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Thank goodness a US President is weighing in on this catastrophe of our time. There's no doubt in my mind that a combination of smartphones, social media, overu

Thank goodness a US President is weighing in on this catastrophe of our time. There's no doubt in my mind that a combination of smartphones, social media, overuse of technology in schools and a surveillance society is having a devastating effect on the mental health of young people. We are doing this to ourselves. Camille Paglia interviewed in the Wall Street Journal characterised "command and control systems in education" as the mechanism by which "a civilisation commits suicide". I think it was Sherry Turkle who characterised what we're doing as "digital child abuse" (a phrase I've used too [1]) It is possible to build Humane Technology [2] if as technologists we treat people as _ends_ and stop treating people as _means_ to our own profit and domination. [1] https://digitalvegan.net https://digitalvegan.net [2] https://www.humanetech.com/ https://www.humanetech.com/

raxxorrax 5y ago
I agree with him on this issue. I believe social networking just creates a pool with extreme peer pressure and especially insecure people are strongly affected by this. The expectation it creates are stronger than what can be induced by publications or people close to those affected. Problem is that government quickly pervert the issue. Child protection becomes an issue about how to sabotage encryption. Real child abuse happens in the vicinity of the victims, so investing in schools and care would put more eyes on the problem and would have a measurable benefit. But the point Mrs. Paglia makes is also relevant. You want to teach people that it is completely okay to see things differently, that their acceptance does not rely on their agreeableness. Although they have quite bad role models currently... I don't think the solution is becoming a luddite. You have to build resilience so that online opinions don't affect you as much. But "don't believe anything you read on the net" has become "extremely dangerous disinformation".
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  > The expectation it creates are stronger than what can be induced by publications or people close to those affected. Yes. The remote 'big other' can exert more affect than our closest friends or even parents. It fuses group approval/awareness with the predator. I think that's why authoritarian leftists dislike the traditional "nuclear family". > Child protection becomes an issue about how to sabotage encryption. The four horsemen of the infopocalypse is a parochial spectre. It's up to us hackers to push the conversation beyond that as quickly as possible. Understanding the ways that technology facilitates abuse that has nothing to do with CSAM and kiddy-fiddling nonces - and making people more aware of that - is important in the struggle for humane technology. > acceptance does not rely on their agreeableness. Beautifully put. Exactly this. > I don't think the solution is becoming a luddite. Be careful even saying that. The principle trick that techno-zealots use is levelling the "accusation" of neo-Ludism, and trying to conflate reasoned tech-critique with regressive savagery. It's an old trick, but still quite effective as you just demonstrated :) Besides the Luddites, as a socio-cultural phenomenon, were much less two dimensional than widely supposed. See Cory Doctorow's recent essay [1] on that. [1] https://onezero.medium.com/science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature-56ed9cfc5470 https://onezero.medium.com/science-fiction-is-a-luddite-lite...

raxxorrax 5y ago

I agree with him on this issue. I believe social networking just creates a pool with extreme peer pressure and especially insecure people are strongly affected by this. The expectation it creates are stronger than what can be induced by publications or people close to those affected. Problem is that government quickly pervert the issue. Child protection becomes an issue about how to sabotage encryption. Real child abuse happens in the vicinity of the victims, so investing in schools and care would put more eyes on the problem and would have a measurable benefit. But the point Mrs. Paglia makes is also relevant. You want to teach people that it is completely okay to see things differently, that their acceptance does not rely on their agreeableness. Although they have quite bad role models currently... I don't think the solution is becoming a luddite. You have to build resilience so that online opinions don't affect you as much. But "don't believe anything you read on the net" has become "extremely dangerous disinformation".

nonrandomstring 5y ago
> The expectation it creates are stronger than what can be induced by publications or people close to those affected. Yes. The remote 'big other' can exert more affect than our closest friends or even parents. It fuses group approval/awareness with the predator. I think that's why authoritarian leftists dislike the traditional "nuclear family". > Child protection becomes an issue about how to sabotage encryption. The four horsemen of the infopocalypse is a parochial spectre. It's up to us hackers to push the conversation beyond that as quickly as possible. Understanding the ways that technology facilitates abuse that has nothing to do with CSAM and kiddy-fiddling nonces - and making people more aware of that - is important in the struggle for humane technology. > acceptance does not rely on their agreeableness. Beautifully put. Exactly this. > I don't think the solution is becoming a luddite. Be careful even saying that. The principle trick that techno-zealots use is levelling the "accusation" of neo-Ludism, and trying to conflate reasoned tech-critique with regressive savagery. It's an old trick, but still quite effective as you just demonstrated :) Besides the Luddites, as a socio-cultural phenomenon, were much less two dimensional than widely supposed. See Cory Doctorow's recent essay [1] on that. [1] https://onezero.medium.com/science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature-56ed9cfc5470 https://onezero.medium.com/science-fiction-is-a-luddite-lite...