but what is better parenting? i don't ask to try to score debate points: i don't know what that looks like, and any insight on what you think it is would guide me to better engage. calling all hubski parents: what do parents have to do?

Parenting, ultimately, is picking your battles. It's a relationship - an unequal one, but a relationship nonetheless - where you have to convince your counterparty to do what you want. You will succeed most, but not all of the time, and you have to work with what you've got.

I'm sure there were aspects of your upbringing where your parents were unreasonably strict. I'm sure there were others where they were inexplicably permissive. The trick with parenting and social media is that it is harder for a parent to evaluate the dangers of social media than it is to evaluate the dangers of cigarettes, for example, or playing in traffic.

I dated a girl whose dad once told me "It's not if you'll screw up your kids, it's how badly and how often." Now granted - he was a fucking horrible parent. I don't think you're destined to screw up your kids. But I do think that they're not going to come out exactly as you plan them to no matter how hard you try. I also think it's more effecitve to tell a kid they can't watch that much television because it makes them easily bored and they aren't getting as much enrichment out of it and they aren't making as many memories as if they were playing with Legos than it is to tell them "because I said so." And right now, the easily-reachable argument for cutting back on social media is "because I said so" since the social media companies are obscuring the facts around the harms.

GenX begat GenZ, but the percentage of IRC-hopping andies and Cory Doctorows of that generation is still not very big.

That's because we fucking left, dawg. For the vast majority of GenX? It was all downhill from Friendster onwards. South Park was the first show I know of that streamed online and every millennial I knew thought it was the beez kneez and every Xer I knew thought it was straight dogshit and if you take online culture from before Winamp, and you take online culture after Winamp, GenX kept their CDs, kept their crunk proto-PHPBB forums, got into one or two messy online relationships via Facebook that threatened their marriages and noped the fuck out of the internet entirely. It became a shouty place where those little shits who were Baby On Board placards when they were kids dictated the rules, dictated the culture, dictated the language and drowned out everything interesting in a miasma of infantile bullshit. That, more than anything, is what led to Yahoo - "let's curate this bullshit by hand so we can ignore most of it. That's what led to Google - "let's figure out an algorithm so we don't have to pay any attention to it at all." That's what led to Amazon - "let's just connect their unfathomable tastes with the bottomless pit that is Ingram." Pretty much every Internet innovation from GenX was "here's whatever fucking content you want, pay me and go the fuck away."

GenX saw the toxicity when Zuck was in fucking high school. That's on us; we figured out how to get rich off of it rather than kill it in the crib. And honestly? I think everyone else will, too.

But it helps when you can easily assess which parts are toxic and which parts aren't without having to sit through it all with your kid beside you the way the 'boomers did to millennials.