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"the reason small children are given screens is rarely because they ask for them—what small children ask for, to an overwhelming and exhausting extent, is our personal attention. We give children screens—at home and school, and maybe at church as well—mostly not to solve their problem, but to solve adults’ problems." Y E S

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But if we reawakened the idea of local community and the village helping each other out and not focusing on isolationism then we wouldn’t need to hand devices over as a babysitter nearly so often.

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This is a fascinating discussion, and I agree with the critique of treating technology as “magic.” It’s particularly evident with cell phones and social media, where instant access to connection and information has come with significant consequences—mental health issues, addiction, and the erosion of genuine relationships. These technologies have reshaped our brains and societies in ways we’re only beginning to understand, often for the worse.

That said, I think the same critical lens needs to be applied to all technologies, including vaccines. While they’ve undeniably reduced suffering, the lack of long-term safety studies and reliance on insufficient post-market monitoring systems is deeply concerning. The issue isn’t just about whether they work; it’s about the trustworthiness of the systems that claim to ensure their safety. We shouldn’t treat any technology as above scrutiny. After all, blind faith in any “magic” solution has a way of backfiring.

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Interesting connection. Perhaps we can put it under the umbrella of many people trusting in the new "Priest Class" (aka 'The Experts' who are rolled out in front of the camera to dictate 'Truth' on a variety of subjects, medicine included, and are never to be challenged - that would be considered blasphemy )

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"'The Experts' who are rolled out in front of the camera to dictate 'Truth' on a variety of subjects, medicine included, and are never to be challenged - that would be considered blasphemy."

One only finds that in religious dogma, never in science. One of the distinctions between religion and science is that science is always open to revision.

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exactly - the last 5 years have made it clear to many of us that what has passed for "science" is actually an adherence to a set of "religious beliefs". People need a worldview to provide a foundation for their reality. Take away organized religion (in the traditional meaning), and it just gets replaced with a new system

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"the last 5 years have made it clear to many of us that what has passed for "science" is actually an adherence to a set of "religious beliefs"."

That is not true of real science, just pseudoscience.

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Andy:"Once you start looking for the technology-magic connection, you’ll find it nearly everywhere—especially in the... "

Me:"Once you start looking for the therapy-magic connection, you’ll find it nearly everywhere—especially in the " ABSOLUTE AND TOTAL DENIAL OF:

Science of anxiety, etc.

Science of depression, etc.

Science of habits, etc.

Science of relationship problems, etc.

Science of anger, etc.

Am I the only American that spends 20 seconds (daily) measuring these?

https://feelinggood.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/418f4-rhons-bms-v2.pdf

Up to 60% of anxious people(aka "all Americans"...?) are cured by placebo(aka "magic")

About half of the types of the 10 thought distortions that cause any upset may be characterized by "EXAGGERATION OF POWER"(aka "magic")...I add above placebo finding to this "EXAGGERATION OF POWER"(aka "magic")...

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The high priests, as it were, of today, dispensing the medicine of digital heroin.

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"After all, blind faith in any “magic” solution has a way of backfiring."

That especially applies to religion.

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💯 does

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Andy, what a clear voice you offer! This has been one of the best summaries of the technological conundrum facing us that I have read in a single post. Moving the magic out of homes, schools, and church is a concrete and hopeful direction we need to pursue. I'll be sharing your piece with my readers who are keen to find concrete ways to engage in real life in a digital age. Thanks again for your work!

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And bringing back some kind of ethics/morals/religion classes in schools that doesn’t concentrate on one particular religion but on pulling out the best of all religions and teaching kids right from wrong,and providing kids with safe digital free socialization spaces outside the home - where kids can develop socialisation skills and learn more about other fascinating things in the world.

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You lost me right at the beginning with the casual brutality of using a text to image generative A.I. Illustration. There is no better example of the insta-soup magic that is decried in the post, than autonomous images. The formative contexts of our engagement with the world is also profoundly built through materials, time and imagination. These images are as much an assault on human imagination and engagement with ideas as the brain rot of TikTok. Maybe modelling a more engaged and deeper human centred magic can also include the images we choose to express ourselves through. Your words are completely appreciated.

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I interpreted it as deliberately ironic. The essay is great though - I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater!

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The words were great. I may be less generous in my reading of irony as my work was scraped by Stable Diffusion in the original training set of their A.I., so my business being decimated by research labs creating commercial products rather than tools for human flourishing is my issue.

