I will admit I haven't read all of their posts, but what Haidt & co highlight is basically the conclusion that I've come around to: that yes, smartphones and social media are the problem. Depression, anxiety, attention span...
There was a Dutch comedian the other day who made a good point: when someone beats their child in public people will step in and say something about it. But when in a restaurant little Timmy is put in front of an iPad to shut up for three hours and the teenagers can just TikTok the entire evening, nobody bats an eye.
I'm not a fan of Haidt. he asks good questions about internet mental health impacts on kids, but loads it with his political biases and takes cheap shots here at wokeness, campus crybabies, supposed tiktok antisemites, etc. it's easier for me to take his research concerns more seriously when the generation bashing is less present. for that reason I appreciate the first linked article in this list, and this rebuttal he lists there. The rest is fundamentally unserious and driven by media hysteria. He says he can't find young people to make counterpoints - that does not match my experience. anecdotally, my internet use came from extreme social isolation. i was homeschooled and had effectively no friends or peers beyond my older sister. i was socially crippled and depressed and anxious before i was even a preteen. the Internet was a godsend for me as soon as i had unfettered access to it around 8 or 9 years old. through the Internet, i received information about my gender and sexuality that led to me realizing i was transgender upon hitting puberty, which simply would not have happened otherwise. my situation is extremely common for any given societal deviant. but it's obviously not that simple. i was also exposed to things that were not at all appropriate for my age in ways that were not appropriately supervised or controlled. i saw graphic violence, child sex abuse images, heinous levels of bigotry, radicalizing fascist groups, and just a level of bad behavior that everybody here who haa used the Internet for a long time is familiar with. I eventually got into a serious of longdistance age-gapped relationships at 15-16-17 with people in their mid-20s that are emotionally complicated for me to understand and likely crossed the line into being abusive at times. the Internet is not safe. the question to me is whether on balance, the shift from physical to online life has been a negative or a positive for my generation. even with all the burrs and barbs of it, I would still wholeheartedly say yes. parents, schools, and authority figures have this need to control every aspect of kids lives, right up through when they're not kids anymore. It never ends. See Haidt's condemnation of college students. i think that this kind of firehouse-sucking access to the world is more than a lot of people can bear, but it's also the best or only avenue to reclaim your autonomy when you're desperately seeking it. the kids aren't fucking, drugging, or making trouble. if some of their brains get cooked, I'm okay with that. i don't see how the solution is continued coddling - especially when the people proposing it seem to be so focused on how this generation is a bunch of neurotic snowflakes. my diagnosis is lighten up cetere autem censeo Google and Facebook esse delendam. just as a brief note: putting your toddler on an ipad all day is like sitting them in front of the TV, but also spinning a roulette wheel that could show them pregnant Elsa dying from getting the Spiderman vaccine. I'm not a doctor, but i think the problem here is not the Internet, it's not interacting with your child to teach/play with them. if they're addicted to the ipad, pull the teat out of their mouth. you control that yet. if they're old enough to be smarter than a golden retriever, and you let them use a few sites, they'll be fine. letting a teen go ham online will be fine, as long as they're not cutting class or something to do it. make sure every once in a while they're not getting groomed by a neonazi or a pedophile. just relax. parents are bombarded with people telling them to be scared. you don't need to be
My assertion would be that there is a direct line from to that doesn't seem to happen often enough. You'd do it, because you know full well where the internet is unsafe, but for the vast majority of parents it seems like an insurmountable task so they just don't. I'd argue the point is not to scare parents, the point is that parents should be helped in managing this shit because the techbros sure as fuck won't help. Tech always moves much faster than society can catch up to it, but in this particular case we seem to be lagging behind in a very painful way and the consensus seems to be to maybe do the absolute minimum. Is the Internet a net positive? Well, yeah, but in moderation. So is alcohol as kb points out. I, too, was a socially isolated preteen on the web and have seen my fair share of awfulness due to the complete lack of any parental guidance. But it exposed me to ideas and information and people I'd otherwise never meet. Because it was hard for anything to engage me irl. I fled to niche hobby phpBB forums and mowed down pedestrians in GTA: Vice City when I was nine. I agree, so I think the solution is better parenting. I don't think I ended up worse from my exploratory years on the Internet but that was way before algorithmic feeds, with my own cautiousness a determining factor in what I did and did not do. Kids and teenagers benefit from parents giving them some borders. I didn't get any, but I came of age just before social media really shaped teenagers. Gen Z also didn't get any restraints, but got rekt by social media. Thank fuck it's dying, but that doesn't mean we're out of the woods I think. This strikes me as a very absurd juxtaposition. What percentage of parents do you think are even aware of these dangers? because I'm afraid it's very, very low. My parents knew literally zero about the dangers, this generation of parents know...some things but it frustrates me how far we still have to go.i think that this kind of firehouse-sucking access to the world is more than a lot of people can bear
if they're addicted to the ipad, pull the teat out of their mouth
i don't see how the solution is continued coddling
make sure every once in a while they're not getting groomed by a neonazi or a pedophile. just relax.
