fascist encroachment on civil liberties and the normalization of surveillance and over policing is always sold as some shit to protect the kids.
when i was a little kid, we rode bikes around the neighborhood, ran around in the quiet streets, and explored undeveloped lots. so signs went up telling us we couldn’t go to places where there weren’t cop patrols and cameras, because SAFETY. and when we stayed in the places left to us, cops would stop us and ask our identities and tell us to go home because they didn’t “like” kids loitering, riding bikes, skateboarding, or any of the other shit people once called “playing outdoors”. the parks were torn up because SAFETY, since i guess merry go rounds and swingsets are death traps that killed 1 billion children. unlike cars and cops guns.
when i was a teen, we would congregate in the malls. but never in groups larger than half a dozen, or that invited policing. trespass orders for the older kids. no no, no playing, no socializing, no loitering: you must come to the mall and efficiently make purchases or work for $4/hr being a retail/food court pain sponge. when you got off work, you must leave the mall. because you’re a teen now, and teens are DANGEROUS. they have NO BUSINESS HERE.
the parks are gone, the malls are dead, parking lots and abandoned lots are hostile places where police cars sit to take naps and accost pedestrians and the poor cutting across on the way to wherever.
outside is BANNED for SAFETY, so kids go online to be social and guess what: that’s DANGEROUS. so that space needs to be just as overpoliced, surveilled and controlled until all that’s left are places to purchase and places to work. for SAFETY.
every place people invent to find some kind of community beyond the eyes of the bosses and their thugs is a place that is DANGEROUS and must be annexed for SAFETY.
Seems to be common in developed countries. Parents whine about kids being inside all day but then talk about how dangerous the world is around them.
Ok but as a parent, 8-year-old George in 1919 is literally incomprehensible. Mother and grandfather were raised right though
In 1919 in Sheffield there wouldn’t have been that many vehicles on the road, so it probably would have been safer from that perspective. Additionally people walked further in daily life back then, and were more used to doing so. Very different times.
Also worth noting that people had a lot more children then, and child death was still a fact of life, so perhaps people were a little less precious.
many businesses now have high pitched buzzers on the outside of their buildings that emit a sound adults cant hear but is painfully annoying for younger people, to stop them from “loitering”. you can get them for your house now. they’re called Mosquitos.
https://mosquitoloiteringsolutions.com/
society treats children and teenagers like a nuisance, a problem to be solved, then wonders why they get frustrated and lash out.
The “turmoil” of adolescence is entirely a product of industrial capitalism and its mistreatment of teenagers.
In 1991 anthropologist Alice Schlegel of the University of Arizona and Herbert Barry III, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, reviewed research on teens in 186 preindustrial societies. Among the important conclusions they drew about these societies: about 60 percent had no word for “adolescence,” teens spent almost all their time with adults, teens showed almost no signs of psychopathology, and antisocial behavior in young males was completely absent in more than half these cultures and extremely mild in cultures in which it did occur.[1]
In fact, I recently learned that the popular notion that the brain isn’t “mature” until age 25 is probably a myth.[2] [3]
Personal anecdote
I grew up in the Deep South (Georgia), and when I was 16, my high school girlfriend and I were dying to fuck, but we never could, because every adult in our lives made it their life’s mission to prevent all “kids” from having literally any privacy whatsoever.
The closest we got was brief, ten minute periods after Friday night football games, while we waited for our parents to pick us up. Band kids like us would hide in the auditorium and make out, but the band directors were constantly sweeping the building, trying to catch kids being “naughty” in order to traumatize and admonish them. I recently learned that that was also a plot point in Handmaid’s Tale—my best friend was unable to finish the book because that scene was too triggering.
It’s been over twenty years and I’m still resentful about it.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-the-teen-brain-2007-06/ ↩︎
I learned it from this infographic. I haven’t fully vetted everything on it, but I’m sharing it to promote discussion:
↩︎https://www.sciencefocus.com/comment/brain-myth-25-development ↩︎
That infographic does worry me a little bit, I’ve known too many people who fried their brain from too much weed as teenagers, and cannot function properly because of it. Was them being a teen the reason behind the damage? Maybe not, but it was the reason why they didn’t have enough moderation.
