10 ms·

I fear the (negative) impact of our current technological drugs goes beyond the impact of traditional drugs. I’ve seen kids not even 3-4 years old already hook

by tirant 2y ago

I fear the (negative) impact of our current technological drugs goes beyond the impact of traditional drugs. I’ve seen kids not even 3-4 years old already hooked to smartphone screens. Even toddlers around 1 year old with an smartphone mount in their stroller. Main impact on kids is lack of socialization, lack of emotional regulation and a complete impact on their capabilities to keep their attention. Those used to be indicators for a future failed adulthood. I remember traditional drugs only becoming present around 14-16 years old. Alcohol was probably the most prevalent, and probably the most dangerous. Followed by Cannabis, tobacco and some recreational drugs like MDMA. Most of those drugs had a component that actually pushed kids heavily towards socialization and forming peer groups. Now looking back to the results of that drug consumption I would say that most of the individuals engaging on them were able to regulate and continue to what it seems to be a very normal adult life. Obviously tobacco with terrible potential future health effects, but beyond that, everyone I know turned up pretty healthy. Not only that, I remember some time later that the most experimental group (mdma, LSD, mushrooms) of drug users being full of people with Master Degrees and PhDs. The new technological drugs scare me way more than the old traditional ones. Obviously it is a normal response of the known va unknown. Time will tell.

