It's wonderful to be considering how we can support a healthy childhood from lots of different angles! I have some hesitations with some of these approaches, though.
I’m sympathetic with the author’s call for more “dumbphone” type tech to be developed, but I would like to see use of such phones grow among adults rather than kids (who I think ought not to have a phone at all). Since there are no more payphones, perhaps “free-ranging” children should have a dumbphone that can call a parent/911 with them when they go out (at least one phone in the group of kids), but they don’t need a Swiss army knife phone — adding on other things will take away from their problem-solving, independence, and ability to hone their mental skills (maps? they don’t need maps — they need to learn to orient themselves!).
But more to the point, I don’t much care for the idea of tech-free clubs and other businesses as a solution. This makes a tech-free childhood a privilege linked to economic wealth and compartmentalizes it into certain parent-provided places. (Something like the Let Grow play groups after school seem to be of a different character, because all children can attend, it is not for-profit and it can bleed into and out of school rather than being heavily compartmentalized.)
And groups like the Boy Scouts…well, their decline is not due to a lack of efforts to re-invigorate them. Many former Scouting families no longer trust the Boy Scouts due to their embrace of particular political and sexual trends, and the Boy Scouts lost their distinctiveness when they began to admit girls.
I am unhappy with the idea of a free childhood needing to be formalized via wealth/business/adult-run organizations. I think local infrastructure like streets that are safe for pedestrians, parks and shops within walking distance of/in neighborhoods, etc. are what is needed most (along with kids and adults eschewing smartphones). A free childhood is not one that is organized and implemented for profit by adults. It is one in which parents do what they can to prepare a friendly environment and then make mental and schedule space to allow children to explore freely.
I fear that a childhood spent with a slightly-less-smart-but-still-pretty-smart-phone in clubs that kids’ parents pay for them to enter and to which their parents drive them would not be a “brought-back childhood.” It would be “now go to this thing and do your 'free childhood' time that your parents have paid for” instead of all of childhood being about forming and growing.
Thank you! I agree. Hanging out at the home of friends is a viable option. Have game nights, make pizza together, do an art project, etc, etc. Ditch the phones for kids. A talk/text for older teens is plenty. All the other bells and whistles are conveniences (and distractions) kids can live without. Can we stop trying to market & sell our way out of our cultural problem?
First you have to find the families that will embrace groups of kids hanging out at their house, game nights, etc. My adult son is that house in his neighborhood. All the kids gather to play with my grandson. Usually they play outside and the front yard grass reflects that. However, while the other families are happy to have their kids join in, none of them are willing to have the same open door policy. Lack of parental support and participation is the downfall of Boy Scouts. When my husband was a scout leader he was trying to encourage people to volunteer and one person said “but you get paid to do this”. They were surprised when he said he isn’t paid and it’s all volunteer. It’s still didn’t make them join in, though. I also agree that admitting girls to the Boy Scouts was not a good idea. Girl Scout Troops often can and do many of the same activities that boys do.
I want to be on board here but am cynical. Decades of corporate greed is what got us into this mess and I’m skeptical the corporate world is the solution to getting us out.
Regarding the empty school grounds after hours - I can’t see how that’s an issue for corporations. All it takes is an active parent or two to spread the word about an after school play meet up right there at school. There’s no reason to add corporate profits into the mix.
I am generally in agreement with almost everything After Babel publishes, but do not resonnate with the approach presented in today’s piece. I believe that a reality-based childhood cannot be marketed, sold, or bought.
"There is a nostalgic hunger in the air for less frenetic, polarized, and superficial times, which means that there's a market for in-real-life (‘IRL’) memory-making and businesses to be built around it. "
Banking on market-driven solutions puts a dollar sign on being human and turns lives into a business venture for “IRL memory-making”.
Long-term change requires us to devote time, interact, create, walk, plant, build, cook, read…- it requires us to give part of ourselves and invite others to join in. It is a personal cost of infinite value, not a dollar sign.