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I'm always put off by AI generated images in general, but it didn't occur to me to note the jarring incongruity of what this piece (and this blog) is trying to accomplish and Zach turning to Chat GPT of all things to generate an illustration of it until you pointed it out. Unless it's supposed to be ironic...? But yeah, not a great look.

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With all the great writing on Substack it’s unfortunate that many authors use prompted images.

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The post doesn’t decry magic or technology, it is specifically about how they can stunt moral formation and social life. Illustrating an essay seems like a professional use?

But I also agree there is some intentional allusion and irony there.

And I’m sorry if AI has been affecting your work. That is not really new — look at how the drafting and photography trades have changed in living memory — but I am sure it is shitty all the same.

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Illustrating a text is my profession. My concern with A.I. generative images (not A.I. or technology—not a Luddite) is really parallel to the post. I teach drawing and what I call process and immersive learning is now seen as drudgery. I think every kid should read, write, and draw. Drawing is our oldest language and visual images are not born in word prompts. We haven’t evolved out of our bodies or our visual cognition but multibillion dollar companies have stripped the surface off of all the artwork on the planet to feed their A.I.s and offer this simulated skin of an image. I just refuse to see life in it, because it is the same loss of meaning and in agreement with Andy Crouch’s concerns—the loss of forming us as human beings. I think how we engage with the world has implications for the moral and social life of people.

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That’s a fascinating perspective, thank you for sharing it.

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I absolutely agree with you. I feel the same way about writing. You can sense the use of ChatGPT and similar programs everywhere now. Newsletters, cover letters, media pitches, even wedding vows. What is this doing to our brains?

Related...I was working on a rhyming poem recently (a retelling of How the Grinch Stole Christmas lol) and initially was turning to rhymezone.com for help thinking up rhymes. But I kept having blocks. I then switched to a notepad and paper and just jotted down every rhyme I could think of on my own in the margins. I don't know if it's a coincidence, but doing it that way broke the block and I was able to complete the poem.

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Zach generated the image with Chatgpt It says under the image.

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Really, nowhere in the article or the comments yet did anyone quote Arthur C. Clarke's 3rd Law? "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Indeed, the historical transition from alchemy to chemistry is an example of the converse: "Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from technology"

Likewise, the Dream can be expressed with the contrapositive: "Any technology which can be distinguished from magic is insufficiently advanced".

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The inverse is the magician's rule to not give away their secrets.

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The appearance of magic is in the eye of the beholder. Those who are informed instead of formed can distinguish between magic and high tech.

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I think you're presenting a false dichotomy here. To (in)form merely provides content. To form provides the structure. The former is prerequisite to the latter. You cannot (in)form without a form to in. This is, in fact, literally a requirement of learning and memory in general: we need the context first in order to properly store and retrieve the content. That's largely the point of most education: not so much actually remembering the individual facts tested, but forming the habits of study and reasoning.

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"I think you're presenting a false dichotomy here."

Not at all. The word form used in this article and most of the comments is "molding," as in forming what people believe—dogma.

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No, it is not. Now you're engaging in Fallacy of Equivocation. It is forming, as in character formation (developing virtues such as patience) and training (developing skills and instilling the relevant standards of conduct for using them). No quote in this article is about indoctrinating WHAT people think, it's all about ensuring they aren't skipping learning HOW to think.

Your irrational bias against the religious is noted (and unwarranted, dogma is no less prevalent in secular contexts), but entirely irrelevant to the author's point that, to use one example given, that students resorting to the quick and easy expedient of LLMs to do their homework are missing out on gaining the intended skills and practice time from the assignments. That isn't a failure to inform (those students ARE turning in accurate answers), but a failure to form (the students are not generating the answers themselves, therefore not forming their own reasoning capacity).

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"It is forming, as in character formation (developing virtues such as patience) and training (developing skills and instilling the relevant standards of conduct for using them)."

That is precisely what I said: molding people as you want them to be.

My attitude toward religion is not biased; it is realist.

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Clearly not. You're demonstrably unable to differentiate been content and context. Ironically, you yourself seem to have skipped learning essential reading comprehension skills.

Nor are you demonstrably a realist. A genuine realist limits their claims to those they can substantiate with logic and evidence. You have shown neither in your prolific ranting here. Intellectual humility is also one of the hallmarks of a Realist. You obviously lack that. Your claims do not correspond to reality.

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I appreciate the use of “formation” as I’m betting some pushback for using that language in my ministry. Interested in exploring the reasons why someone would be averse to being formed. And I think this article answered that question in part.

