And the worst part, for me, is that so much of this propaganda is being delivered effectively.

Effective propaganda designs itself so that any attempt to refute it instead reinforces it.

"Oh, you question the need for us to self isolate? Clearly you're secretly a member of that other group." No!

Fuck this.

We aren't here on this green and blue and increasingly hot orb for any particular reason that I can discern.

But we're here, and we're here together, and we're stuck.

So we owe it to ourselves, and to one another, to hold space for one another, to experience what this life has to offer, and to work together.

Now, you may be asking yourself 'Why would there be a bunch of propaganda targeted at younger adults and teens which appears designed to isolate them, to make them hate one another, and to make them suspicious of anyone who tries to unify them?"

And the answer, I think, is simple. We're living through the dying days of a failing empire. People are easier to control when they're alone. People are easier to keep alone when you've cultivated an idea in their minds that they're correct, and special, and the only way to remain both of those things is to remove anyone who isn't correct and special from their lives.

I feel like that last bit needs to be unpacked.

I work with kids on a volunteer basis. I mostly do reading tutoring, which consists largely of giving these kids situations in which they are motivated to read, and then trying to remove obstacles.

The other part of what I do is focused on helping kids develop healthy and safe relationships with technology.

A lot of the kids I work with are autistic or have some other kind of learning difference that has left them falling behind other kids their age, but some of the kids I'm working with right now are seemingly NT and reasonably well adjusted. They're smart, but also they're between the ages of 8 and 12 and reading on a first grade level at best.

I work with their teachers and their therapists and their mental health professionals and their parents to figure out what can be done, what motivates them, where they're doing well and what they struggle with.

I did this kind of work less before covid, but some. Since covid, I've kind of stumbled smack in to the middle of it. (One of my closest and oldest friends is dating the director of the special education non-profit affiliated with our local Montessori school. The director is my wife's best friend. Their kids are among the group I'm working with.)

Pre-covid I was mostly working with the children of affluent families as a result of the area that we lived in. These kids mostly didn't have access to technology at all, outside of a classroom setting. Within the classroom setting, that technology access was heavily mediated.

Now I'm working with a combination of fairly affluent kids (it is a private school, after all) and very much not (we're in rural north GA, and associated with a non-profit that provides various needs based scholarships.) It is like I'm living in a different universe though. I don't know how much is covid (I never worked with kids in this area pre-covid), but discounting that, the biggest difference between the DC area kids I was working with 5+ years ago and the kids I'm working with now is technology access.

I'm in a kind of unique position, because I'm not a teacher.

I'm mostly playing games, making puzzles, curating books and video games and movies, and helping parents build strategies for encouraging reading.

I'm doing this with access to these kids teachers, but also their diagnoses and IEPs, and occasionally support from other professionals.

And what I'm seeing is terrifying.

The first thing I want to point out is that every parent tells me some variation on "oh he's so much better with this stuff than I am" w/r/t tech in general and it's just not true.

None of these kids are good with technology, not even a little bit. Some of them have grown adept at navigating the menus on a Nintendo switch, or have learned some tricks to cover their tracks when they're doing something they're not supposed to on a smartphone, but across the board they have a fundamental lack of understanding of even the basic principles of most of the tech they interact with.

What they're good at is getting to the thing that they want. They're good at this not because they are good at technology, but because they're desperate, and have nothing better to do.

Over the years, I've done some work with some people who were addicted to various drugs. Meth is the big one around here, but I've worked around and with folks with various chemical dependencies.

Saying these kids are good with technology is like saying those folks were good at chemistry.

What they're good at is getting a fix.

The tech of choice for most of these kids is YouTube.

That's what they want.

When they can get it, they use speech to text to search for what they are after, and then use pictures to pick which video they'll start with.

And then they just sit. Sometimes they'll skip a video or pick one off the list, but mostly they just sit and stare until they get caught.