I just showed the video to my 14 y/o son. He likes the idea- but says it would only work in a specific type city- One with the density of kids between 13 and 16 Who have access to public transportation Or at least a decent bike lane.
In our small (and recently annihilated by a Hurricane) Appalachian city, there is dismal public transportation & kids are spread out all over; I don’t know how teens would get to a “Den” after school and then get picked up again…?
He admits to being on his phone too much, but it’s how he keeps up with friends- his only connection since his friend group rarely gets together in person.
At his age, I was at sleep overs nearly every weekend; we’d T.P. A cute boy’s house & giggle all night long. In contrast, I honestly can’t remember when he last laughed.
-And he is an athlete with good grades and a generally jolly disposition- but without a way to share it.
There is no money to be made in healthy children because healthy children play with sticks, dirt, fresh air, kittens, the moon, sun and stars. Business makes billions off the absence of God’s free world.
Thinking back to what created the circumstances for my “free-range” 70s childhood, I can identify a few important and essential beliefs all parents held in common (and those who didn’t were ostracized):
1. Kids should take care of things themselves, as early as possible. (From hygiene to household chores to transportation, kids were expected to take on responsibility early.)
2. Kids are supposed to play outside, unless the weather forbids it. (Parents were forever shooing us out of the house if we lounged in front of the TV or video game console.)
3. If a kid is at someone else’s house, they must obey house rules. (Parents deferred to each other to discipline each other’s kids without much thought.)
4. Teenagers should be taking on more and more adult responsibility. (From child-minding to lawn mowing to work outside the home, teens were encouraged to contribute, not to be catered to.)
5. A child who makes threats is acting like a “spoiled brat” and you don’t give in to that stuff. (“I’ll run away” or “I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue” were seen as childish manipulation, and parents felt it was their duty to hold the line on common sense.)
6. It was important for kids’ safety to have some women at home in the neighbourhood 24/7. (A few women worked outside the home, like mine did, but neighbour moms who were not working were there to be on call in case of emergencies. They didn’t “supervise” our play, but we knew where to run in a crisis.)
7. Kids were allowed freedom, but “running wild” and antisocial behaviour was seen as a reflection of poor parenting and a call for more guidance and discipline, not “trauma” or “mental illness” requiring accommodation of the child.
Sadly, none of these social agreements of 1970s parenting remain in place. No matter what the corporate world creates, if we as adults can’t agree on some basic tenets of what children need and what’s expected of them at various ages (and this includes teachers / administrators / counsellors), we end up with isolated kids.
There are some hard truths about what we lost when women were expected to have careers as well as raise kids. What we lost when half of parents divorced. What we lost when affluence made it possible to provide kids with 24/7 adult supervision, and this expectation got codified into laws. What we lost when parents started ratting each other out for “neglect.” What we lost when we decided just keeping kids alive was more important than encouraging kids to live, and have lives.
Short of some kind of cataclysmic event that forces us to become interdependent communities again, I can’t see a market-driven way out of this isolation.
I can relate to the culture shock of switching schools. For my first two years, I studied engineering at an engineering school, then switched to two years of studying English at a liberal arts school.
They're two entirely different worlds. Engineering school focuses on reality. Engineers can't get away with imaging a new reality. Reality is absolutely constant. Engineers learn how to measure reality and learn how to manipulate it. That's their job. Feelings barely come into the picture.
Liberal arts schools are the reverse. Reality is of little note; it's all about the feelings. Feelings never built a bridge, a highway, an efficient energy system, cured a disease or saved anything at all, much less the entire planet. But liberal arts majors sure FEEL like they're solving those problems, evidence be damned.
Manipulating people is easy. Manipulating reality is tricky. I am half engineer and half artist. I appreciate both. But I know which one takes the real smarts. It also requires the ability to subjugate the ego in order to solve the problem.
Part of what humans do though is to imagine reality into being, like artists. Through stories and beliefs that can either create community or destroy it. Community is also created through music and dance and craftsmanship. Much of capitalism has a community-destroying, individual-elevating, efficiency (sometimes trading off with beauty) producing story.
