Look, I fucking love technology. I love what the advancements in my lifetime have been able to make possible. The sheer amount of information and communication and creative tools available is incredible, and I often wonder how different my life would be now if I’d grown up with all these things available and accessible. (How many more things would I know how to do? How much more music could I have written? How much more art could I have produced? Could I have started my own businesses sooner? How many more people from how many more places would I know?)

But the things in the above posts are problems. I see plenty of bitching now about the effects that ‘TV / video game babysitting’ had on you - you think handing a 2-year-old a tablet to shut them up isn’t just another incarnation of the same thing? 

We bitch about how fucked up algorithms are all over the internet, and you don’t think kids having nearly unmonitored access is a problem? You don’t see a potential for how this could be fucking someone up? Open a YouTube page as a new user (with zero history, cookies, etc.), click on an innocuous video, and let autoplay run for a bit. It gets weird real fast. (Even with filters.)

As difficult as ‘don’t worry about looking like the people in the magazines, they don’t look like that either’ was for us, you don’t think there’s a potential for more damage with social media etc. now? Everybody has access to filters and photoshop etc. The whole ‘influencer’ thing is that ‘anybody can be a star, you can make yourself, you don’t have to wait for a studio etc. to discover you.’ Seven-year-olds obsessing whether they look fat or if their instagrams can compete with some random person who’s edited the shit out of their photos (and they’re not a movie star, just a random person, so it must be real!) is messed up. 

Kids coming into schools with lower vocabulary levels because they haven’t heard as many words from people by a certain age - because it’s easier to sit them in front of a pretty, addicting game to keep them occupied and behaving than spend the time interacting with them person-to-person - is messed up.

This is what my parents did for me. It exercises the kids’ brains, particularly the centers associated with creativity/mental imaging/thinking (as opposed to phones that provide the image for you and engage the front part of your brain more than the parts associated with task focussing). 

You signed up to be a parent; that doesn’t mean you can stick your kid in front of an ipad/phone/tv/computer all day so they don’t bother you. BE A PARENT, PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR KIDS, TEACH THEM TO USE TECH RESPONSIBLY, TEACH THEM HOW TO BE POLITE IN PUBLIC. 

I mean, certain limitations on the use can be healthy, like “no screens after lights out”, but banning it completely isn’t really an option any more,

The biggest thing is that if you tell a kid “No, don’t do that!”, you have to give them something else to do instead, preferably something more fun and satisfying than the screen.

And what you are describing is a good way to responsibly use tech! But kids need to be taught how to do that instead of going for the game apps. And also be provided drawing tools, or be given the option of picking out a family activity or something for places to go, etc, in order for that to be responsible tech use. 

DO NOT DO THIS, you are fucking US ALL.

The only grounds to get your house fees and tips back that we have to stand on are that we are employees. Employees don’t tip out and employees don’t pay house fees. Independent contractors pay rent for a place to practice their business and tip those who help them do their job.

PLEASE, I am leaving this industry in two years because I am old, I promise this won’t affect me. DO NOT FUCK YOURSELVES BECAUSE YOU HEAR YOU CAN GET MONEY BACK, educate yourself about what is happening in California and