Discord, longform content like ebooks/movies/TV/podcasts, shortform content like news articles/memes/alerts, official interactions with the government or other institutions, ads, games, work, etc.
Being on screens all day is probably worse than pulling levers all day, but it's still wildly underspecified. Even if they define it better in the actual podcast than your comment, it still feels like they're over-reaching with the label.
(unless they're talking about eyestrain and neck problems, but I have a feeling that never came up)
I'm keeping an eye out, but I haven't really seen it. One step better is people talking about "algorithms", and how there's a race to the bottom as genuine value loses out to virality.
Yes, this is what bothers me.
If I watch shows, do taxes, make arrangements to meet up with friends, learn a craft skill, write an essay, facilitate a video call between my mom and her grandchildren, and troll my outgoup, all on screens, then I should probably also go touch grass or something, but some of those are way more subject to overuse than others.
The algorithm discourse bothers me less, I am more concerned about my children seeing wildly different content than me on the same platform.
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I think the point of "screens" as a concept is to tie in the current moral panic about children's internet use with the earlier moral panic about children watching too much TV.
I remember someone trying to write a serious analysis of what "screens" is actually about and pointing out that there were two different issues:
Moral panics about trash media go back a long way and long predate screens - there was a similar panic about mass-market novels, for example. And they almost never make the distinction between the two issues. My sons spend "too much" time on screens, but I follow what they are doing, and it is net educational. If I thought screen time was stopping them socialising in person (they can't do much of that because autism) I would curtail it. It is making it harder to get them to do outdoor exercise.
My father reports being an introverted child in the 50s and 60s, and spending a fair amount of time literally staring at a wall. Sometimes playing wall ball with himself. My mother had a swimming pool, so was better off. My impression from Southern American writing is that people spent a lot of time squatting beside roads and getting into fights. I suppose it's fair to ask, when doing things through a screen "what's the alternative at this moment?" If the alternative is "get more sleep" or "spend time in the garden," then, certainly, one should go do that.
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Yeah. I've got a two year old and if you leave any sort of an autoplay going for more than 2-3 videos you quickly end up offramping to some mix of pure AI sloptent, Elsagate content or 'Youtube Poop designed to stimulate unattended toddlers via a mix of stock sound effects and popular action figures'. Say what you want about 'unattended child stays up till 2AM and ends up accidentally seeing the Indie French Avant Garde stuff' atleast that was gated by time and attention spans.
I've seen that on Youtube, but not Netflix or PBS kids, which is what I'm most familiar with. I've seen a lot of Gabby's Dollhouse lately, which isn't fantastic, but seems reasonably innocuous. Youtube Kids especially seems to be absolute garbage. Octonauts looked fine. I watched a lot of hours of my brother playing Mega Man and Super Mario Brothers as a kid, which was not very productive for sure.
Watch the cat, I think it often looks like it would prefer to be elsewhere.
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6yo uses Youtube Kids on iPad so we have to approve each channel individually. 9yo mostly drives himself, and is primarily interested in educational channels when he is less tired and Minecraft slop when he is knackered, which is pretty harmless. He has unintentionally conditioned the algorithm only to show Minecraft slop if he lets it autoplay.
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I rate the the harm of screen time roughly by how hard the content on the screen tries to claim your attention. At one end of the scale would be a screen that displays a static image of a still life painting - this is clearly no more harmful than an actual physical painting, except that it might hurt more if it fell on you. At the other end is rapidly cutting and highly animated brain-rot videos with over-the-top sound effects, in an endless stream that a child can flip through continuously. (Or the equivalent for adults).
Mr. Rogers is the show I always go to for what I would consider to be a beneficial use of screens. Aside from the positive lessons, it's slow and very minimally attention grabbing:
The show is more attention grabbing to a child than staring at a blank wall, and roughly on the order of playing with some toys or having a conversation with an adult. All of the aspects I mentioned are in very stark contrast to what's on youtube shorts or tiktok today. If Mr. Rogers is an oatmeal raisin cookie in terms of appeal, the stuff many kids watch today is heroin.
Of course, this is all aside from violent, emotionally disturbing or mature content, which, while there are probably disagreements about what is harmful at the boundary, most of us would agree is not appropriate for children -- though adults know how to process it healthily. I do think though that hyper-attention-grabbing content is bad for adults too, even if we're better at restraining ourselves from indulging in it too much.