None of these kids have intentional unrestricted YouTube access on any device, but they're desperate and they've got free time. They find all kinds of cracks and gaps that let them get to YouTube.

When they aren't on YouTube, they're on whatever slot machine mechanics wrapped around a children's media franchise mobile game has attracted their attention that month.

Most of the kids I work with don't have smartphones or tablets (some of them do) but they've all gotten pretty good at giving mom a convincing reason to hand hers over.

I've been struggling, lately, because most of the tools and techniques that I've used to motivate kids in the past aren't working anymore.

Their TV shows are hyper-stimulating. Their video games are hyper-stimulating and have a dozen baked in slot machine mechanics. (Even the benign looking games, hot wheels racers and the like, are full of random draw lootboxes.) Everything is designed to maximize their attention and keep them coming back.

We used to describe video games as "addictive" as if that was a good thing, when it was rarely true in even extreme circumstances. Now it's just true most of the time, and obviously bad.

When I was 8, I'd have rather done literally anything else than to sit quietly and do nothing.

I'd stare out the window, listen to music, read a book, draw, ask questions, tell stories, play solitaire. If I was going to need to be quiet and in the same spot for a long enough period of time, I would even do practice math problems to pass the time. Anything to keep things moving.

But these kids I'm working with now would rather sit and be miserable (and they are clearly, obviously miserable. Frankly, suffering to an extent that exceeds my expectations) instead of reading or writing or drawing or whatever.

I might be able to get their attention for a few minutes, but eventually it wanes and then they'd rather do nothing, when doing nothing is causing them a great amount of distress, than have to put the work in to do something else.

At first I thought I might be imagining things, so I started talking to parents and teachers and therapists and support folks.

And all of them have noticed the same trends, but from a lot closer. They've been boiling the frog, you know? Setting a new baseline each year for how attention span work, and really only ever considering this year's group against last year, or this kid against where they were a year ago.

They all agreed the problem was increasingly bad, but none of them had really given a lot of thought to the extremity of it or it's source (because it's not what they're working on, most of the time. Most of what they're working on is improving, so the "short attention span" thing gets chalked up as a generational divide or an old man yelling at clouds situation, until they stop and pay attention.)

I, on the other hand, took a few years off from working with kids and then came back to the same age group and found it to be a fundamentally different experience.

But then I pointed out the trends. I pointed out how these kids would rather do literally nothing than read a book. How the only thing that seemed to motivate them was the promise of access to video games or streaming services which, by and large, seem to be making the problem worse, and I started working with these professionals to build plans to dig out of this hole and ...

Nearly across the board they confided in me that they were also seeing these issues with older kids. The few who work with kids and adults mentioned that it was also starting to creep in to the conversation with the adults they work with, sometimes with seniors.

And that this increasingly dependent technology relationship seems to also frequently coincide with conspiracy theory belief, self isolation, etc.

Which is where we started the thread.

So we have a generation of kids growing up with a severe and frequently life impacting dependence on a dopamine reward cycle facilitated by technology, and getting fed to algorithms designed to maximize engagement at all costs, which generally means isolating them from their peers and pushing them towards more and more extreme content.

They would increasingly rather do literally nothing, in spite of the fact that doing nothing leaves them in a kind of discomfort that is akin to spiritual anguish, than anything that requires more than a minimal level of effort.

And we have a bunch of adults who are barely out running the same beast, who are falling victim to the same patterns. With the adults, they usually have at least some defence mechanisms against this stuff. They can usually read reasonably well. But the algorithms are more aggressive, and the gambling mechanics come with dollars attached, and it's not just that the things they're consuming are hyper-stimulating, it's specifically that these things are aggressively isolating them from their peers and alienating them from their own decision making.

That last bit "alienating them from their own decision making" is the real crux of my concerns.

We're ceding our agency in the things we consume and the ways we communicate to machines designed to make a profit, and they profit off of us by alienating us further from our own intentions and agency.

