"This is utterly heartbreaking, and the Big Tech bros should be held accountable.
But what can we (parents) do in the face of such evil, before it has been thwarted?
Here's my suggestion: It's absolutely crucial that parents do not yield to the pressure to give their kids their own private screens. More than an hour a day for a child is an existential threat, in my view, even if they're just watching mild 3D animated slop with zero ideological weight. While I'm at it, I may as well overstate the point: too much screen time is child abuse.
Again, it's the screen itself (as attention-sucking-idol) that's the problem. Think of Alien's facehuggers if you want a more visceral analogy for the screen.
As McLuhan says, "The medium is the message." He means that the technology itself (the medium) has far greater force in shaping us (our habits, minds, bodies) than its content (the message). As he also said, the content is like the juicy piece of meat used by the burger (the medium) to distract the watchdog of the mind.
At the very least, siding with Jon Haidt's research, kids should not have phones and unfettered internet access when they're younger than 16. But my stance is more radical: it's the screen itself that is the problem, not just phones, the internet and AI (although I agree that there's more evil in Big Tech on this last thing than we even know about).
Kids need space to be bored, to find physical ways to interact with the world, space to imagine, play, and read, etc. Go for walks with your kids. Play games with them, inside games and outside games. Climb trees with them (do it badly, if you must). I, for one, want to be telling real and made-up stories to my kids, both my own and those in books, so that they develop a deep and rich narrative capacity — while building human relationships. I want to have space to listen to my kids as they tell me what they're discovering. I want them to learn, in a highly embodied fashion, that life can have rhythms and a rich musicality and feelings and thoughts not dictated to them by those who believe that existence is a mere notification centre. Enjoy silence with your kids, too, and with yourself.
This is an idea to help with thinking about this stuff:
Our deepest desires and yearnings aren't our strongest desires.
That may not sound like spectacular wisdom at first, but it is profound in what it means for life. In the deepest parts of ourselves, we want deep connections — with God, with others, and with the world. But the entire screen-world trains us to yield to immediacy and shallowness. This strengthens the grip of stupidities and leaves us hungry for more of what will not feed us. It fosters this culture of immaturity we're all living in — this mostly mindless sibling society. It trains us to yield to the lie that our strongest desires are more important than our deepest desires and longings.
This isn't difficult to grasp, but it is hard to implement. It means we have to change the way we act towards technology, not just the way we think about it in abstraction. McLuhan described, in amazing detail, the 'discarnating' (i.e. disembodying) effects of the electric world — the very kind of discarnation that causes people to lose touch with what and who is most valuable to them. Technology inverts our relationship with what's near and what's far, as Heidegger pointed out, such that what's near becomes unimportant while what's far becomes important. Ellul writes about the propagandistic nature of technology. Nothing we are seeing now is totally new; it's an intensification of the already discarnate world most of us were born into. And many wise guides, McLuhan and Ellul especially, can help us transcend the technological frame.
The totalising reign of (especially electric) technologies does not need to be taken as given or inevitable. AI doesn't need to be given as much of a voice as it has been given. It's possible to step away from tech and to help our kids do the same."