will5421 2y ago
Playing Devil’s advocate… Socialisation is what’s driving technology use. It’s just happening on the phones, not irl. Just like with alcohol, anyone not participating will be left out. If everyone’s on their phones all the time, IRL socialisation won’t matter compared to socialisation via phones.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  Disagree. Nothing can replace face to face socialization. We're not even close. Our minds are just adapting, but to a new local maximum that is far away from the global maximum of ideal. (Edit: corrected typographical error.)
- Timshel 2y ago
  Socialization online exists, but I'm not sure that it's the main activity on phones. When you look at https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-for-teens https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-for-teens it does not look promising. Video is leading, then Gaming which can include socialization then third come Social media but with Tik Tok leading which I would not categorize as socialization.
- tgv 2y ago
  Rather: avoidance of socialization is what's driving it. It's the easy way out of meeting people while still getting compliments and such and pretending "everything is fine". In that sense, it indeed has a lot in common with alcohol.
- herval 2y ago
  I think this was true a decade ago, where people used social media to talk to each other and actively kept chats with friends, etc. What I’m seeing now is social media got so hyper optimized for engagement that it became a passive consumption mechanism, and the only “socialization” left is sharing memes. It’s a widespread digital heroin epidemic
  - internet101010 2y ago
    The communication aspect has just moved to other places.
    - herval 2y ago
      such as?
jorvi 2y ago
I’m very much for legalizing and regulating (almost) all drugs, but watch out with the confirmation bias of “everyone in my social circle who used recreationally turned out fine.” I can’t find it right now but I read a great comment on legalization that pointed out that a kid experimenting with weed and cocaine in college is doing so for a radically different reason than a kid doing it escape the daily misery of his ghetto neighborhood. This is also why you’ll often see staunch opposition to legalization in the lower socio-economic classes, with them having seen people close to them destroyed by drug use. And yes, legalization and regulation would of course also allow harm reduction. But it is good to be able to take the opposition’s perspective :)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tremon 2y ago
  > with them having seen people close to them destroyed by drug use. But isn't this a false correlation, then? Were they destroyed by drug use, or by the daily misery of their ghetto neighborhood?
  - westerno 2y ago
    The combination, which is the point of the comment above. Legalization may be fine in places where people have other support factors that make them less likely to destroy their lives with drugs and alcohol, but in areas without those protective forces, it's good that there are some controls (or at least many of the people who live there think so).
    - jacksnipe 2y ago
      At that point it becomes important to ask (1) how much damage does the illegalization itself do; (2) how much harm does the limited access actually prevent; and (3) how much damage alcohol does, and what the tradeoff is. If you’re going to make a harm reduction argument, you need to do your best to fully account for all the harms in play.
  - 2y ago
lolinder 2y ago
> Most of those drugs had a component that actually pushed kids heavily towards socialization and forming peer groups. Now looking back to the results of that drug consumption I would say that most of the individuals engaging on them were able to regulate and continue to what it seems to be a very normal adult life. Counterargument: a "very normal adult life" in our generations treats alcohol as basically mandatory for having a good time with a group. As someone who doesn't drink, I'm perfectly happy to go to parties and hang out and socialize, but as the night wears on it becomes less and less stimulating as the alcohol kicks in. People get less interesting on drugs, but they perceive themselves to be having more fun. It's a crutch. Now, maybe having a social crutch like alcohol is better than having a drug which encourages disappearing from the physical social world entirely, but our generation's answer was hardly healthy.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  A substance is a means to an end. What you described is just one of the many. And I agree. I do not drink, not even in social settings, and I feel like I'm the odd one out for doing so, thus I typically avoid parties and gatherings as much as possible. I do take something people would consider a drug though, but for different reasons you described. It is to manage pain, anxiety, and depression, difficulty walking, and urinary incontinence. What I take works for all of the problems that affects the quality of my life. That said, new year is coming up, and I'm definitely not going to drink.
- frereubu 2y ago
  I don't think that's true any more, at least not in the UK. Not drinking alcohol is becoming normalised to a large extent - most restaurants and bars I go to now have non-alcoholic options, some of which are really delicious. I had a non-alcoholic "dry martini" in a bar the other day which had a really nice bite to it. I used to feel a bit cheated with non-alcoholic options because they were mostly like overly sweet cocktails or nasty-tasting beers, but the choices are really opening out now.
api 2y ago
Old drugs are also at least sometimes social. Even heroin gives rise to cliques of users. It’s deeply unhealthy and self destructive but at least there is connection. Sometimes you get art out of it too. A whole era of great music has many bittersweet odes to smack. I particularly worry about men. The greater cultural and possibly (more controversial) biological susceptibility to isolation coupled with this stuff means a generation of young men who are isolated, hopeless, poor, lonely, and sexless. Then we have a culture that, depending on which side you listen to, either shames them as potential rapists from the patriarchy or simply “losers.” (IMHO the “woke” shaming is just code for loser, as I have heard said in private.) They are neither. They are victims of exploitation, of a nearly exact analog to the Matrix that is destroying their minds. I speak mostly of social media and addiction optimized gaming, not all tech. The problem is the apps not the phone. Really anything that works very hard to “maximize engagement” should be considered guilty unless proven innocent. This phrase is code for addiction. As we have seen the gurus that appeal to such men are the likes of Andrew Tate. As awful as he is Jordan Peterson is actually among the less toxic of the crew since he does occasionally say something good. In the future we could have gurus for hordes of lonely poor men that make Tate look helpful and wise. This is how we either LARP the Handmaid’s Tale or — worse — ISIS or the Khmer Rouge. I have two daughters and I fear for their safety in a country full of fascism radicalized angry emotionally stunted men who have been told they are losers and then handed pitchforks. Our industry is the industry making the opium to which these youth are addicted and that is destroying them. We are destroying the minds of a generation every time any B2C app tries to optimize its time on app KPI. Mothers and fathers of boys: raise your sons or Andrew Tate will.
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  If you read William Dalrymple’s book about the early Christian church in the Middle East, that is exactly what happened in terms of gurus for hordes of fanatic monks.
  - api 2y ago
    I’m sure that’s just one of endless historical examples. Large numbers of desperate people are a danger to society. I harp on men because I think they are more vulnerable (for various reasons and the reasons don’t matter much) to isolation and radicalization, though as we recently saw with our young lady school shooter this is definitely not universal. I also didn’t mean to dismiss the damage addictionware can do to young womens’ self esteem and mental health, and I have noticed a disturbing rise in “femcel” rhetoric that mirrors the incel cancer. The style of the rhetoric is a little different but it’s coming from similar places and has similar effects. We need to stop calling it social media too. It stopped being social when algorithmic timelines were introduced and over time it’s evolving toward less and less connection and more shoveling of engagement bait slop.
sevensor 2y ago
Why are the moral panics always about the media diets of children? Let’s talk about old people for a minute. 1) They can be socially isolated in ways that few children are. An unsupervised septuagenarian can go literal days without speaking to another live human being. 2) They’re more technologically competent than we give them credit for, certainly enough to spend days doomscrolling their politically aligned newsfeeds of choice. The generation who thought their CD-ROM drives were cupholders passed quite some time ago. 3) They have an outsized influence on politics. Not only do they vote more than any other demographic in the US, they are the most likely to turn up and harangue your city council or school board meeting. Of course, nothing new under the sun, their parents’ generation was mainlining cable news and AM talk radio 20-30 years ago.
- mistermann 2y ago
  >Why are the moral panics always about the media diets of children? Let’s talk about old people for a minute. This same reasoning is highly applicable to how various "so terrible, they're a threat to X!" are constantly vilified, yet the Normies (who cause most of the problems) get a free pass. Rigged popularity contests are a terrible way to run a world, yet we insist on it.
- agency 2y ago
  because children are undergoing a critical phase in their development that has no analogy for older populations? I'm not saying isolation among the elderly is not concerning, nor widespread phone/tech addiction among adults. But I think there’s ample reason to have particular concern for the effects on children.
- dasil003 2y ago
  LOL at “mainlining cable news and AM talk radio”.
- computerthings 2y ago
  Why play kids and the elderly off against the other? How is there even a dichotomy here?
qwertox 2y ago
> I’ve seen kids not even 3-4 years old already hooked to smartphone screens. Even toddlers around 1 year old with an smartphone mount in their stroller. Now imagine that they would not be engaging with silly YouTube videos, but with an AI trying to get them to interact with them in order to learn to speak, to learn about the world. Things which parents can't dedicate enough time to. Then also give the kids ideas for what to do with the parents, what to talk about, tease them about science and stuff they'd normally have no access to, because it is information mostly hidden in books or in an inaccessible format, like dedicated to students. I do see a huge potential in this, call it cheaply a "nanny for the brain", to help develop it better and faster. There are certainly risks to it, but if it were well done, in a way in which we assume universities are "places well done", it could be better than just having the kids watching TV.
- etimberg 2y ago
  I assume you don’t have kids because as the parent of a toddler this is a terrible idea. The last thing a toddler needs is AI hallucinations “teaching” them
  - qwertox 2y ago
    I don't have kids, but I am not talking about contemporary AIs which love to hallucinate.
    - tomrod 2y ago
      Until a new modem architecture comes along to supplement current LLMs, I'd recommend keeping this idea in the speculation bucket.
- jader201 2y ago
  Please no. While what you describe may be better than YouTube/TV, there is no replacement for development through human interaction and contact. Let’s not give parents another excuse to have devices babysit/raise their children. EDIT: and if your post is being upvoted -- and it seems to be -- I hope it's by people that don't have children, and will later realize how bad of an idea this is once they do have children.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by tirant 2y ago

