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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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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