And then "AI" enters the picture.

Most of the above to say this:

This is not an old man yelling at the sky. This is not "the youth are wrong, trust me a middle aged man."

People in their early 20s are struggling to form social bonds to a significantly greater extent than they were in the already socially isolated climate of 10 - 15 years ago, and are increasingly falling victim to technologies designed to capitalize on this.

People younger than that are developing such flawed relationships with these same technologies that it is fundamentally altering how they view and interact with the world.

And, all the while, we're being turned against one another.

Technology isn't a force for food or a force for evil. It's a force multiplier, an accelerator.

Right now, it's mostly being wielded by people who want to extract as much attention and value out of you as possible. Or by people with money who are trying to concentrate their power and squash dissent.

And, along the way, they're trying to convince you that tech is a young person's domain, too expensive and complicated for you to worry about, and that the current technological landscape is inevitable and inescapable.

And lots of folks are getting hurt in the crossfire.

It doesn't have to be like this.

So what's to be done?

Intention.

Right now, most people's relationship with technology is either transactional (I need to use this in order to accomplish this task, do my job, talk to this person) or impulsive (I got a notification, let me check tiktok) but rarely is it intentional.

We can do this at an individual level. I think that, for many of us, being on the fediverse is part of this quest for intentional computing.

For myself, I'm a Linux user because that allows me to preserve more of my own agency than Mac or windows (conversely, if also frequently demands that I exercise my own agency more than Mac or windows.)

I've disabled the vast majority of notifications on my phone. I will spend my attention where I choose to do so.

But this is a very 1960s hippie argument. This is the whole earth catalog argument. "I can fix this for myself, so that's good enough."

Nope. This is a community problem and it's going to take a community solution.

I'm not suggesting that we all turn off youtube and facebook and abandon windows and mac en mass for linux and the fediverse.

Well, I'm not *not* suggesting that, but I think it's unlikely to happen and even if it did happen, it's likely that we would just see the same dark patterns replicate themselves on other platforms.

I'm not even suggesting that we stop consuming Youtube specifically. I'm on youtube a lot, honestly. It's the closest thing we have to an ubiquitous community media platform.

The core of my hope here is that we can re-introduce some intention and agency to our relationship with technology.

So I'm working with a couple of professionals on the psychology/childhood development side of the house, and I'm standing in as a professional on the technology side of the house, and I'm trying to figure out what an intentional relationship with technology looks like, and what it takes to build a healthy relationship with a platform like Youtube when you're a kid with a deep and abiding obsession that dominates pretty much everything else in your life.

I'm trying to figure out how to motivate kids to read, when most of the methods I've used in the past aren't working at all.

I wish that I could wrap this in a neat little bow and say "here's a 5 step plan for fixing our current technological problems and encouraging literacy" but I'm still very much trying to figure it out.

I believe there is a path forward. I believe it starts with re-framing our relationship with technology to be more intentional.

What do you think?

Oh, and as a side note, I've spent most of this thread talking about kids and young adults because those are the folks I work most closely with, but this problem is perhaps even more extreme with my grandparent's generation.

Folks who grew up without much tech access are now being forced in to situations where they have to use it, and figuring out many of the same methods that kids are using, and it's absolutely unraveling them. I'm less convinced that this can be fixed, but ...

Just check in on your parents and your grandparents and make sure they're not mainline facebook shorts conspiracy theories about the texas floods, okay?

@ajroach42 It's the people in the middle, too, and a big part of the reason why men and suffering and why the manosphere is a thing.

I've got so many male friends without families, who spend hours. a. day. on YouTube. Most of the them work, but they hate their jobs, they literally don't think their lives matter.

I've got so many female friends, WITH families, who feel they are suffering from undiagnosed ADHD. Whether right or wrong, their attention itself has been stolen.

@OptOut ... That last comment feels pretty misogynistic.

You speak of your male friends with understanding, and your female friends with derision?