No, kids should not have unsupervised acess to the internet. Yes, I got that and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Its a paradox.
It’s not a paradox – it’s a different net.
When we were kids, the internet was a sandbox-style open world – full of dangerous things, yes, but also nearly unlimited potential – and we learned to be careful, and we learned fast, and we learned fairly well.
Now, the internet is a series of black box silos built by corporations to maximize engagement at the expense of everything else.
I may have seen Two Girls One Cup by accident and at the tender age of ten, but I never had to deal with companies using gambling-addiction-creating strategies pioneered in literal casinos to try and make me hand over hundreds of real dollars at the same age. I may have been exposed to vicious bigotry in anonymous and pseudanonymous messages boards, but I never had algorithms spoonfeeding me explicitly far right radicalizing content. The blithely unfettered access people of our generation had is just genuinely not the same as what kids with unsupervised access are getting today.