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One big issue with Haidt's stance is the question of effectiveness and the rights we have to give up in order to ban children to begin with. Meaningful age verification by necessity means ID verification, anything else can be easily bypassed.
Maybe it's worth the cost for no one to have anonymity to the sites they use, and for the possibility of everyone's face and identity connected directly to the accounts to leak (like what happened somewhat with Discord recently where they leaked face scans) just to stop children, but it's not free.
And that's still assuming it does stop children. China's attempts to curb childhood gaming has not worked out that well. Because they just used someone else's face/ID as identification. Either by sneaking it, or the parents who are cool with that behavior just allowing them on. Just like how the parents who hand their kids an iPhone already are liable to just make an account for them too when asked.
This is China and they're failing to keep kids from doing what they want. It's not just enough to have facial scans or ID uploads, doing those is sacrificing privacy for little benefit. At least if it worked the sacrifice would have some meaning! But it's not going to be enough, we have to be Mega China to be meaningfully effective, we have to be more invasive than the authoritarian communists because even they are failing.
Is that still worth it? Haidt correctly diagnosed a problem in society and then decided the only solution is nuking everyone's freedom just to fail anyway.
But US parents are already unusually likely to set screen time/technology use limits, partly driven by conservative parents’ ideological beliefs. That they often do this in a non-optimal way and it isn’t spread evenly through society are fixable-ish problems.
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The social media ban isn't really the main goal of organisations like Haidt's. The goal is to get kids off smartphones. That is much easier for parents to do when 'I need Snapchat to talk to all my friends' is no longer true. Even if a social media ban can be bypassed, there's no reason to do so if none of a child's peers are using the platforms. The same is true of school smartphone bans. It's much easier for parents to say 'no you can't have a smartphone' if smartphones are a prohibited item in school.
Worrying about kids' privacy when preventing them from accessing social media is kind of ironic. The kids are already sharing their deepest, darkest secrets with these platforms. We're trying to prevent them giving up their privacy.
It's also worth talking about the actual technology used for age verification. In the UK we have it for porn sites already. 90% of them use third parties like AgeGo which don't require you to upload ID (although you can), they just use age estimation from a face scan, which isn't even saved once the check has been done. It's fine.
Yes, I have a lot more sympathy for trying to get parents to not let their kids have smart phones, in comparison with not letting them have computers more generally. I don't want my kids to have smart phones until they're old enough to drive, but we'll see if that ends up working out or not.
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Zero-knowledge proof of age systems would be a very easy way to handle age verification without having to provide any identifying information to any third party instead of faffing around with crap like AgeGo or face scans.
Of course, I wonder why this will never happen ...
Please, tell us.
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It's coming, and soon. Zero-knowledge proofs for age are in the design of the age-verification framework of the EU Digital Identity Wallet, and in the specs of the Swiss eID law they passed a while back. Both involve an app on your phone holding your ID and your crypto keys and generating ZKP responses to things like age requests.
Both designs are decent in my opinion. Once you've come to terms with the slippery slope that we'll soon have digital ID checks everywhere, all the time, there's not much to criticize. It's probably the best way to do it, if we agree that we need to do any of that. But also, it's pretty far from a "very easy way". This scheme absolutely needs a central authority (probably a national government) doing the final ID/age check and then the issuing of crypto keys. I'll be curious how the US handles this. I expect Google/Apple to take over that task, since the majority probably won't trust the government to do it right...
That's actually quite well implemented: I didn't know about those initiatives.
I do honestly agree that with the advent of LLM's, the time of the internet being an anonymous wild west has pretty much already ended. Once we've decided that we need online ID checks, it does seem best if we implement it in as privacy-preserving fashion as possible.
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We're probably 5-10 years out from "device with (parental) content locks enabled is able to internally detect and choose not to render objectionable content" (for separate check boxes of "nudity", "violence", and "heretical ideas", naturally). I have pretty mixed feelings about the idea: device-side removes a lot of the privacy concerns, but every year it feels like my freedom to do what I want with my electronic devices gets eroded.
