The Wait Until 8th pledge

The traditional publishing industry has a massive set of gatekeeping mechanisms around publication. People love to complain about this, but it significantly helps in ensuring the quality of information in a published book, especially from established publication houses, remains high. The internet basically has no such mechanism, and even worse, couples that with the ability to discover new bits of this low quality information at extreme rates — further, platform algorithms optimize for engagement, not information quality and the next thing you know your loved ones are running around telling you earth is flat.

You'll never be able to block every website. This is the crux of the issue, outside of the fact that constantly bombarding yourself with short fragments of totally unconnected, decontextualized experiences (a la instagram and tiktok feeds) probably directly aids in becoming something like a lite-schizophrenic.

Disclaimer: thank goodness I don't have any kids, so this is not a parenting advice. Just my own story.

I grew up around the same era and computing was a huge thing for me. I've had my first computer (ZX Spectrum 48k) when I was 6, first IBM PC-compatible when I was around 9, first dial-up Internet access around 14. I don't really remember the ages TBH (except the 6, because I left some evidence by hardcoding my age in a BASIC program), so they're plus-minus couple years.

But then Internet was different back in the day. Pay-per-minute dial-up, 14kbps on a good day, so the best available time killer was reading jokes and anecdotes from FidoNet or Usenet, offline. Endless meaningless feeds the whole day wasn't a thing. And when tech got better my interests were already ingrained in me.

Looking back, it changed the trajectory of my whole life, and in a good way. I've had all the latest tech news, talked to smart people, and was able to learn lots of things - all when I've still had that virtually infinite energy and my brain was much more agile than today. So with some luck, I was able to seize some opportunities. The history has no "if"s, but I can't imagine things would've went half as good, would I not be into computers back then.

But also, wouldn't I have that curiosity, limited attention span (any game got boring pretty fast) and innate desire to entertain myself by tinkering with whatever random thing was available, I guess it could've went nowhere.

Now, the subject at hand is drastically different - phones now and personal computers back then are hard to compare fairly. Except that my parents back then weren't always exactly fond of me setting all day and night in front some screen rather than playing with other kids (or whatever). But they tolerated it and appraised my successes.

Morale is, I think, it all depends on the kid - not on the tech - how they're gonna spend their time and where they'll head in their life. Some will create new things, some will just drown themselves in Modern Internet's firehose of shit (maybe there was something similar back in the day and I'm just blissfully unaware, hah). I'm glad my parents have provided me with things I've had, letting my energy flow into something not just non-harmful but actually somewhat useful, and that their only real interference was in indirect moral guidance by me see some good and bad examples.

I feel like this rhetoric also existed when I was in middle school, well before smartphones. The villain then was TV and violent video games, and there were similar campaigns to “cut the cord” (I remember my school having a giant fake plug a bunch of kids pulled of of a socket symbolically). The idea then, as now, was that kids are spending less time outdoors, reading books, etc.

I think this is a perennial reaction of parents to a changing world and the disparity between their childhood and their children’s childhoods.

Good lord...