I do NOT think that capitalism is about greed or ego. There are many entrepreneurs who are motivated by wanting to serve humanity and are willing to sacrifice much of their personal comfort and sometimes relationships to achieve these goals, working hard for long hours. Capitalism did not invent greed and ego, these predate our species. What capitalism did is destroy the intermediate levels of human organization between individual and state (or big corporation) which were able to check and balance greed and ego, and align individuals' goals to their immediate family's and neighbors' goals. Less so within small companies, and even within some larger corporations, but these entitites also have some serious issues with regards to multiple, competing loyalties.
John and Jess seem to believe that the disappearance of outdoor play-based childhood and the rise of social media with children is just an accident that has nothing to do with capitalism. I think capitalism is a major cause of these developments. I don't currently have the resources to test this hypothesis, but John does. He won't though, because his bread and butter come from capitalism, right John?
No, Jess, I'm sorry, but capitalism won't get us out of this mess, even with well-intentioned entrepreneurs. Children are not just a market opportunity. We have to create a culture where there is a meaningful life for ADULTS, and where children are not the only meaning for adults. We have to restore not just individual psyches ravaged by the attention economy, but families, villages and tribes. If the entrepreneurial spirit can be channeled to do these things, that would be great, but tying this spirit to global, impersonal markets is what got us into this mess to begin with. Remind me of Bill Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY
Thank you for this, Jess. I think it's wonderful that there are more amazing entrepreneurs attempting to redirect tech toward good (like Gabb, Angel Kids, Bark). Each in that list has an amazing CEO who truly wants to see kids thrive online.
But I'm not sure we have enough of them to "help us escape" the mess until we change the incentives or increase the disincentive attached to causing harm. For example, can we encourage creation of a business model to replace the current advertising model, where our time is the resource? (Gaia Berstein talks about this extensively in her book Unwired). Or, could we pass a federal design code with enforcement teeth (including personal liability) where harms to children are mitigated?
I am old(er), but grew up in the age of free-range childhood. I thought it was interesting the McDonald's in the UK is advertising itself as a teen hang out. As a teenager, we "cruised McDonald's" every Friday and Saturday night. K-Mart was next door, and when we'd find friends, we'd park our cars and chat, make a lot of noise and even spin donuts. I can't imagine any city that would allow this today. Times have changed, but the need for connection has not changed. I think of this all the time. I work in early learning and at our center, we don't allow any screen time for children (and no teacher phones in the class either!) Often, the first thing I hear when a child is picked up is, "Is my tablet in the car?" I am thankful for the work that is being shared through this column. I use a lot of it in my conversations with parents.
Answer:Corona(because we love to sabotage, yes, the evolutionary origins of the shape and stroke of the penis is to remove(sabotage) the last male's ejaculate)
It is for this reason that I am writing in "TRIUMPH THE INSULT COMIC DOG PUPPET" as president!
IMHO, President Harris will deliver Biden's pledge for more Americorps by MASSIVE GOVT CONTRACTS TO DEPROGRAM MAGA CULTISTS...please join my team to position ourselves to win these contracts!(humor may be key to "Killing the Ego")😁😁😁
Jess, I'm having trouble squaring this position with your past AR attempts at Blippar. AR, the promise of never having to exist "IRF"!
In a 2014 interview you said,
"the winners will be those that harness everything across all the different formats so they are looking at their tablet and looking at mobile and looking at online and desktop content as well as the printed format and indeed all the social channels and finding a way to maximize each of those channels with different types of content that moves the consumer between them. I think it's a big challenge but it's one that we're just starting to see some great success within."
Do you have regrets? Even Tick, while helping to build people's skills, would have relied on dopamine inducing short videos aimed at seducing others to the platform.
I'm totally with you that we need to infuse more empathy into tech culture, but I worry 'market forces' act like a vortex that sucks even the most well intentioned entrepreneur into the attention economy.