Do the zero-knowledge proposals have good answers for the actual human parts of the systems? It's cryptographically interesting, but seems like it requires issuing authorities and all sorts of other identification crypto infrastructure from what I can tell.
Well, you do need a centralized authority but any jurisdiction interested in implementing such a policy has the nation state ready to step in.
The initiatives mentioned in pbmonster's post look pretty interesting qua implementation.
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It's not kid's privacy, it's adult's privacy at risk. The only meaningful way to have age verification is to have ID verification (and even that isn't actually enough even with China's much more strict ID system). The entire idea of being anonymous on the internet must be destroyed just for a chance that kids might get off the phones.
Parents can do that already anyway! You can simply not give your kid a smartphone if you wish. You can lock it down via various methods if you want to. There's not a bunch of smartphone drug dealers passing out free samples to children.
The parents who just hand their 3 year old a phone to babysit for them are the same parents who are just gonna let their kid scan their face to make the Instagram account. We can see by their choice that they're fine with their kids being online.
Not only is it very easy to bypass (as we saw with people even using video game characters with it) and you could just use your parents/older friends like the kids in China do but it's an obvious lie and Discord already leaked tons of users just a little bit ago. If you seriously believe that they're deleting everything, I got a bridge to sell you if you want.
As I mentioned, the UK manages porn sites perfectly well without mandatory ID verification. It may not be completely impenetrable, but that's fine. Surely you would be happy about this fact, rather than demanding something that you say is bad? You seem to be arguing that a) the current system is insufficiently robust and must be reformed and b) a more robust system would be bad. Why not be happy with our imperfect system?
That is a very naive position. It's technically correct, in the same way that I can technically go and live in the woods. In practice, peer pressure is immensely powerful, and parents find it extremely difficult to tell their kids 'every child in your class has a smartphone, but you can't have one'. Even if successful, it still causes parents a huge amount of stress having to constantly re-fight the battle every day. That is why we have rules around kids smoking and drinking. Technically, we could abolish age restrictions and just say to parents 'it's up to you'. In reality, humans are a social species that work around norms. The free for all status quo simply allows those norms to be set by tech companies, rather than by parents.
And why exactly does Pornhub or AgeGo want a grainy, 3 second video of my face at 2am? Leaving aside the fact that big companies do, in fact, obey the law as a rule, because breaking it is bad for business, you seem to imply that these companies are holding on to data that they have explicitly promised to (and are legally obliged to) delete for the sake of being evil and creepy, in spite of no actual benefit to them.
Oh please I visited the UK three months ago and stayed there for a few weeks, it was a trivial matter to find sites that didn't demand some form of proof. I live in NC where we have similar laws, it is also very easy to get past because I'm not giving my ID to porn sites.
And if I find it really easy, I assume any teenager with decent motivation and a lack of retardation can also do it.
Because it's not a fact, it's a failure. When I say effective I mean effective, not theater. They are easy af to bypass.
Will kids never ask their parents for a smartphone or social media in a world where it takes a facial scan? Seems like a pretty wild claim to me.
Parents who are cool with their kids smoking and drinking let them! They'll buy cigarettes and alcohol for them. It's just not many parents are cool with it.
Then why did the discord leak happen? You could just as easily say the same thing about them, and yet tons of people got their identification revealed anyway. Leaks like this happen constantly with people's data. Your argument is refuted by the real world happenings.
I agree, but the system is new and there's obviously going to be a degree of cat and mouse. If we required perfection for every system we wouldn't have any systems at all.
I'm less concerned about teenagers and more concerned about very small children. 40% of six year olds own a tablet in the UK, and another 40% have access to one. Before the current rules were in place, most of them had access to the infinity of online porn. My eight year old neice doesn't have a smartphone, but kids at her school do and have shown her videos of ISIS beheadings. This concerns me (and approximately every parent). I suspect you don't have kids. I assure you, internet libertarianism becomes much less appealing once you do.
Because Discord used a different third party verification company with a different process.
Ah, older siblings. Where would we be without them? (A better place, perhaps?) Perhaps more interesting is the apparent fact they're able to correctly spell 'beheading', given their typical performance on the more pedestrian spelling tests and the lack of auto-complete.