Though my solution wouldn’t be “ban all drugs from kids” because that’s literally how this sort of shit happens, they get high, have a great time, nothing bad happens, so they keep doing it, and end up relying on it, and in turn, because all the adults around them just have a “you should never take drugs” attitude, they never actually have a proper talk about their issues and so it just ends up getting worse.
A better “drug education” for teens would be to teach moderation and proper knowledge of side effects, not “if you take drugs it’s destroy your life” but “smoking weed every now and then is ok, but too much too often can and will fuck you up.”
Yeah, the drug part is my primary reservation.
Edit: It appears to be the opinion of the infographic’s creator rather than a topic explored in its cited literature.
this is very interesting, thank you!!
I really wish that Epstein(real unfortunate name) cited some actual peer-reviewed research papers. Otherwise this “research” paper is just a vibes based analysis without a works cited.
…It cites several. What are you talking about?We’re talking about my first source, right?
References
a series of long-term studies set in motion in the 1980s by anthropologists Beatrice Whiting and John Whiting of Harvard University
Studies by Beatriz Luna of the Laboratory of Neurocognitive Development at the University of Pittsburgh
An electroencephalogram (EEG) study by Irwin Feinberg and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis
a 1993 study by Jsus Pujol and his colleagues at the Autonomous University of Barcelona
Other studies, conducted by researchers such as Elizabeth Sowell of the University of California, Los Angeles
a 2004 study conducted by James Bjork and his colleagues at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, at Stanford University and at the Catholic University of America
I wish the article included links (a common complaint in science writing), but I doubt Scientific American would have allowed the article to be published if the referenced studies were all hallucinations.
Magazine articles like this are often reduxes of formal literature reviews. I’ll see if I can find a more formal one.
Edit: Not by Robert Epstein, but related papers:
https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1099_861
https://sci-hub.ru/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11343525/
https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00767-3
I am very adult but unfortunately my ears are somehow still good enough that I can often hear those vile things. They can be quite painful to be around, probably because the assholes who operate them tend to crank up the volume to extremely high and probably unsafe levels. After all, that’s what the kind of business tyrant who would get one of these in the first place would naturally want to do. What an awful invention.
The shopping center by my house has huge speakers everywhere outside that just play seagulls shrieking at ear-splitting volume to prevent anyone from spending any time outside. Go to the store, buy something, then get back in your car immediately.
I thought you were joking. I was sure of it, even. I thought “it must be a bit from the Simpsons or something.” I followed the link to the website and still thought it must be a joke, one of those satirical sites. But it’s not a joke. Parody is dead.
If I ever see one of these things (apparently I’m too old to hear it), I don’t give a shit if I incur legal repercussions, I will be taking a hammer to it.
those were a thing when i was a teenager, like 15-20 years ago
some of us used to use the sound as a ringtone so we could text in class without getting caught lol
Did you just write this? I feel like this should be pasta
1000% my exact experience growing up in an extremely low crime area in a mellow college town in California.
Also now they weaponize as part of this the massive homeless issues in California that they also created by much of the same overcriminalization.
Look, being a parent is hard, i get it, but you can’t just put an ipad in front of your kid and then get incensed when they’re watching gore videos. You need to unhook that thing from the internet and put like 5 games on it or something. Some of our generation’s parents weren’t much better in this regard, it was just really hard to find out about german fart porn on your game boy color.
I worked in peds and I was a little judgemental of parents of iPad kids, but I gotta say its super convenient to have the equivalent of an off button for a toddler who is screaming. Ive done IV starts on toddlers who barely flinched after they turned on Miss Rachel. Like… I get why people do it
It’s the modern equivalent of putting a bit of whiskey in the bottle.