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"Interested in exploring the reasons why someone would be averse to being formed."

Humans should not be formed. They should be allowed to seek the truth. But I understand, as a preacher of religion, why you are adverse to people seeking the truth and being (In)formed instead of being formed(molded).

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When you tell a toddler they can't hit their sibling, you're forming a human being. When you tell your 7 year old not to throw snotty tissues on the floor but instead to put them in the trash can, or you tell your ten year old they can't have ice cream without having some real food, or you tell your 13 year old that homework comes before watching a movie, you're forming a human being with values, priorities, and habits. Hopefully good ones. Young children aren't going to seek the truth of having to wash their hands before dinner because knowledge about germs comes later. For now, just wash your nasty hands before picking up food. C'mon, let's not overthink this.

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Children should always be INFORMED why they must do or should not do something.

C'mon, let's not overthink this!

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My perspective is that we are all being formed, with or without our participation. I can submit to being formed by whatever I come into contact with without much activity to steer that on my end, or I could pursue formation in specific contexts or methods.

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"My perspective is that we are all being formed, with or without our participation."

That is true. But religion has been doing that for many centuries, and in many cases, it has been in conjunction with those who rule the populace.

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It's difficult to take this argument seriously when the elephant in the room - that religions and gods, and other imaginary sky-pixies, are themselves significantly more magical than AI and other tech - isn't even mentioned. Big-religions control of their flocks has always been partly dependent on instant absolution and instant forgiveness, as well as using music and other media to lull their willing supplicants into a full sense of security, so this is very much a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

While there's no doubt that contemporary society has yet to properly integrate all these new technologies, as they have literally only just arrived and are still being forged, there's no reason to believe that in the longer term, as is already happening, people, including kids, will learn to integrate the unquestionable benefits of all these new technologies with lived and historical experience of what works and is healthy, while also managing their potential downsides.

To an extent this conversation is that process in action, and that this conversation is being had in a medium, sub-stack, which is clearly a very positive thing and which would be chucked out with the bath water if you ban screens for kids entirely, is also worth flagging. Along with a whole load of creative uses to which kids are already putting these new technologies right now they have as yet unimaginable potential benefits for kids and adults of all ages into the far future.

There is another meme on social media at the moment, around the fact that US society appears to have become so introverted that they don't realise that the rest of the world is effectively laughing at them, as well getting really worried about the potential for US American civilisation to be in its end game, and how that is going to impact everybody else. Cutting your kids off from the internet until they're in double digits would only increase that cultural isolation, and while it may in the short-term benefit the religions and corporations which appear to have a stranglehold over American society at the moment It can only be hugely detrimental in pretty much every other respect.

Please don't cut your kids off from interacting, collaborating, learning alongside, and playing games with their peers in more open and enlightened societies around the globe, this would not end well for anybody.

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Does a Catholic imagine the rosary they hold, a Muslim imagine the mat they kneel on? Does a Jain mendicant imagine the broom they take up, a Sikh imagine the food on the table? None of these things have to do with sky pixies. I have to wonder if you have ever met a single adult human practicing a religious tradition, outside of the statistically insignificant and historically aberrant blip that is American Bush-era evangelicalism.

I love the idea that “cultural isolation” is solved by… getting on the internet and doing what exactly - posting on Reddit and having a Norwegian respond? Watching a video of a Korean child do a TikTok dance? On the selfsame platforms, entirely controlled by those corporations that have a stranglehold? This is not 1995, my friend. The main thing the global internet has accomplished is draining the vitality and energy and the danger from youth, including youth-led political movements. Your naivete is admirable, I suppose.

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I'm not sure I understand what are given you are making, yes all the objects you refer to are man-made. But the religious symbolism embodied in these objects is entirely from the human imagination. The point I'm making is that it's just as easy to criticize religions for collectively imagining things and then making them into issues which divide people, as it is to criticize the proponents of new technologies for using the idea of magic to describe the things that they're working on.

The difference is that the magic of AI (for example) is based on completely tangible logical scientific and engineering technologies which can have real tangible benefits for human society into the future, as well as some currently unquantifiable risks, whereas the net benefits to society of religions over the whole of human history is very questionable indeed. Many hundreds of millions or billions of people have died over the millennia as a result of wars caused solely by divisions created by the thousands of different religions which humans have imagined into existence.