Kids have been grossing each other out and watching absurd nonsense since forever. Porn is kind of like that [for them] too, for that matter, though I get that women (and their simps) complain about normalizing the concept that women have sex, occasionally on camera- which is naturally/by instinct what they're trying to stamp out. Of course, these women will then turn around and assert that a 7 year old boy willing to play with the dollies is trans and needs immediate medical treatment.
I believe you are incapable of telling the difference between the two. That property affects young adults (and by extension, older adults) more negatively than it does small children, for obvious reasons, but it's fun to do that to them so people see that as a value-add. It's neutral at worst; it's not like they vote.
Or rather, currently the norms are set by reality, not parents. Naturally, parents are very angry and Stressed(tm) out about this.
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"Not perfect" is overselling it too, not even close to effective is the more likely truth. Even if it's already at China levels (doubtful given it's way less strict), then 80% of children still have a means of access without issue.
"Access" sure that is technically true, but how many six year olds care to sit around and watch porn anyway? Tons of them will just be grossed out as little kids tend to do with sexual things. Maybe like 10+ or something will have a meaningful cohort seeking out porn but that's already in the age that just clicking on sites until something works or taking their parents ID from their wallet should be simple and obvious.
I do have a three year old so I don't have much experience with Internet access, but at home I do know there's a very simple fix. Don't let my kid have a phone. The same way I wouldn't let them drink or party. Out of the house I can't control, but if it was say, the early 2000s I also wouldn't be able to stop my kid and his friends going on the computer during a sleepover at a friend's house If they wanted to look up ISIS videos either.
I agree with phones out of school. In fact the mechanism for banning phones is simple, the adult in charge of monitoring them doesn't allow phone use. Simple and easy and any parent can employ it right now if they choose. If they're too weak willed to say no, then they're gonna be too weak willed when they say "mommy can I scan your face for Instagram pweaseeee, all my friends parents do it!"
It's perfectly safe until it's not, in which case it becomes "uh it was just that one". But how do you know in advance which one will be saved and leaked?
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I for one wouldn't be concerned about a six-year-old finding porn because they aren't going to watch infinity of it (unlike twelve-year-olds). My guess is that on opening such a website on accident they're going to think it's weird and gross and close it immediately and maybe, maybe ask their parents a few questions that the parents would prefer not to answer but should be equipped to anyway.
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And there are further ways to avoid giving away your Valid Personal Nomenclature....
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Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the UK system (from my understanding, users have to buy a card from a retailer that validates age, typically in person?), and it has some obvious and well-documented faults. But it’s still not quite as stupid as asking people to upload their photo ID.
That’s presuming you can get the system without getting OFCOM and that whole related mess — the ease of the system for normies may well have made that more palatable politically! — but my guess is that they’re separate results of different political drives.
I haven't heard of that one. Ofcom lists a bunch of acceptable methods here, but none of them involve buying a card from a shop.
Let's go over the acceptable method
Requires your face, thereby identifying you.
Requires banking details, thereby identifying you.
Vague enough that maybe it doesn't require it somehow for the "digital identity wallets" but questionable as to how the digital identity wallets verify it then without identifying you.
Requires your credit card details, thereby identifying you.
requires your email for the purpose of linking it to other things you use your email for like banks and utility, thereby identifying you.
Requires you to have your mobile network confirm you, thereby identifying you.
This is obviously identifying you.
You claimed "without mandatory ID verification", meanwhile every single one includes a form of mandatory identification. And despite that, it still fails as I've outlined in another comment.
Not only is it easy to bypass through the many many many sites that don't bother because they aren't big/based in the UK, but they also have obvious weak points for any non retard child to do.
Stuff like facial age estimation has been bypassed by video game characters and YouTube videos (and perhaps AI videos too), credit card/ID can be bypassed by just grabbing your parents wallet, mobile network operator age just use your parents or a friend's number.
It leaves the "in China 80% of kids are still gaming" problem left unsolved.
That isn't what I said. My exact words were '90% of them use third parties like AgeGo which don't require you to upload ID'. That obviously means uploading e.g. a driving licence, not age estimation through the camera.
Because yes, in order to use age estimation, AgeGo will need a short video clip of my face, which will then be deleted once the verification is complete. If this counts as 'identifying me' then fine, I don't care. It's worth it if it makes it harder for children to watch porn.