It’s not really about kids, unfortunately
yeah it’s bad parenting but also how can you not be a bad parent these days? everyone’s stressed, both parents are worked to the bone and are still saddled with debt up to their eyeballs and no matter how hard they try they seem to not be able to provide their only kid with the quality of life they see other people’s kids have, which they know their kid will resent them for it once they turn into a teenager.
every parent i’ve talked to says they know it’s bad but they’re tired and stressed all the time and they just need some quiet time, and the screen is the only thing that makes their kid shut up.
Yeah like I’m all for keeping kids away from hardcore porn, there’s things for sure they shouldn’t see, but ofc capitalism is going about this ass backwards.
I had a flashback the other day to my scrapbook of lewd images i’d collected from newspapers and magazines, not to even mention my collection of homebrew erotic lit
😅
I had a similar collection of ecchi manga pages for like two years, my mom grounded me and threw it out when she found it.
Good, that stuff is pure trash.
someone should fork one of those youtube clients that lets you download videos. parent can scrape the channels/playlists/videos they approve of. have a function where the phone can go into a some sort of locked-down offline kiosk mode and only those videos will be available visible/available but functionality otherwise works same as youtube with suggestions, autoplay etc.
suddenly parents all love pirates
you can do this on desktop with freetube
The settings you wold need to use are:
- Password
- Set a password for the settings menu
- Parental Control
- Hide Search Bar
- Distraction Free
- Hide Trending Videos
- Hide Popular Videos
- Recommended Videos
- Hide comments
probably still some edgecase ways to get around these that a dedicated kid could find but you can also ban videos containing specified terms and enable “Show family-friendly only” to limit what can get through even then.
Can you lock the UI and turn off the internet though?
I think all the pieces exist.
Need to package it up in a way that is pre set for this use case. Not wait for parents of toddlers to find open source projects on their own.
sorry should have specified this doesn’t pre-download videos it’s just a highly customizable and featured youtube frontend.
- Password
youtube kids allows this functionality, including only allowing downloaded videos
You could pretty much have thousands of arcade/NES/SNES/Genesis/GBA games thanks to emulators. I mean, kid me had those shareware compilation CDs with ~40 DOS games. The main difference is that kids today can play Super Mario World or Metal Slug instead of the shareware version of Jazz Jackrabbit.
it was just really hard to find out about german fart porn on your game boy color.
Best we had was taking our friend’s gameboy and renaming all their pokemon to “poo” and “butts”
I don’t think the iPad-parents give a fuck what their kid watches, they’ve already given up at that point. I think anyone that actually supports anything about making the internet more child-whatever (friendly? censored? IDK) is basically people who are worried about other kids becoming iPad babies but feel totally powerless to stop it because you’re not allowed to suggest, criticize, involve yourself with another person’s child/property in any other way than via the government or via private corporations who get to do it on the basis of private property.
So like, if I was a kid, couldn’t I just click on adult content to be classified as adult by these machines?
“Yea, that account watched 2 hours of political debate, must be 18” kinda thing.
Just to be safe kids start “watching” ~10 hours a week of political debate. Somehow kids can watch 10 tabs at once and all the vids are going at 2x speed.
My God, gen alpha will be aging into boomers in 10x speed time
If instead of just putting on the news coverage of their country’s politicians on a tab they’re ignoring, they were to actually watch useful and informative political stuff, maybe that’d do the world some good by getting the next generation engaging with politics.
Tbf, I really enjoyed that kind of thing when I was like 10-12. The way a toddler will shut up instantly when you put on those complete nonsense toddler crack videos, you could probably have gotten a similar response from 11 year old me with either current political issues at the time or anything vaguely leftist. Not that a single adult responsible for me knew that or would have believed it if someone told them.
If only you had known that you were mentally old enough to watch LGBTQ content and porn at that age!
I still have mostly the same subs from when I was 12 lol, Red Letter Media, Diresta, Rhett and Link, Potholer54, and some other classics. My subs list is a graveyard of dead channels though.