Obviously Jess changed her mind, which shows cognitive flexibility. But the basic paradigm she has seems to be the same (correct me if I'm wrong, Jess): her prime directive is market opportunities, with no regard to whether a particular opportunity destroys individuals (making them dopamine addicts), families and communities (making people in those not need each other making them need the entrepreneur's company instead). Something like "see a need that is fulfilled, destroy the way it is fulfilled outside of capitalism, and then make the needy depend on one's company to fulfill it". Perhaps I'm being too harsh?
if the markets are local, then perhaps there are more checks and balances on greed, short-termism, non-accountability to impacts on others (including other species) and lack of empathy?
- pickup sports like basketball in rec centers, gyms and playgrounds
- riding their bikes places
- urging other parents to let your kids have a little freedom together - this can be challenging but it’s doable. Kids are dying to not be watched and to be trusted.
- urging your kid to do small errands or tasks on their own and not giving them the means to do it unless they do it alone
- rural stuff like 4-H
We took up the outdoors in a big way when our son was 5 and covid hit. I don’t always love the process but it’s amazing for him. He will be able to guide trips in his teens.
These things take effort (and often $) on the part of the parent. But it can’t be outsourced to tech bros who never had real childhoods anyway.
My kid is anxious and nerdy by nature and needs a lot of pushing. It is work! But that’s parenting.
It's wonderful to be considering how we can support a healthy childhood from lots of different angles! I have some hesitations with some of these approaches, though.
I’m sympathetic with the author’s call for more “dumbphone” type tech to be developed, but I would like to see use of such phones grow among adults rather than kids (who I think ought not to have a phone at all). Since there are no more payphones, perhaps “free-ranging” children should have a dumbphone that can call a parent/911 with them when they go out (at least one phone in the group of kids), but they don’t need a Swiss army knife phone — adding on other things will take away from their problem-solving, independence, and ability to hone their mental skills (maps? they don’t need maps — they need to learn to orient themselves!).
But more to the point, I don’t much care for the idea of tech-free clubs and other businesses as a solution. This makes a tech-free childhood a privilege linked to economic wealth and compartmentalizes it into certain parent-provided places. (Something like the Let Grow play groups after school seem to be of a different character, because all children can attend, it is not for-profit and it can bleed into and out of school rather than being heavily compartmentalized.)
And groups like the Boy Scouts…well, their decline is not due to a lack of efforts to re-invigorate them. Many former Scouting families no longer trust the Boy Scouts due to their embrace of particular political and sexual trends, and the Boy Scouts lost their distinctiveness when they began to admit girls.
I am unhappy with the idea of a free childhood needing to be formalized via wealth/business/adult-run organizations. I think local infrastructure like streets that are safe for pedestrians, parks and shops within walking distance of/in neighborhoods, etc. are what is needed most (along with kids and adults eschewing smartphones). A free childhood is not one that is organized and implemented for profit by adults. It is one in which parents do what they can to prepare a friendly environment and then make mental and schedule space to allow children to explore freely.
I fear that a childhood spent with a slightly-less-smart-but-still-pretty-smart-phone in clubs that kids’ parents pay for them to enter and to which their parents drive them would not be a “brought-back childhood.” It would be “now go to this thing and do your 'free childhood' time that your parents have paid for” instead of all of childhood being about forming and growing.
Thoughts?
Thank you! I agree. Hanging out at the home of friends is a viable option. Have game nights, make pizza together, do an art project, etc, etc. Ditch the phones for kids. A talk/text for older teens is plenty. All the other bells and whistles are conveniences (and distractions) kids can live without. Can we stop trying to market & sell our way out of our cultural problem?
First you have to find the families that will embrace groups of kids hanging out at their house, game nights, etc. My adult son is that house in his neighborhood. All the kids gather to play with my grandson. Usually they play outside and the front yard grass reflects that. However, while the other families are happy to have their kids join in, none of them are willing to have the same open door policy. Lack of parental support and participation is the downfall of Boy Scouts. When my husband was a scout leader he was trying to encourage people to volunteer and one person said “but you get paid to do this”. They were surprised when he said he isn’t paid and it’s all volunteer. It’s still didn’t make them join in, though. I also agree that admitting girls to the Boy Scouts was not a good idea. Girl Scout Troops often can and do many of the same activities that boys do.