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I think that meant a government issued ID document, not the act of identifying.
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Huh. I guess I was thinking of the older MindGeek AgeID system, which seems to have been sunsetted before being broadly implemented. The OfCom list there looks nearly identical to the proposals most American social conservatives (or anti-social-media people) have proposed, when they've considered any detail, with the sole exception of 'phone-based filtering'.
All of them seem to have similar privacy concerns: there's still a single point of data ownership that connects a user's meatspace name to their account(s). The ICO double-pinky-swearing people to safety doesn't really seem that persuasive from a security perspective.
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You don’t need a foolproof system. You need a system that imposes enough friction to meaningfully reduce the fraction of teens on social media.
These are very different things. Notably, the drinking age does not mean 0% of your local highschool goes to a kegger before graduation- does this mean it doesn’t work and should be abolished?
Sure, but again consider China. They went really really restrictive and have managed to only get ~20% off. Is that meaningful enough to you?
The level of friction necessary is to be a Mega China. Maybe Mega China is worth it, but the debate needs to be honest about just how strict internet access needs to become to be worth a damn.
Otherwise it's the same logic as the crazy climate bureaucrats who, because they can't implement harsh climate restrictions, decide to put water limiters on our showers and low flow toilets. Making everyone's life worse just so they don't feel bad about their complete failure. People should either be honest and admit that Mega China is a fine tradeoff for them or give up on the theater and take the L.
The most important factor in anyone’s life before a certain age- probably more like 21 for most people, but certainly before 15 or so for the vast majority- is not government policy. It’s parents. And parents in the US are unusually willing to exercise their authority to curtail screen time/electronic entertainments. That they do so imperfectly is a much more eminently fixable problem than screens being bad.
Banning social media before a certain age, for example, will meaningfully convince parents to enact and enforce that rule in a way that Chinese gaming laws likely won’t, because American society is different from Chinese society and the inherently subsidiarist nature of minority allows this solution to work better.
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My ideal policy would be one that sidesteps this problem by being a uniform policy for everyone. I don't know if it's possible, but what I'd aim for is putting a bit of friction on the slot machine lever.
For example -- banning endless scrolling feeds. Banning autoplay, except in certain cases like music playlists or playlists created by the user themselves. Having a delay (5 or 10 seconds?) before showing recommendations of other videos to watch. Or even a gradually increasing delay the longer you've been watching. Anything to making watching the next video a bit less appealing than doing something else.
Would people start just making compilation videos to work around this limitation? Probably. It's a hard problem to solve.
What I'd really like is a lot stricter rules around what is appropriate for a "kids" section of a website, like Youtube Kids. Some sort of maximum measurement of how hyper-attention-grabbing a video is, and while this could be done with objective rules, it's pretty hard to measure for every video. But we do manage to have rules around content, so I don't think it's undoable. Then at least parents could let their kids use just that app and not worry about their brains turning to mush at such a rapid rate.
This is equivalent to "open source software is illegal".
I think you can get 99% of the way there by making this law apply to software available to the public, produced by for-profit companies over a certain size in terms of market cap, or view numbers, or some other hard-enough-to-game metric. It's fine if Big Vinny's Open Source Video Sharing Site with 153 users doesn't follow these rules, that's not what kids are watching on their iPads.
I still see issues here.
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Open source software doesn't usually have mass-market adoption and it doesn't do this kind of skinner-boxing engagement hacking in my experience; of all possible tech regulations I don't think this one is likely to be an issue. Also, in practice, these restrictions are almost always predicated on market share & revenue and again I don't think open source software has to worry about this.
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Another thing we could aim for, possibly something we should aim for first, is decreasing the friction on the alternatives.
What would you rather children and adolescents do instead of watching things on screens?
Are there obstacles to them doing that now?
I'd rather they be playing outside and getting exercise, playing with friends, reading, doing creative stuff. The latter two are lower-friction than they've ever been, though the first two (especially playing with friends) are higher than they used to be, partly because of cultural changes, partly because of modern car-centric suburban development patterns, though I won't get on my soapbox about that right now.