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? what do you do right now, at whatever age your kid is at? what do you think you should do, or could do better? i don't know how to respond other than to say that the lack of comprehension among the elderly and the internet-elderly is cooking them as well, and that they are eating the slop and enjoying it more than young people. if you weren't part of the pre-eternal september vanguard, and you aren't tech-adjacent, and you didn't spend some part of your youth online, your base level of knowledge is "how do i print pdf" and "facebook said there are chemicals in the tapwater." i don't think it's absurd to talk about what-ought-to-be in this context when we can all see that what-actually-is is a mess. all you need to be a parent is to have kids. think about the average person in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc - and extrapolate that knowledgeset to the average parent in the same age range. i think it's safe to say that for a really large chunk of people, the internet is incomprehensible beyond the lake that they skim the surface of. from what i see, people make themselves a range that they stick to: email, social media, a little youtube if you're getting spicy. they keep it shallow because they are conscious of their own ignorance, and develop skills to avoid showing it. the continuing problem is the fact that young people are much, much more equipped to deal with all this than their parents. GenX begat GenZ, but the percentage of IRC-hopping andies and Cory Doctorows of that generation is still not very big. Now that Millennials are giving birth to GenAlpha, we see how ("more") internet-equipped parents are raising internet-accessing children, but those kids are still preteens at most. There's no survive the internet class. there isn't even a be a parent class. instead we have the onslaught of "phone bad, screen bad" from every source read by the parent age brackets, and either you know nothing about it (aforementioned GenX and older beyond the Elite Percentage who could probably roll and smoke >90% of the world population on this), or you're a Millennial and you have extreme guilt over your own screen use and internet addiction, and project your own experiences on your Ipad kid. I'm not at all equipped or qualified to solve any of this. I do think that I'm more capable of narrowing down the problem than the average OpEd writer of the world, or the average Haidt. Maybe that's egotistical, but I believe it.This strikes me as a very absurd juxtaposition. What percentage of parents do you think are even aware of these dangers? because I'm afraid it's very, very low. My parents knew literally zero about the dangers, this generation of parents know...some things but it frustrates me how far we still have to go.
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. 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.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?
GenX begat GenZ, but the percentage of IRC-hopping andies and Cory Doctorows of that generation is still not very big.
This is a fallacious line of reasoning though, because it's akin to saying that the solution to the obesity epidemic is to eat less. While this could be technically true for any given person, the fact that so many people are suffering simultaneously points to an underlying structural problem. I was just reading a lead story today in WSJ about how cancer rates, specifically cancers of the digestion system, are seeing significant increases among young people born since the 90s. It would be foolhardy to opine that gen Z should just live like everyone else did before them and they wouldn't get cancer. You have to identify, isolate, and correct the cause. In my opinion these scary high rates of depression are indicative that the milieu is toxic. Whether social media is the cause or a correlate is beyond my knowledge, but either way solely blaming the parents fails the test.I agree, so I think the solution is better parenting.