will5421 2y ago

Playing Devil’s advocate… Socialisation is what’s driving technology use. It’s just happening on the phones, not irl. Just like with alcohol, anyone not participating will be left out. If everyone’s on their phones all the time, IRL socialisation won’t matter compared to socialisation via phones.

vouaobrasil 2y ago
Disagree. Nothing can replace face to face socialization. We're not even close. Our minds are just adapting, but to a new local maximum that is far away from the global maximum of ideal. (Edit: corrected typographical error.)
Timshel 2y ago
Socialization online exists, but I'm not sure that it's the main activity on phones. When you look at https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-for-teens https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-for-teens it does not look promising. Video is leading, then Gaming which can include socialization then third come Social media but with Tik Tok leading which I would not categorize as socialization.
tgv 2y ago
Rather: avoidance of socialization is what's driving it. It's the easy way out of meeting people while still getting compliments and such and pretending "everything is fine". In that sense, it indeed has a lot in common with alcohol.
herval 2y ago
I think this was true a decade ago, where people used social media to talk to each other and actively kept chats with friends, etc. What I’m seeing now is social media got so hyper optimized for engagement that it became a passive consumption mechanism, and the only “socialization” left is sharing memes. It’s a widespread digital heroin epidemic
- internet101010 2y ago
  The communication aspect has just moved to other places.
  - herval 2y ago
    such as?

