The Internet's Already Eaten Us Alive

Will our kids be ready? What does ready even look like?

Musings

1. Oakland has a new mayor in Barbara Lee. Its voters passed a new tax measure to increase sales tax to 10.75%, one of the highest in the country. And is evaluating increasing property taxes.

2. I recently joined the Birkenstock club and feel pretty punk rock when wearing them sockless.

3. Google Gemini is looking to expand to Kids because whatever at this point.

4. Why is Mark Zuckerberg so strange?

Today’s post comes after 2 weeks of staying home building train sets in the shape of a penis because we were all too sick to go outside.

Should It Survive

It’s been a year since the release of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. He’s been doing talk show and podcast interviews rehashing his research for those who missed it the first time.

Haidt makes the argument that there are two parenting problems today: (1) digital under-parenting and (2) real-world over-parenting. We’re spending too much time overthinking how our kids play while spending a lot less time thinking about phones and the internet.

And on the other side of the debate is Taylor Lorenz (whom I adore), making the case that this is nothing more than typical fear mongering. The internet is a gift that has helped marginalized kids find voices, build community, and shouldn’t be over-policed by parents controlling what kids can and cannot see to align with their world view [interview]. Our energy would be better spent pressing internet platforms and policy writers to do more to protect kids from their addictive platforms and harmful content.

The discourse on the internet is almost in unanimous agreement with Haidt and any attempt to even evaluate Lorenz’s position is drowned out by the usual “Taylor Lorenz is a fucking moron” comment.

As a child of the internet, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own position of unrestricted early access and what I might have changed. I grew up in the AOL chatrooms of the 90s. My first penpal was a girl named Cynthia who lived in Michigan I met in AOL’s “Town Square” - we would send drawings of ducks to each other in the mail with a sentence about how much we hated doing homework. My Warcraft3 guild mates I met online in middle school came to my wedding 20 years later. I watched Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine off Napster before seeding it on a torrent site to get my ratio up. I meticulously highlighted over URLs friends shared on chat to make sure the link didn’t go to Two Girls One Cup or Lemon Party. I turned out okay-ish.

A lot has changed since my days of discovering the internet. In 2000, there was ~400 million people online. That number is now 5 billion as of 2021. And with more people, faster connections, and new data centers being spun up every week, content on the internet has grown a mind numbing amount.

(Source: https://ourworldindata.org/internet)

In 2010, the internet created about 2 zettabytes (1 zettabyte = 1 trillion gigabytes = 40 billion Blu-Rays of a season of Friends) of new content. We’re projected to create ~181 zettabytes this year (7 trillion, two hundred forty billion Blu-Rays of Joey Tribbiani). This assumes 1 Blu-Ray is utilized to its max file size of 25GB

(Source: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/data-generated-per-day)

How anyone is expected to safely navigate that at a young age is hard to imagine but maybe that’s all part of the course of childhood. Haidt outlines 4 steps parents can take:

1. No Smartphones before High School

2. No Social Media before 16

3. Phone-Free School

4. Teach Responsible Tech Use

Will a school’s phone policy decide whether we enroll our kid in a particular school? No. But it’ll be a part of the calculus as we start school tours. Will I give my kid a phone? If he really wants one, he can have mine. I spend too little time sleeping and too much time shitting because of it.

Things I Want to Know from You

1. What are your own thoughts on kids x internet?

2. Are there any good parts left?

See you next time,
Jason