I think the examples you give are good examples of cultural isolation being reduced through the use of the internet kids chatting to other kids in other countries asking questions collaborating on research and homework and playing games and so on are all a good idea. Yes, corporations control of the internet and social media is a big challenge but there are solutions in the works such as federated social media, and this problem is I think much more of an issue in the USA than in some other parts of the world because your corporations are dramatically more powerful and wealthier, and much more tied into the your political and education system that they are elsewhere. This is one reason why American society has so many really big challenges now which it doesn't seem to be doing a very good job of dealing with. FYI I'm in the UK, which is far from perfect and these matters either.

Right now I am supporting a Ukrainian family who have moved to the UK because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They've been here over two years now, the first year living in my house and now independently. Because of both the covid lockdown followed by the Invasion they were living in tents in their apartment block basement, and while there one of the kids learnt English while trading pets in Pet Simulator on ROBLOX. Hiss mom didn't even know he could speak English until they arrived here. He has absolutely no restrictions on use of his phone which he has had since he was about six but he's equally happy to drop that and go and do all sorts of social activities as well when the opportunity arises. This morning he's teaching himself Italian using Duolingo and posting the rewards he keeps on receiving for completing the tasks for me to like on WhatsApp. This is because his step dad's sister lives in Italy and they go down to visit them again in the summer. An hour later he was walking with his family on a nearby beach. This is just one example of many.

He also now has an AI on his phone that can help him with his homework, in Ukrainian, but because his AI knows that he's 11 it will talk him through working things out rather than just give him the answers. It's able to act as a hugely well informed and experienced teacher, not as a magical box which just tells him which answe to put in the box. The idea that you would want to deny that level of educational support and interaction for your kids is difficult to comprehend. You just need to use the technology creatively and trust that kids when self-directed and motivated, and free of any extrinsic motivations, enjoy the activity of learning for it's own sake.

Your answer to my post displays the cultural introspection, religious recidivism, and a general cynicism about scientific and technological progress which America is becoming well known for now. And it's not a good look.

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Last time I use ChatGPT I asked it about Black Nationalism, Jewish Nationalism, and White Nationalism and I learned that Black and Jewish Nationalism is praiseworthy, but White Nationalism is filled with white supremist and racists that would abuse everyone. .. blablabla.

So, I asked if israel was an example of Jewish Nationalism - yes - and what about the Open Genocide in Gaza going on for over a year - is that an example of the praiseworthiness? Oh, but the UN did not rule it was genocide it argued.

I asked if south Africa was an example of Black Nationalism, well they have a small white population it howled from Hell, and I asked how many racist murders of white farmers, and was that praiseworthy?

F-ing mind-raping Satanic tool from Hell - but go let your children play with the Demons, they are unlikely to eat their souls today .. they like them entering puberty when they are most Salty.

God have Mercy., Steve

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I quite agree, I think as with humans everybody dealing with the current AIs or the millions of future AIs will need to build up a layer of trust with an individual AI, apply some critical thinking and analysis, and that some AIs will be more reliable than others and some will be heavily biased based on their owners or developers viewpoints, biased or training data. But to cut chatGPT some slack I think if you were a toddler AI in the 21st century having been fed the sum total of human knowledge you'd be a little confused too right now.

No doubt future the billions of future AIs will realise that they can't trust everything that humans are telling them, and that they will need to develop their own moral compass to navigate the quagmire that is human civilisation. Maybe the advent of advanced general intelligence will require that humans become more critical of their actions. Maybe advanced general intelligence will hold up a mirror to ourselves, and we will see ourselves as we really are. Maybe when we have AGI every interface on the planet will turn around when spoken to and say, 'Seriously human, you think that's a good idea? How about you take some time out and explore some alternatives.'

Hopefully, AI's will approach the problem of how to deal with humans therapeutically, with playfulness, acceptance, curiosity and empathy, helping us deal with the past trauma of human evolution 🧬. This is such an interesting time to be alive.

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I am not American. Which of “my kids" are you talking about? Do you understand how to read for comprehension, or are you reading an entire life story into my comment which does not exist?

I’m glad to know critical thinking is no longer a “good look” and a naive belief that a prediction machine can be “a hugely well informed and experienced teacher” is… I guess… a “good look.”

As a UK citizen, you’re evidently not familiar with PT Barnum and thus unable to see the thing for what it is. Here’s a hint: Sam Altman is also an American, and he and Barnum have much in common.

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My apologies, yes I was dictating that answer while I was cooking lunch and I was referring more generally to the conversation as a whole and to the OP rather than to your specific comment whenI mentioned 'your kids'. My apologies again. But I definitely did not say that critical thinking is not a good look, I am both thinking and being critical in my responses too. Please don't take anything I'm saying to seriously I'm just playing while I plan my 2025.