jorvi 2y ago

I’m very much for legalizing and regulating (almost) all drugs, but watch out with the confirmation bias of “everyone in my social circle who used recreationally turned out fine.” I can’t find it right now but I read a great comment on legalization that pointed out that a kid experimenting with weed and cocaine in college is doing so for a radically different reason than a kid doing it escape the daily misery of his ghetto neighborhood. This is also why you’ll often see staunch opposition to legalization in the lower socio-economic classes, with them having seen people close to them destroyed by drug use. And yes, legalization and regulation would of course also allow harm reduction. But it is good to be able to take the opposition’s perspective :)

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tremon 2y ago
> with them having seen people close to them destroyed by drug use. But isn't this a false correlation, then? Were they destroyed by drug use, or by the daily misery of their ghetto neighborhood?
- westerno 2y ago
  The combination, which is the point of the comment above. Legalization may be fine in places where people have other support factors that make them less likely to destroy their lives with drugs and alcohol, but in areas without those protective forces, it's good that there are some controls (or at least many of the people who live there think so).
  - jacksnipe 2y ago
    At that point it becomes important to ask (1) how much damage does the illegalization itself do; (2) how much harm does the limited access actually prevent; and (3) how much damage alcohol does, and what the tradeoff is. If you’re going to make a harm reduction argument, you need to do your best to fully account for all the harms in play.
- 2y ago

lolinder 2y ago

> Most of those drugs had a component that actually pushed kids heavily towards socialization and forming peer groups. Now looking back to the results of that drug consumption I would say that most of the individuals engaging on them were able to regulate and continue to what it seems to be a very normal adult life. Counterargument: a "very normal adult life" in our generations treats alcohol as basically mandatory for having a good time with a group. As someone who doesn't drink, I'm perfectly happy to go to parties and hang out and socialize, but as the night wears on it becomes less and less stimulating as the alcohol kicks in. People get less interesting on drugs, but they perceive themselves to be having more fun. It's a crutch. Now, maybe having a social crutch like alcohol is better than having a drug which encourages disappearing from the physical social world entirely, but our generation's answer was hardly healthy.

johnisgood 2y ago
A substance is a means to an end. What you described is just one of the many. And I agree. I do not drink, not even in social settings, and I feel like I'm the odd one out for doing so, thus I typically avoid parties and gatherings as much as possible. I do take something people would consider a drug though, but for different reasons you described. It is to manage pain, anxiety, and depression, difficulty walking, and urinary incontinence. What I take works for all of the problems that affects the quality of my life. That said, new year is coming up, and I'm definitely not going to drink.
frereubu 2y ago
I don't think that's true any more, at least not in the UK. Not drinking alcohol is becoming normalised to a large extent - most restaurants and bars I go to now have non-alcoholic options, some of which are really delicious. I had a non-alcoholic "dry martini" in a bar the other day which had a really nice bite to it. I used to feel a bit cheated with non-alcoholic options because they were mostly like overly sweet cocktails or nasty-tasting beers, but the choices are really opening out now.

api 2y ago

Old drugs are also at least sometimes social. Even heroin gives rise to cliques of users. It’s deeply unhealthy and self destructive but at least there is connection. Sometimes you get art out of it too. A whole era of great music has many bittersweet odes to smack. I particularly worry about men. The greater cultural and possibly (more controversial) biological susceptibility to isolation coupled with this stuff means a generation of young men who are isolated, hopeless, poor, lonely, and sexless. Then we have a culture that, depending on which side you listen to, either shames them as potential rapists from the patriarchy or simply “losers.” (IMHO the “woke” shaming is just code for loser, as I have heard said in private.) They are neither. They are victims of exploitation, of a nearly exact analog to the Matrix that is destroying their minds. I speak mostly of social media and addiction optimized gaming, not all tech. The problem is the apps not the phone. Really anything that works very hard to “maximize engagement” should be considered guilty unless proven innocent. This phrase is code for addiction. As we have seen the gurus that appeal to such men are the likes of Andrew Tate. As awful as he is Jordan Peterson is actually among the less toxic of the crew since he does occasionally say something good. In the future we could have gurus for hordes of lonely poor men that make Tate look helpful and wise. This is how we either LARP the Handmaid’s Tale or — worse — ISIS or the Khmer Rouge. I have two daughters and I fear for their safety in a country full of fascism radicalized angry emotionally stunted men who have been told they are losers and then handed pitchforks. Our industry is the industry making the opium to which these youth are addicted and that is destroying them. We are destroying the minds of a generation every time any B2C app tries to optimize its time on app KPI. Mothers and fathers of boys: raise your sons or Andrew Tate will.