Calling it now, this will still let the Elsagate slop through, but it’ll prevent anyone who so much as glanced at a video about Disney movies from seeing trans-related content.
Blocking all instances of ‘trans’ from the internet to stop the Irish making the trans-atlantic journey 😂
at least the local trans community are doing a lot of diy zines for this kind of information as i write this
looking up a bunch of videos on how to file my taxes to avoid getting flagged as a minor
I think my youtube account is 18 years old at this point
i went and double checked. Mine’s 15.
Knowing google the AI would be absolute dogshit and would flag you as a minor anyway
If I were erroneously flagged I’d probably feel insulted.
I’ve been watching tutorials on renovating drywall though, so I’m probably in the clear.
This is so backwards, I’d probably get flagged as a baby since I only use youtube to watch gaming videos.
it would be unbelievably funny if gaming got counted as kid shit
Considering the sorts of groups pushing this stuff, there’s a non zero chance of that happening.
when are we gonna find out the “AI” is actually just a room full of nonces
Imo this has always about about restricting millions of people from open sources of information, next up, banning books or whatever
but first, kick every people off the internet who uses an anime pfp on twitter
I didn’t have an ID for a long time in my adulthood, same for credit card.
good news / bad news on banning books: very few people read books so they are not as relevant. probably lower priority to ban.
Didn’t stop them from going after libgen and zlibrary the last couple of years
That’s more driven by profit motive than fear of people finding education. They have effectively banned books by making the population complicit in their own illiteracy. Diffuse Spectacle hits different.
as always “if _____ could change anything it would be illegal”
Please take out YouTube, please do it’s the one thing I waste time on all day.
for real it might fix 60% of my prductivity issues
The power lies within you comrade
Couple threads in my mind about this:
- Social media giants have been trying to figure out moderation for a while. It is always met with backlash. All this regulation is laundering the backlash to the government, giving tech companies a little PR help
- On that same beat, if everyone is documented then it makes moderation way easier from a technical standpoint. Fewer financial resources have to go into moderation.
- Part of this has to be a correction for bots. Tech giants are learning that unregulated bots are bad, especially with trying to train AI. They want to crush bots that are not theirs and validate that their users are real. This will help them tremendously with marketing as they can point to a real user base and know their AI training data is coming from real people
- There is also the dream that all this will be automated by AI, despite the UK suddenly being filled with Normans Reedus. So offloading resources from moderation isn’t just moving it to ID validation, resources are also reduced there as well.
This will probably damage the income of most YouTubers who rely on a kid audience to keep them afloat, whether they’re aware of it or not.
taylor lorenz has been doing good coverage on this for a little while now
The world would be a better place if YouTube didn’t just ban the kids abut also banned all of the adults too.
Just bots endlessly rambling back and forth, sharing increasingly nonsensical AI videos where Morgan Freeman narrates a story about a cat while completely unrelated cats to the one in the story appear on screen. Just that, forever.
deleted by creator
Kids shouldn’t have access to life unsupervised in general. I’m not saying be a helicopter parent but you should know what your kids are up to. You wouldn’t let a kid walk into a library with a big porno section and just assume your kid won’t go in there. No. You’d pay attention to where they were going. Same applies to the internet. Or cable TV. You shouldn’t give a kid free reign. You also don’t let them pick every fucking meal so it’s nothing but chocate sauce and rainbow sprinkles. No. You share a meal. You make sure they eat well.
The amount of actual things that are “kid friendly” aka “we let the kids be 100% in charge of it” is extremely fucking slim if you’re doing your job as a parent. That’s why they invented shake n bake. So your little dumbasses can run around the kitchen shaking that fucking bag like goblin warlords while you handle the hot pan.
i gotta disagree. kids need their unsupervised play time or else they grow up to be depressed pieces of shit like me. source
A kkkristian parent wouldn’t let their kid walk into a library with an LGBTQ section unsupervised, which is why kids absolutely need unsupervised access to media.