I have a complex regard for Haidt because on the one hand, his research is imaginative, well-designed and supports a lot of his basic conclusions. On the other hand, he's all about I used to be a liberal until they ignored my conclusions now I am SYNNNNDROMMMMME Haidt's fundamental argument is "Western liberal thought is an anomaly across humanity, therefore we should be more accepting of conservatives." Compare and contrast with neoliberalism: "Western liberal thought is an anomaly across humanity, that's why we run the fucking planet, bitchez." I think liberals and conservatives are way too wrapped around the wheel justifying their social mores, which is kind of Haidt's point. Haidt is one of those people wrapped around the wheel, which is why he's controversial. I will also say that there's a real need for both sides of the culture wars to scour the field for swords rather than plowshares. To whit: Okay, what are the "three very bad ideas?" That's too general to be useful and is dismissive of a whole lot of nuance. "What doesn't kill you makes you weaker" is a flippant argument against safe spaces, which are valuable in therapy and divisive in general society. But there's always going to be a give and take over defining the square. The thing nobody wants to talk about regarding campuses is that it's a captive population paying through the absolute nose for a questionable credential before they parachute into an economy that has never been so challenging for young people since the advent of child labor laws and there will be a lot of jockeying by young people trying to get their money's worth while they still can. And the gay ones? Are gonna wanna not get hassled for being gay. Jon Haidt is ten years older than me, which means he was just starting to teach in an era where manic Christian preachers would stand in the middle of the square and shout "you're going to burn in hell, faggot" through a megaphone at anyone with colored hair. Wait, what am I talking about that shit was still happening in 2019 in the middle of one of the most liberal community colleges in the middle of one of the most liberal west coast states in America. Haidt himself would agree that people need time to heal from trauma and that people heal slower if the trauma is ongoing. The vast majority of even the most terminally online lefties would agree that not everything needs to be nerfed out for all things and all people at all times. Yet everyone will go to the mattresses warring over the viability of safe spaces because of course we will. I also think that "internet" and "social media" are very much not the same thing. Social media could be great for kids but the fundamental layout adapted and espoused by every social media company out there (except one) is dark design through and through. I don't think you can credibly say "most studies on social media are bad" and have any credibility when (1) Facebook designed their own studies (2) ran them for their own edification only (3) by their own metrics determined that social media is bad (4) did fucking nothing about it while (5) hiding the results. If RJR pays someone to determine if cigarettes cause cancer, gets told conclusively that cigarettes cause cancer, hides the info that cigarettes cause cancer and continue to sell cigarettes as if they don't cause cancer? Yeah that's negligence. Social media, same same. You'd think they'd run a study or two about how to make social media not an overwhelming net negative. Maybe they have! But if they had any results that said anything other than "go out of business" you'd expect them to trumpet those results from the rooftops. You're absolutely right about toddlers and iPads. The contention is "how bad is unfettered iPad access for your kid" and pretty much any analysis you run is going to tell you "worse than Youtube would have you believe." Fundamentally, the problem is risk assessment and social media companies' attempts to elide the actual risks.The post shows how three very bad ideas were nurtured on Tumblr, around 2013, and then escaped into progressive online communities (and ultimately into progressive real-world communities such as university campuses), leading to a sharp rise in signs of depression, anxiety, and hopelessness that was most pronounced in young women on the left.
1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
2. Always trust your feelings 3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
I actually consider it bad that kids aren’t misbehaving anymore or at least at the same rates. The problem with that is that getting in trouble (provided it isn’t crime or hard drugs) does two things that are important for making stable healthy adults. First, it allows kids to make mistakes and learn how to make better decisions, and second it teaches them that even pretty serious mistakes are things you can recover from. The biggest problem for anyone raised with screens from birth is that they just don’t seems to develop the same sort of independence older generations did. We got into all kinds of Trouble. But the things that let us get into trouble made us independent: time alone, unsupervised with our peers. We fucked up, paid for it, fixed it, and realized it wasn’t that terrible. They never do it, don’t learn from making the bad decision, and never learn that those mistakes can be corrected and you’ll be okay. To be honest, if I’m hiring and I want a leader, I want people who fucked up at least a little. Not because I want someone who makes bad decisions, but because I want somebody who isn’t afraid to try things. Someone who can make a mistake without going to pieces. Any kind of leadership, design, creative work, or even just getting things done requires a mindset that you need to move fast, break things, and figure out how to recover from that. Meekly sitting around waiting for someone to tell you exactly what to do and exactly how to do it not only means that you’re never going to get good at anything, but that you’ll have anxiety because you don’t think you can. In the mind of these kids who are afraid of messing up is the fear that if you make a mistake, you’re just done.
My 4 year old son asked me just this morning at what age kids usually get phones. I was like, um, a lot older than you. Kids want to be like older kids a lot more than they want to be like authority figures (even though all the authority figures have phone addictions, too, so no difference, I guess), so it's natural for them to emulate. I'm terrified of that day when we relent and get them phones (early teenager? Tween? Don't know exactly). Here in the US you'll hear many parents say their kids need phones in school because of the school shooter phenomenon. Could have a flip, I suppose. Hubski is the only social media (are we social media?) I use, so I'm not immersed in that world. Although I see the allure and have been sucked into Twitter vortices at times in the past, I see the whole endeavor as a cancer on society, and I hope eventually we will treat TikTok, FB and the rest just like we did PhilipMorris and RJ Reynolds. You make a product that is a giant net negative to humanity while making billions and defending it against all evidence, then you should be sued out of existence. Period. I do not care one whit about how much wealth would be destroyed by that action. Took 40 years in the case of Big Tobacco. Social media is destroying the world a lot faster, so I'm guessing less time here.