selimthegrim 2y ago
If you read William Dalrymple’s book about the early Christian church in the Middle East, that is exactly what happened in terms of gurus for hordes of fanatic monks.
- api 2y ago
  I’m sure that’s just one of endless historical examples. Large numbers of desperate people are a danger to society. I harp on men because I think they are more vulnerable (for various reasons and the reasons don’t matter much) to isolation and radicalization, though as we recently saw with our young lady school shooter this is definitely not universal. I also didn’t mean to dismiss the damage addictionware can do to young womens’ self esteem and mental health, and I have noticed a disturbing rise in “femcel” rhetoric that mirrors the incel cancer. The style of the rhetoric is a little different but it’s coming from similar places and has similar effects. We need to stop calling it social media too. It stopped being social when algorithmic timelines were introduced and over time it’s evolving toward less and less connection and more shoveling of engagement bait slop.

sevensor 2y ago

Why are the moral panics always about the media diets of children? Let’s talk about old people for a minute. 1) They can be socially isolated in ways that few children are. An unsupervised septuagenarian can go literal days without speaking to another live human being. 2) They’re more technologically competent than we give them credit for, certainly enough to spend days doomscrolling their politically aligned newsfeeds of choice. The generation who thought their CD-ROM drives were cupholders passed quite some time ago. 3) They have an outsized influence on politics. Not only do they vote more than any other demographic in the US, they are the most likely to turn up and harangue your city council or school board meeting. Of course, nothing new under the sun, their parents’ generation was mainlining cable news and AM talk radio 20-30 years ago.

mistermann 2y ago
>Why are the moral panics always about the media diets of children? Let’s talk about old people for a minute. This same reasoning is highly applicable to how various "so terrible, they're a threat to X!" are constantly vilified, yet the Normies (who cause most of the problems) get a free pass. Rigged popularity contests are a terrible way to run a world, yet we insist on it.
agency 2y ago
because children are undergoing a critical phase in their development that has no analogy for older populations? I'm not saying isolation among the elderly is not concerning, nor widespread phone/tech addiction among adults. But I think there’s ample reason to have particular concern for the effects on children.
dasil003 2y ago
LOL at “mainlining cable news and AM talk radio”.
computerthings 2y ago
Why play kids and the elderly off against the other? How is there even a dichotomy here?

qwertox 2y ago

> I’ve seen kids not even 3-4 years old already hooked to smartphone screens. Even toddlers around 1 year old with an smartphone mount in their stroller. Now imagine that they would not be engaging with silly YouTube videos, but with an AI trying to get them to interact with them in order to learn to speak, to learn about the world. Things which parents can't dedicate enough time to. Then also give the kids ideas for what to do with the parents, what to talk about, tease them about science and stuff they'd normally have no access to, because it is information mostly hidden in books or in an inaccessible format, like dedicated to students. I do see a huge potential in this, call it cheaply a "nanny for the brain", to help develop it better and faster. There are certainly risks to it, but if it were well done, in a way in which we assume universities are "places well done", it could be better than just having the kids watching TV.

etimberg 2y ago
I assume you don’t have kids because as the parent of a toddler this is a terrible idea. The last thing a toddler needs is AI hallucinations “teaching” them
- qwertox 2y ago
  I don't have kids, but I am not talking about contemporary AIs which love to hallucinate.
  - tomrod 2y ago
    Until a new modem architecture comes along to supplement current LLMs, I'd recommend keeping this idea in the speculation bucket.
jader201 2y ago
Please no. While what you describe may be better than YouTube/TV, there is no replacement for development through human interaction and contact. Let’s not give parents another excuse to have devices babysit/raise their children. EDIT: and if your post is being upvoted -- and it seems to be -- I hope it's by people that don't have children, and will later realize how bad of an idea this is once they do have children.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]