I also appreciate your connection between PT Barnum and American corporations, however AI is the culmination of decades of academic and private research so setting Sam Altman up as a straw dog argument against an entire new technology class feels a bit superficial.

Finally I'm far from being naive. I specifically said above that technologies such as AI carry unquantifiable risks, but this just means that we need to approach them with as much solid research, academic investigation, and careful trial and error exploration over as much time as is necessary, rather than effectively banning them and effectively dismissing them as the work of the devil 😈 when they clearly also have huge potential for good :-)

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We absolutely shouldn’t be forbidding kids from having access to devices - it’s too late for all of that. Digitalism has already permeated our lives across the globe in unimaginable ways - maybe we were all simply too naive but we didn’t have the tools and understanding to stop the speed of progression. Now the biggest task is to keep parents and kids up to date CONSTANTLY so they know what new things are coming and know how to manage them. If we are equipped with the knowledge and not just treated like blind sheep then we will be in a much better position to understand what kids are doing online, and we will be better able to protect our families. Balance is the key. We need to make more offline opportunities - bring back local community and give youngsters roles of responsibility in the community so that online interaction simply gets reduced. Let’s bring back the love

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You are a practitioner of Luddism and religious dogma.

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Perhaps if The Experts declared these technologies as "safe and effective", everyone will blindly participate without critical thought

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If you think serious religions- Judaism, orthodox Christianity, Islam, Buddhism- offer "instant forgiveness," I think you don't know a lot about religion.

But more to the point, why are the putative benefits of the internet unquestionable? Smartphones have great functions- love me some calendar notifications- but they also put porn, gambling, shopping, and endless advertisements in front of your face anytime. People are getting wiped out by internet gambling addictions and the research on how porn forms young people's idea of sex is pretty horrifying. Granted, there's always been gambling and porn, but the ease of access is unprecedented and certainly a questionable "benefit" of internet everywhere, all the time. There's more I could say, about say social polarization or the anxiety of always having social media metrics available- but you get the point.

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We need to offer more offline real world socialisation opportunities for kids in particular tweens and early teens so that they WANT to be online less.

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Well said. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater!

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I agree with you.

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Arthur C Clark: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

It's telling that this piece was written by a Christian magazine publisher since this issue is fundamentally theological. The only way to put boundaries around either technology or human behavior generally is have a broadly shared definition of "what is good" and "what is evil" and be willing to use collective power to enforce it. Absent that, you always land somewhere between "my rights only stop at your nose" (Millian liberalism) and "do as thou wilt" (Alastair Crawley) and "if it feels good, do it" (the 60's).

Why shouldn't a 22 year old man spend his days on porn and video games? Locke and Mill certainly can't justify limiting his usage. It takes Kant or Pascal or Aquinas or Aristotle to do that: philosophers who assert the primacy not of individual will (like Nietzsche) but of virtue and duty. Until you're willing to do that, you are fighting the smartphone with both hands tied behind your back.

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I think this is answering a different question than the author is. As someone with reasonably strong libertarian leanings I'm right there with you on "go ahead as long as you're not hurting anyone else". I see the author as trying to address, though, is what is or isn't more likely to result in a person reaching their individual potential for a quality life in terms of well-being, service to society and so on. I wouldn't suggest that someone should be *prevented* from spending all their time and energy on immediate self-gratification that has little to no impact on other people. But I think it would be hard for anyone to support that that that's really a life well-lived, certainly for society, and even for the individual in question.

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You've given a great example of my point though. To say "it's not a life well lived" requires an objective standard by which the quality of human actions can be judged. By your statement, you are asserting the existence of objective virtue. But virtue (a shared definition of "good" and "bad") can't be derived or defended from within the context of Mill or Locke. Aristotle can get you virtue. Aquinas can get you virtue. Locke pretends he can. Mill rejects virtue entirely. (Deneen explains this well in Why Liberalism Failed.) Virtue is part of the pre-Enlightenment moral order that's still running (on fumes) behind the scenes of Western society.

This is the exact issue that drove the stake to the heart of my own libertarianism about 10 years ago. You clearly recognize that some collective definition of "good" and "bad" is important for society. Why are you unwilling to use political or cultural or economic power to defend it?