For ten years now I've said that if Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft and Apple disappeared from the face of the earth, and left nothing in their wake, the rest of us would be just fine. More than that, we'd acclimate to our new hubless digital world with surprising aplomb. George Gilder wrote a great book that nobody on the left read because Gilder is an arch-Reaganite who basically created Intelligent Design and nobody on the right read because it said "no actually the hippies are right this whole technological artifice is about to collapse." His fundamental point is that the past 40 years about technological innovation have been about bottlenecking the spread of information and that blockchain technology just fuckin' straight-up sidesteps that shit. Full stop. All your heavily-moted drawbridges are fucking doomed, best figure out what's next. I bring all this up because social media is dying, and it's dying quickly. Even the WSJ agrees. I wrote this just yesterday to some friends: I think you have to look at it through the sclerotic eye of pragmatism: what are kids getting out of social media? That answer didn't used to be "a giant phatty net negative." But that's all it is now. Both TikTok and Facebook have demonstrated that we're all just grist for the mill and they aren't making half as much money as they used to. TikTok pushed hard into "ackshully Jews should be exterminated" and there are enough people who remember when Nazis were bad that the end result is it ground the precise surgical weapon of social media into a blunt stick. I do use social media, and have done, at a high level, since it was usenet through a VT100 terminal. I think it's important to note that the early days where there was discovery and things to learn and friends to make and all the rest? That shit's over. What's left is a place where loners don't feel so alone. Not that it's helping them - it's not. But it's making them feel like they're being helped. It's any other addiction - the dopamine hit distracts you from the problem you aren't solving. This is why, in my assessment, it mostly belongs to people on the spectrum. Those with no object permanence and an inability to parse facial expressions do much better online, and they've all found each other. Unfortunately they're no better at interacting with humanity online than they are in person so it just drives them deeper. That, if anything, is where I think Haidt et. al.'s data is coming from: the simple fact that we've created another channel for addiction but we haven't regulated it in the slightest. Meta knows Instagram is bad for kids the same way RJR-Nabisco knows Lunchables are toxic. it makes them money tho so don't expect that to change without an external force. And I don't think there will be an external force. Do you know what a usage plateau means? it means that young people aren't adopting something. My daughter is 11. She has yet to ask for a phone. Her principle wants were a rabbit and a hamster. Is she online? She's online AF. That kid will be sitting on the couch with a laptop open to Roblox, a Switch open to Animal Crossing, an iPad open to Facetime and the projector screen playing Okami because she's farming customers in Restaurant Simulator, doing some vegetable picking or some shit in Animal Crossing and the iPad is showing her friend how to get through a tricky part in Okami. This is how she uses "social media" - she and two or three of her friends log into some server and play Sky or Roblox or Minecraft or whatever. I've asked her if she wants a Twitch account because it would simplify things - she can't be sussed. The Internet is where you meet your friends when you aren't at school, and there are Youtube videos that are only useful if they teach you shit about Minecraft otherwise why bother. But then, she was never likely to be particularly vulnerable to social media - she's good in person. I feel like we need controls on social media for the same reason we need controls on alcohol - it's a great servant and a terrible master. Most people don't get hooked to cigarettes by never smoking them. Most people have no problems with alcohol but some do. And there are people whose lives are being torn apart by social media. Doesn't mean social media exists solely to tear lives apart. But as time goes on, it becomes more and more like cigarettes and less and less like alcohol - you can party sometimes with champagne or tequila and have a good time but with cigarettes? If you aren't addicted to them why would you even pick up a pack?As the Wall Street Journal points out, social media is dying. In the early days there was a lot of pride about being a go-to answer man or the guy who made cool sketches or even someone with timely memes. I was one of the people who got SolInvictus banned. We started /r/IAma because it was clogging up /r/AskReddit and within two weeks we had Israeli whistleblowers from Dimona. It was crazy. But now, as my receptionist puts it, “never be a main character on the Internet.” Everyone who can find something better to do with their time has, leaving social media for shut-ins, autists and attention whores. It’s horseshoe theory incarnate - you’ve got the MAGA ‘boomers on Facebook, you’ve got the tankie zoomers on TikTok and in between you’ve got the normies who recognize that Twitter is basically cigarettes that shout at you.