Rich parents can afford nannies who force the children to interact with them.

Poor parents use TVs and smart phones to amuse their kids.

I feel like we are headed to some sort of collective that im going to be outside of.

Join the Borg!

This digital divide is getting worse too - studies show kids from lower-income families average 7+ hours of screen time daily vs under 2 for wealthy families who can afford "tech-free" activities and education.

Also, free range kids are likely to be reported by 'concerned' neighbors.

Pretty soon, 'Stand By Me' and 'The Goonies' are going to be classified as dangerous propaganda.

Non-paywall: archive.ph

An electorate that has lost the capacity for long-form thought will be more tribal, less rational, largely uninterested in facts or even matters of historical record, moved more by vibes than cogent argument and open to fantastical ideas and bizarre conspiracy theories. If that sounds familiar, it may be a sign of how far down this path the West has already traveled.

For canny operators, such a public affords new opportunities for corruption. Oligarchs attempting to shape policy to their advantage will benefit from the fact that few will have the attention span to track or challenge policies in dull, technical fields; what a majority now wants is not forensic investigation but a new video short “owning” the other tribe. We can expect the governing class to adapt pragmatically to the electorate’s collective decline in rational capacity, for example, by retaining the rituals associated with mass democracy, while quietly shifting key policy areas beyond the reach of a capricious and easily manipulated citizenry. I do not celebrate this, but our net-native youth seem unfazed: International polls show waning support for democracy among Gen Z.

Lest you mistake me, there is no reason the opportunity to sideline the electorate or to arbitrage the gap between vibes and policy should especially favor either the red team or the blue team. This post-literate world favors demagogues skilled at code-switching between the elite language of policy and the populist one of meme-slop. It favors oligarchs with good social media game and those with more self-assurance than integrity. It does not favor those with little money, little political power and no one to speak up for them.

That's what we call "getting old"

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Tldr: New tech (audiovisual media) bad, old tech (reading) good.

They even say that good reading skills lead to liberal democracy. Which is ironic because there is no government on this planet (that i know of) that is democratic (or liberal).

Personally i think we would live in a utopia if people consumed cave-art and stories by storytellers rather than this book-slop which is easy to mass produce and distribute.

I mean I’d say the Stage of Technology we’ve been in since like 2010 has been very detrimental for the individual and destructive to society. Social media, smartphones, surveillance states. AI is an even worse version of these. If social media ran by billionaires are not open, unbiased, non-manipulative emotional-reactaction-over-critical-thinking silos, what makes you think all these LLMs run by millionaires and billionaires won’t be? They’re just the next step in social media.

I think this is all very person-dependent. I have found 3d printing resources/tips/experiences from others. I have gotten into building my own antennas after learning about VNAs via social media. I have gotten into SDRs, ham radio, electronics thanks to shtuff on social media. I have learned a few new 3d modeling tricks via social media. I have found a few suggestions for go packages, etc. I could keep going for years about what I have run into online.

I have found the world's knowledge available at my fingertips. Others are finding tiktok dances. I think this is a matter of who you are and what you prefer to do than "the bad tech" making people somehow bad. You will find that people through history have fit a similar distribution of people who are into learning and people who just want to be entertained.