Lack of reciprocity is really hard to take sometimes. I'm sorry.
Rapid Radio
Children can also learn to go to a store clerk and ask to use the store phone.
Taking the time to find a store with a supportive clerk might be deadly.
Rapid Radio provides an instantaneous connection.
Organizing summer camps is one of the best initiatives I've ever been a part of.
I want to be on board here but am cynical. Decades of corporate greed is what got us into this mess and I’m skeptical the corporate world is the solution to getting us out.
Regarding the empty school grounds after hours - I can’t see how that’s an issue for corporations. All it takes is an active parent or two to spread the word about an after school play meet up right there at school. There’s no reason to add corporate profits into the mix.
IMO, the best way to optimize many public functions would be to amalgamate their functions with 24/7 child care programs.
I am generally in agreement with almost everything After Babel publishes, but do not resonnate with the approach presented in today’s piece. I believe that a reality-based childhood cannot be marketed, sold, or bought.
"There is a nostalgic hunger in the air for less frenetic, polarized, and superficial times, which means that there's a market for in-real-life (‘IRL’) memory-making and businesses to be built around it. "
Banking on market-driven solutions puts a dollar sign on being human and turns lives into a business venture for “IRL memory-making”.
Long-term change requires us to devote time, interact, create, walk, plant, build, cook, read…- it requires us to give part of ourselves and invite others to join in. It is a personal cost of infinite value, not a dollar sign.
I just showed the video to my 14 y/o son. He likes the idea- but says it would only work in a specific type city- One with the density of kids between 13 and 16 Who have access to public transportation Or at least a decent bike lane.
In our small (and recently annihilated by a Hurricane) Appalachian city, there is dismal public transportation & kids are spread out all over; I don’t know how teens would get to a “Den” after school and then get picked up again…?
He admits to being on his phone too much, but it’s how he keeps up with friends- his only connection since his friend group rarely gets together in person.
At his age, I was at sleep overs nearly every weekend; we’d T.P. A cute boy’s house & giggle all night long. In contrast, I honestly can’t remember when he last laughed.
-And he is an athlete with good grades and a generally jolly disposition- but without a way to share it.
His friend group might get together in person more if they didn't have phones to divide them.
There is no money to be made in healthy children because healthy children play with sticks, dirt, fresh air, kittens, the moon, sun and stars. Business makes billions off the absence of God’s free world.
Megachurches are very successful businesses.
Thinking back to what created the circumstances for my “free-range” 70s childhood, I can identify a few important and essential beliefs all parents held in common (and those who didn’t were ostracized):
1. Kids should take care of things themselves, as early as possible. (From hygiene to household chores to transportation, kids were expected to take on responsibility early.)
2. Kids are supposed to play outside, unless the weather forbids it. (Parents were forever shooing us out of the house if we lounged in front of the TV or video game console.)
3. If a kid is at someone else’s house, they must obey house rules. (Parents deferred to each other to discipline each other’s kids without much thought.)
4. Teenagers should be taking on more and more adult responsibility. (From child-minding to lawn mowing to work outside the home, teens were encouraged to contribute, not to be catered to.)
5. A child who makes threats is acting like a “spoiled brat” and you don’t give in to that stuff. (“I’ll run away” or “I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue” were seen as childish manipulation, and parents felt it was their duty to hold the line on common sense.)
6. It was important for kids’ safety to have some women at home in the neighbourhood 24/7. (A few women worked outside the home, like mine did, but neighbour moms who were not working were there to be on call in case of emergencies. They didn’t “supervise” our play, but we knew where to run in a crisis.)
7. Kids were allowed freedom, but “running wild” and antisocial behaviour was seen as a reflection of poor parenting and a call for more guidance and discipline, not “trauma” or “mental illness” requiring accommodation of the child.
