I'm curious -- what are you hoping that argument will accomplish?
Freedom of ANY kind allows bad things to happen. The most secure world is one in which we are all locked up, nobody ever interacts, and are only fed via tube from their government provided feeder in their government provided cube.
Since I'm fairly sure that isn't what you're advocating, please, explain what you're hoping to accomplish by stating that a free and open internet is a problem.
I was responding to a comment that stated an authoritarian/nationalistic movement would fear a free and open internet. I was pointing out that a free and open internet can be a tool of an authoritarian/nationalistic movement. I was hoping to open some people's eyes to how openness can be abused.
Also I don't know if this was intentional, but just letting you know that your phrasing of this post comes off as needlessly confrontational. You can ask for clarification without asking "what are you hoping that argument will accomplish" which sounds accusatory as it implies a nefarious motive.
I keep asking people to explain why they downvote posts like yours and nobody wants to. I guess they know the reasons aren't good, they just can't help giving in to the desire for control.
Beautiful list though and well said. I've been trying to think of a succinct way to summarize some of those concepts and I think you've broken them up well.
At the risk of a reddit-style comment: "Yes please."
Honestly just reverse the drug bans, treat them life public health problems, and disband agencies like this. Nothing good has ever come out of giving government agencies this kind of power and this kind of mandate.
Why do you think he somehow "managed" this? How your children act and what they want to do is, in many ways, beyond your control. Do you think of yourself like that? Like "I acted like X because my parents raised me like Y?"
You're taking one example and generalizing it. I'm sure someone did something productive with cocaine once too, but that's not generally its outcome. (just a random example that occurs to me, I do not agree with the "War on some drugs" btw it was just an example)
I'm sorry, I fail to see how providing a counter-example to someone pooh-poohing phone use by children is now analogous to advocating for productive cocaine use.
It seem unproductive to deal with bizarre flights of fancy on the part of HN commenters, so I'll get back to my phone or something else productive now.
I explicitly added the disclaimer to preempt your attempt to ignore my question, which you did anyway. Fantastic.
You know exactly what I was trying to say. ONE counter example to a statistic doesn't invalidate the statistic and you were trying to say that just because very very very rarely someone makes productive use of their phone (one out of millions), that therefore there's no problem with how people use phones. Even you have to see how that argument misses the mark.
Okay, I'll try this one last time. Please try to read the whole comment, rather than getting hung up on one element of it. You know, like you incorrectly suggest I did.
This thread exists on a post where someone laments that their child, upon turning 10, stopped making arts and crafts, and started maintaining social media accounts and spending a lot of time on her phone.
This thread itself started with someone pushing back against the assumptions in that article, pointing out that many of us of a certain age dealt with what sound like similar argument, spending all of our time on a newfangled computer, indoors, when "normal" kids were outside doing outside things. Or in this particular case, spending time on the computer instead of studying. I relate to this, because while my parent were more supportive, I too spent my childhood on a series of entry-level computers: a Timex Sinclair TS-1000, a Commodore VIC-20, and so on.
That comment, and therefore this thread, specifically says, "who am I to say that Minecraft, Youtube, or some variant of it won't be the future operating system of society." So true!
Then another user, seemingly not able to understand how computers seemed like an incredible dead-end waste of time in the early 1980s, suggests that phones are completely different, because "your interests in computing would lead to job opportunities."
That's the context in which I posted. Remembering that what seemed like a completely dead-end waste of time turned out to be one of the best careers in the world, and seeing how dismissive the most recent comment was.
So I tried to give an example, just one example, to show how the parent commenter's assumptions resulted in an unfair blanket statement. On a thread about a little girl who doesn't color now that she found Instagram. Within the context of "lead[ing] to job opportunities."
Does that make sense now? Obviously most people aren't going to derive their primary income from streaming in the future. I never made that claim.
It turns out 99.9% of people who color and make string art and fashion paper clothes for dolls also don't end up making a career out of that when they're adults. In fact, given a 10-year-old child, perhaps job opportunities shouldn't even be the primary concern.
So your most recent comment says I ignored your question, which is weird, because I didn't actually see a question mark:
You're taking one example and generalizing it. I'm sure someone did something productive with cocaine once too, but that's not generally its outcome. (just a random example that occurs to me, I do not agree with the "War on some drugs" btw it was just an example)
I still don't see what sort of question you were trying to ask there, or I'd try to answer it.
Now you're mentioning statistics, which is interesting to me. What exactly is the statistic on what's going to happen 15 years from now when this 10-year-old kid is entering the work force? How are these future statistics derived, anyway? Man, what I would have given for such a thing back when I was ten!
Given how people are, I'm guessing my attempt to remind you of the context in which these comments exist will fail. But hey, my parents insisted I spend time as a youngster writing, so it's good practice.
TL;DR: You don't know what the future holds for the current generation of young kids using phones, and neither do I. But the present hold many surprises for those in the past who never could have predicted that I would end up making a nice living with those weird computer things, or that people could possibly ever earning a living making YouTube videos or playing video games on twitch or doing whatever an instagram influencer does, and there are probably many, many, many more people involved in video editing and production today than one might have expected 15 or 20 years ago.
That's all. Don't be so quick to assume that smartphones--or any other technology--are 100% bad. That's it. That's the only thing I was saying.
P.S. Personally, I don't think the kid's problem is the phone, but the social media. TikTok and Instagram are a poison to humanity.
I was 100% convinced my kids won't get these devices until their very late teens, when I saw how my less than 1 year old reacted to the phones my wife and I use. Because his reaction is pure instinct, the dopamine response just to the colors and brightness was shocking.
We now have to work HARD to keep these devices away from him. Part of it, of course, is he observes how much attention we pay them but his eyes definitely light up differently when they are turned on. And that's without the manipulative, 1000-engineers-optimizing-for-your-addiction software built into them.
I honestly find it harder and harder to believe these things do anything positive for us. I 100% believe they can I just think we've turned them into something ugly, right now.
I've babysat for friends with a 3 and 5 yr old, and it is phenomenal how you could grab their attention (and distract from any ailment they had a second earlier) by showing them youtube videos of fire engines with sirens.
This is how these things always go isn't it? We invent this incredible technology that augments what we do, what we can be, what we can learn, and what we can believe...
and then we turn it into an almost-exclusively advertising tool designed to convert a human being into a money making machine.
It's one of the reasons I'm not enthusiastic about technology anymore. I see what we do with it. Every. Single. Time.
I'll third this. I was so excited about the applications for speech/smart interfaces in the home a la Cherry 2000. But we got Alexa. A tool to buy stuff and spy. I won't denigrate the actual useful functions these devices have - I like to ask Alexa to tell me jokes when I'm at a friend's house that has one. However, it's all the things that come with it that turned me off.
I'm currently pursuing open-source tools to run home automation but it's slow-going. It's complex.
This is in no way meant to offend you: You thought about it, but you didn't, just like most people do. It's easy to say you would do something, but actually going ahead and doing it and going against the mainstream is a whole other thing entirely. If that's the data point you want to offer, than it seems like it was just supporting my point.
(And who am I to judge, I've resigned to using Github as well...)
There's now a bulwark between developers and bad actors attempting to use Github and the legal framework against them. It is very probably that outside actual, valid legal justification, what the RIAA tried will never be tried again, thanks to the presence of that fund.
Freedom of ANY kind allows bad things to happen. The most secure world is one in which we are all locked up, nobody ever interacts, and are only fed via tube from their government provided feeder in their government provided cube.
Since I'm fairly sure that isn't what you're advocating, please, explain what you're hoping to accomplish by stating that a free and open internet is a problem.