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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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 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.
We’re talking about my first source, right?
References
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.