Sadly, none of these social agreements of 1970s parenting remain in place. No matter what the corporate world creates, if we as adults can’t agree on some basic tenets of what children need and what’s expected of them at various ages (and this includes teachers / administrators / counsellors), we end up with isolated kids.
There are some hard truths about what we lost when women were expected to have careers as well as raise kids. What we lost when half of parents divorced. What we lost when affluence made it possible to provide kids with 24/7 adult supervision, and this expectation got codified into laws. What we lost when parents started ratting each other out for “neglect.” What we lost when we decided just keeping kids alive was more important than encouraging kids to live, and have lives.
Short of some kind of cataclysmic event that forces us to become interdependent communities again, I can’t see a market-driven way out of this isolation.
I can relate to the culture shock of switching schools. For my first two years, I studied engineering at an engineering school, then switched to two years of studying English at a liberal arts school.
They're two entirely different worlds. Engineering school focuses on reality. Engineers can't get away with imaging a new reality. Reality is absolutely constant. Engineers learn how to measure reality and learn how to manipulate it. That's their job. Feelings barely come into the picture.
Liberal arts schools are the reverse. Reality is of little note; it's all about the feelings. Feelings never built a bridge, a highway, an efficient energy system, cured a disease or saved anything at all, much less the entire planet. But liberal arts majors sure FEEL like they're solving those problems, evidence be damned.
Manipulating people is easy. Manipulating reality is tricky. I am half engineer and half artist. I appreciate both. But I know which one takes the real smarts. It also requires the ability to subjugate the ego in order to solve the problem.
Part of what humans do though is to imagine reality into being, like artists. Through stories and beliefs that can either create community or destroy it. Community is also created through music and dance and craftsmanship. Much of capitalism has a community-destroying, individual-elevating, efficiency (sometimes trading off with beauty) producing story.
I do NOT think that capitalism is about greed or ego. There are many entrepreneurs who are motivated by wanting to serve humanity and are willing to sacrifice much of their personal comfort and sometimes relationships to achieve these goals, working hard for long hours. Capitalism did not invent greed and ego, these predate our species. What capitalism did is destroy the intermediate levels of human organization between individual and state (or big corporation) which were able to check and balance greed and ego, and align individuals' goals to their immediate family's and neighbors' goals. Less so within small companies, and even within some larger corporations, but these entitites also have some serious issues with regards to multiple, competing loyalties.
John and Jess seem to believe that the disappearance of outdoor play-based childhood and the rise of social media with children is just an accident that has nothing to do with capitalism. I think capitalism is a major cause of these developments. I don't currently have the resources to test this hypothesis, but John does. He won't though, because his bread and butter come from capitalism, right John?
No, Jess, I'm sorry, but capitalism won't get us out of this mess, even with well-intentioned entrepreneurs. Children are not just a market opportunity. We have to create a culture where there is a meaningful life for ADULTS, and where children are not the only meaning for adults. We have to restore not just individual psyches ravaged by the attention economy, but families, villages and tribes. If the entrepreneurial spirit can be channeled to do these things, that would be great, but tying this spirit to global, impersonal markets is what got us into this mess to begin with. Remind me of Bill Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY
Thank you for this, Jess. I think it's wonderful that there are more amazing entrepreneurs attempting to redirect tech toward good (like Gabb, Angel Kids, Bark). Each in that list has an amazing CEO who truly wants to see kids thrive online.
But I'm not sure we have enough of them to "help us escape" the mess until we change the incentives or increase the disincentive attached to causing harm. For example, can we encourage creation of a business model to replace the current advertising model, where our time is the resource? (Gaia Berstein talks about this extensively in her book Unwired). Or, could we pass a federal design code with enforcement teeth (including personal liability) where harms to children are mitigated?
What an outstanding post. From the bottom of Australian parents and teachers' hearts - thank you.
