alt Hacker NewsThe kids with phones are alright
Comments
Kids with phones are alright. Attention economy of social media is not. As did tabaco companies, they (soc. media tech giants) push proposals to regulate phone use based on age in hopes that the their information asymmetry advantage and addictive dark patterns that are the problem in the first place won't be regulated and they can keep exploiting the public held in their trap by network effect.
HN title automangler automangled this title. It references a specific song: “The kids are alright”, and removing the “The” reduces the impact of the reference.
Edit: now fixed, thanks mods
The focus on children needing their phones controlled is the correct instinct, incorrectly applied to a too-narrow group.
Smartphones are fomes peccati.
Conflates a whole load of othogonal issues that really have nothing to do with each other
What’s easier: waiting until your child is mature enough before giving them a smartphone, or trying to regulate social media companies and every addictive website?
> These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives,
People who are not yet ready to have full agency of their own lives is more or less the definition of children.
Does she also expect children to have full time jobs, pay taxes, pay all their own bills and rent, etc etc?
Personally, I don’t even think adults with phones are alright.
The problem is not phones. Phones are fine. The problem is specific apps that make use of addiction engineering. These are bad on desktops too but the extreme portability of phones makes them a hundred times more potent.
Like all risks it doesn’t affect all kids equally either.
Some are less vulnerable for various cognitive reasons just like some are less prone to chemical addiction.
Kids with wealthier and/or more engaged parents or parents with more free time are also less vulnerable. Wealthier kids have more activities available and can often afford to have one parent stay home.
Lastly kids in healthier communities or suburbs or safe urban settings where they can roam free are less vulnerable.
They children of the poor, those with ADD or ASD conditions, and those with less third spaces or other activities are most vulnerable to becoming addicted to endless stupefying doom scrolling and addictive games that pre-train them for future gambling addiction.
It’s not just kids either. The elderly and the isolated become addicted to this stuff.
Addiction engineering is the problem, whether it’s via a phone, a web site, or a chemical.
IMO if you intentionally and knowingly engineer something for addiction you are committing a form of assault.
He was only caught because he was on his phone and someone could see his screen. No one would stand up for the girls if he was wearing one of those meta glasses taking the same pics.
It's important to define kids.
The article mentions 15-16 years of age.
The best practice is to keep kids off smartphones with full internet, full social media, touchscreen and scrolling at least until 13.
It doesn't mean they can't have other kinds of devices.
This is a wide open market category.
This essay extends one anecdote involving 16+ year old teenagers to the unsupported conclusion that kids should have phones and those who wish to restrict that are all wealthy 1% right wing authoritarians. Then with the personal note it seems clear that the core of the essay stems from the author's own personal trauma/experience.
I don't disagree that big adtech's reliance on dopamine-driven addictive behavior is real evil, but regulations that at least wall kids off from that makes sense and there's all kinds of research to suggest as much, in contrast to a personal essay about a video online.
This whole article just boils down to the argument "If badly-behaved adults are allowed to have cameras, why shouldn't well-behaved children have access to for-profit social media platforms designed to addict them and feed them misinformation?"
It's complete nonsense. The conversation in the UK right now isn't about whether or not teenagers should be allowed to own cell phones; it's about whether they should be allowed to have access to the myriad of addictive and harmful apps and services available on those devices, often maliciously targeted at them.
The drunk pervert filming them on the train has nothing to do with this argument. He's using his phone like a camera. Teenagers are allowed to have cameras, and assuredly every one of the girls he was filming had a camera of some sort on them of their own. Nobody was on uneven ground in this situation technologically.
If people actually were worried about perverted adults preying on children, they would take a look at the countless examples of perverted adults preying on children via their social media accounts and devices. It's been open season on children online for the past decade.
If people actually cared about accountability, they would stop pushing for age-verification laws, and start penalizing social media companies for their laissez faire attitude towards inappropriate sexual conduct, because currently, sites like Instagram and TikTok cater directly to pedophiles and do absolutely nothing about the predatory behavior coming from their user base towards children that are clearly too young to legally use social media in most parts of the world (<13 in the USA).
We need to reframe this whole conversation. It's not about keeping kids away from social media. It's about keeping trillion-dollar businesses from profiting off of children while actively doing harm to them with addictive algorithms, misinformation, and exposure to malicious actors.
[dead]
So this is the new hot take? That kids need unfettered access to smart phones and the internet to toughen them up? Absolutely cringe.
Do people want to restrict 16 year olds with phones? That seems like a really bad idea. For 10 year olds it makes sense, but 16 is nearly adult; they need to really learn this responsibility. And of course they need a phone when they go out like these girls.
A bit of a weird tangent from what apparently is harassment in a train or something like that? I admit it's hard to follow what is going on.