I do think that reducing the friction on the alternatives is good. But I disagree that we should do this first, because the problem of easily accessible and endless over-stimulating video is a really big problem and not that hard of a problem to at least put a serious dent in with a bit of effort, in my opinion. And reducing friction can only get you so far, when the friction for the thing you're competing with is non-existent.
And of course, different people can work on solving different problems.
Though of course, the demand for dopamine rush can quickly shift to something like video games. For that, I'd love to see an age rating for games and TV shows that includes a score for their addictiveness, so parents can make informed choices.
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Yep. All this handwringing over screen time when the possible alternatives are likely unavailable, unlawful, uninsurable, require an adult's constant participation, and/or would raise eyebrows with the Karens/curtain-twitchers and get the authorities called in.
Which means the Internet is the final frontier (in both the 'infinite probability space' and 'the last one that exists' sense), and to a point is still beyond the reach of the Karen. (Which, of course, is why the states proposing this are who they are.)
The thing that people tend to miss is that it is vital to the health of any society that Karen must be oppressed, because she deserves to be. But then again, that's just the mission statement of/justification for [classic] liberalism.
Only in the sense of "You're oppressing me by not letting me oppress others!" (cf. the Cavaliers in Virginia.)
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Yeah, I think it's very difficult to implement policies from the company side. Davidson said that he thought it was utterly insane that families in the 90s bought computers and connected them to the internet at all, but as I say, he was on a podcast and published a book, so how extreme could he really be in that respect?
Instagram is interesting, because it shows different faces to different people. Also on Maiden Mother Matriarch, Jean Twenge was talking about how it conforms to the insecurities of girls, especially, but an adult might get a totally acceptable Instagram feed. My feed is a couple of IRL friends, a bunch of totally normal art, and some costumes, but I didn't have an account until I was almost 30. AI also sees extremely sensitive to phrasing, so if you write to it as an adult who's trying to get something done, it will be your colleague, but it's hard to pretend to be someone else effectively enough to guess how it will respond to them.
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This is the part where I think you’re wrong. Because it’s possible to have a lever that is not attached to a slot machine, so there is no slippery slope from “Here’s a lever (that teaches you the educational engineering mechanics of fulcrums!)” to “You are now addicted to penny slots”. But it is NOT possible to have an internet-enabled device that lacks a slippery slope from “You are watching an educational Youtube video” to “You are now addicted to dopaminagenic slop”. It’s literally one click away. With the physical lever, you have to actually get off your ass and go to a casino; and as Scott tells us: you get an outsize effect from minor inconveniences.
I have a hard enough time avoiding slipping on the Youtube slope, and I’m a 30-year-old academic with enough self-discipline to finish a PhD. You wanna put five year olds on the top of the slope? Get outta heeeeeere
(What I will say, though, is that it’s better to have a five year old addicted to dopaminagenic slop than no five year old at all, so I actually support kids being raised by screens if it means TFR goes up. Just don’t delude yourself that the practice ain’t cookin’ their brains)
What does that mean? I'm pretty picky, and often do look at Youtube or Instagram, see that there's nothing interesting there, and then close the tabs and go to bed or sit under a tree with a physical book. Maybe I'm a bit odd. If I'm feeling... stressed? I'm not sure what the state is... I'll refresh The Motte or something over and over for a while, and yeah that's dumb, I shouldn't do that. I should probably take a nap at that point.
I was listening to my daughter play Hytale, and she was narrating some story about a dragon, and she was going to send it food so it wouldn't eat the villagers, and then she was making them a protector, and then it was raining pigs, and there was a zoo, and it sounded very similar to when she's drawing and narrating stories about how her doll is putting on a party, and these are invitations, here have an invitation, and now they need to reverse for their performance, and so on and so forth.
I'm right there with you, but I don't think it's universal. I feel like I won the lottery of fascinations because the supposedly-addictive (and also useless) content that gets spread around is just boring to me, so I don't get sucked into those holes. It takes zero effort whatsoever on my part.
Same. I think my snobbishness saves me. If I swipe through Youtube shorts, my brain doesn't dump dopamine, it goes "this is shit" over and over again and gets more annoyed with every swipe.
Video is the wrong format for most content, and short form video is the wrong format for very close to absolutely all content. The very few exceptions to that rule where discovered 10 years ago on Vine, and done in thousands of variations since.
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