I am old(er), but grew up in the age of free-range childhood. I thought it was interesting the McDonald's in the UK is advertising itself as a teen hang out. As a teenager, we "cruised McDonald's" every Friday and Saturday night. K-Mart was next door, and when we'd find friends, we'd park our cars and chat, make a lot of noise and even spin donuts. I can't imagine any city that would allow this today. Times have changed, but the need for connection has not changed. I think of this all the time. I work in early learning and at our center, we don't allow any screen time for children (and no teacher phones in the class either!) Often, the first thing I hear when a child is picked up is, "Is my tablet in the car?" I am thankful for the work that is being shared through this column. I use a lot of it in my conversations with parents.
😁😁😁
Jess:"...tackle norm #4 from The Anxious Generation––more independence, free play, and responsibility ...and in creating safer..."
Me:"aka 'become more safe by being less safe'...?"
google.com/search?q=site:feelinggood.com+paradox
NEXT TOPIC:
How did we get an insult comic as President?
Answer:Corona(because we love to sabotage, yes, the evolutionary origins of the shape and stroke of the penis is to remove(sabotage) the last male's ejaculate)
It is for this reason that I am writing in "TRIUMPH THE INSULT COMIC DOG PUPPET" as president!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yN0Pru9fNQ
Research:
Science:"Semen Displacement as a Sperm Competition Strategy in Humans"
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/147470490400200105
Science:" The human penis as a semen displacement device "
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=4cea697c1f0d9c80e0fa8c366ae686ec72eea642
IMHO, President Harris will deliver Biden's pledge for more Americorps by MASSIVE GOVT CONTRACTS TO DEPROGRAM MAGA CULTISTS...please join my team to position ourselves to win these contracts!(humor may be key to "Killing the Ego")😁😁😁
Jess, I'm having trouble squaring this position with your past AR attempts at Blippar. AR, the promise of never having to exist "IRF"!
In a 2014 interview you said,
"the winners will be those that harness everything across all the different formats so they are looking at their tablet and looking at mobile and looking at online and desktop content as well as the printed format and indeed all the social channels and finding a way to maximize each of those channels with different types of content that moves the consumer between them. I think it's a big challenge but it's one that we're just starting to see some great success within."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdpRtwEgMZk
Do you have regrets? Even Tick, while helping to build people's skills, would have relied on dopamine inducing short videos aimed at seducing others to the platform.
I'm totally with you that we need to infuse more empathy into tech culture, but I worry 'market forces' act like a vortex that sucks even the most well intentioned entrepreneur into the attention economy.
Obviously Jess changed her mind, which shows cognitive flexibility. But the basic paradigm she has seems to be the same (correct me if I'm wrong, Jess): her prime directive is market opportunities, with no regard to whether a particular opportunity destroys individuals (making them dopamine addicts), families and communities (making people in those not need each other making them need the entrepreneur's company instead). Something like "see a need that is fulfilled, destroy the way it is fulfilled outside of capitalism, and then make the needy depend on one's company to fulfill it". Perhaps I'm being too harsh?
if the markets are local, then perhaps there are more checks and balances on greed, short-termism, non-accountability to impacts on others (including other species) and lack of empathy?
Here are some things that work:
- smaller towns
- Montessori and Waldorf
- Individual outdoor sports that involve groups, self reliance and exploration : skiing,mountain biking, xc skiing, hiking, horses, hunting (yes hunting), fishing
- learning to build things with your hands
- camping as a family
- pickup sports like basketball in rec centers, gyms and playgrounds
- riding their bikes places
- urging other parents to let your kids have a little freedom together - this can be challenging but it’s doable. Kids are dying to not be watched and to be trusted.
- urging your kid to do small errands or tasks on their own and not giving them the means to do it unless they do it alone
- rural stuff like 4-H
We took up the outdoors in a big way when our son was 5 and covid hit. I don’t always love the process but it’s amazing for him. He will be able to guide trips in his teens.
These things take effort (and often $) on the part of the parent. But it can’t be outsourced to tech bros who never had real childhoods anyway.
My kid is anxious and nerdy by nature and needs a lot of pushing. It is work! But that’s parenting.
FYI: https://www.npr.org/2024/11/07/nx-s1-5182775/australia-social-media-ban-children