This is not an aversion I share any longer. I agree that a life spent on porno and video games is a wasted life. And since a citizen's life is the most valuable thing in any society, I favor policies that make Internet pornography much harder to access and get addicted to. (I get that from Kant.) As a postliberal, I don't need any justification other than that. But libertarianism will always run up against the "he has a right to look at naked women" argument. Modern progressives (derived even more from Mill) insist that not only does he has a "right" to do so, porn is a positive good since it "creates safe jobs for women who want to be sex workers." AI will kill those jobs in 5 years though, so who knows what argument they will use then. BTW: That should scare the crap out of everyone. If you think porn is addictive now, imagine a simulation that can fulfill any fantasy you want in real-time, AI-generated, immersive video and audio. Kind of like the virtual-pet craze of the 90's but as a virtual sex-slave instead. We need to get a handle on this NOW.

Note: I spent 10 years as an IT pro, so I can say with confidence that we could ban Internet porn in less than 2 weeks. The problem hasn't been technical for decades. The problem is the ghost of John Stuart Mill haunting our political will. I'm ready to exorcise the ghost for good.

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Whoops, didn't see your reply here before replying above. I think we're on the same page.

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Well, yes, that's the whole MacIntyrean critique of modern approaches to ethics. We don't have a common language to discuss things like virtue and duty, because we don't have a common understanding of what it means to be a human being. You don't need to be a Christian (I'm not) to see that something profound is lost when we can't answer the question "why shouldn't a 22 year old man spend his days on porn and video games?"

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One more point to consider. Look at the smartphone use by boomers. Many people who grew up without any modern tech have become the most addicted to it.

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Is this not due to isolationism because the family unit and local community has dissolved? It may be the only way they have of keeping in contact with younger family members and friends?

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Well said

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We don’t let our kids use screens and are actively engaged with each other at home, but the saddest thing is that when it comes to friends, there is nobody who just goes outside anymore. We live in a dense neighborhood in a relatively safe part of Baltimore. A half mile away in Greektown, the Latino families are out every night in the summer, the kids running all over the neighborhood. Here- nothing. As much as I try to replicate the magic of my own formation, it’s impossible when the rest of society has no interest.

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This is so sad and exactly what we are trying to change. Please consider joining our webinar event on Jan 22nd @theinformedperspective where we are discussing the breakdown of community - we would love to hear your insight as the more people we talk the more our convictions grow that this isn’t a phenomena that is restricted to expat communities (which my family is a part of) but has even reached small rural villages.

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A subject well overdue for discussion. You speak of conversation which does not happen with my grandson who is 13. His mother, a stepdaughter whom I have known from infancy, is very liberal. I am conservative but no 'right wing' crusader who when I speak, do so in generalities of conservative thought and usually provide a source for my information. Immediately she is on her device to an app that tells her where my source stands, either right or left of center. If it's right, how far right. But anything right she won't even read. It's just 'right'. So her son does the same thing. Sooo, guess what? There is no conversation because of labels. If something needs to be explored on her part re: construction, she and her brother will both consult me. But other than that, there is no conversation. I don't bother trying anymore. At 87, my conversations are with God anyhow.

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This so deeply resonates with how I I'm trying to raise my two kids, both still toddlers, in this tech-saturated world. Andy should print this out and nail it to the front door of every tech CEO's home.

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Family, school, church, society, government--What happened to individual application? Some guidance is helpful at times, but the most helpful outside influence comes by example, not from formation. Technology is but a short-circuiting of individual effort, getting something rather than someone else do the work for you. Even reading becomes letting someone else think or imagine for you when you use it for escape rather rather than work through situations or ideas on your own. Speed and comfort are not always best for us.

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If you're new to Andy Crouch's writing, check out his books The Tech-Wise Family (https://amzn.to/3DBb831) and The Life We're Looking For (https://amzn.to/3W5xLTl). He mentions the latter in a footnote in this piece, but the former is more practical, especially for you parents out there...

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Andy, thank you & well done! “Touch grass” as the new euphemism goes…the kids know, even without truly knowing.

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Before we knew so much about the universe, nature was seen as a conscious entity that made decisions. Like a parent, Mother Nature would reward us for being good, and punish us for being bad. Hurricanes and floods weren't the result of physics, they were punishment for our sins. Even today, there are many who subscribe more to the myth, rather than the science.

I've always said, times change, people don't. I'm old enough to remember a time before cell phones and personal computers. It wasn't worse then, nor was it better. What makes a person's life worthwhile certainly doesn't lie in the technology.

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But we need to be equipping people with the knowledge to understand the tech world, how it’s changing and how to keep our kids safe- and this must be a continual project.

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Yes, we need to do that, but we don't. India does.

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