Mastodawn

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116240274811219588

One can generalize my thoughts about "junior engineers" to "adolescents" in many cases. Children *are* different from adults, but far less different than popular discourse would have you believe. *Most* of the idea that they are a special class of person whose agency should be tightly controlled by their betters, is a self-soothing fantasy *by* those "betters" about their own deficiencies, not about risks to children.

To wit: "age gating" anything on the Internet is solving the wrong problem.

Engagement-maximizing has a whole bunch of problems. It creates a nonconsensual, exploitative feedback loop. It's bad for kids; it's also bad for adults. It does not appear to be meaningfully *differently* bad for kids vs. adults.

It is justifiable to age-restrict things that kids are A) especially vulnerable to (cars) or B) developmentally affected by (alcohol & drugs).

Neither seems to be true for "social media". (Source, vaguely: If Books Could Kill's episode on The Anxious Generation)

Anyone interested in solving the problem of e.g. Instagram-driven anorexia would be much better off banning Instagram's machine-learning algorithms whose entire job is to get vulnerable young women trapped in cyclical problem behaviors, not getting involved in draconian liability regimes where it's OK to do this to a young woman who is 22 but illegal to do to one who is 17 even if the technique is equally effective on both

But, even that framing is still "othering" the problem (assuming that your representative is not a 22-year-old woman). The best way to think about this from a regulator's perspective is to ask the potential regulator: how do you want the regulation to impact YOUR behavior, rather than kids'? If the choice is "stop allowing Instagram to trick kids" vs. "stop allowing kids to access instagram" this feels like a nuanced debate; making it "stop allowing instagram to trick ME" the discourse sharpens.

Ultimately every good regulatory regime needs to be designed by people who know that they are themselves supposed to be protected by the same rules. Our leaders are not "our betters", a special class of people endowed with better judgement who should have different rules, just a group of people we have entrusted to represent our interests. Political representatives need to think of their constituents, even their constituents who are minors, this way. They are stewards, not lords.

@glyph one very notable failure mode of this approach is when dealing with a certain class of person (the ones that commonly reduce to “ghoul”), who *do not want to be impacted by regulation*. approaches to handle the regulatory design also need to be cognisant of this dynamic, and have an explicit way to deal

otherwise we get the VW and ARB type outcomes (to wit: regulatory capture, or worse)

@froztbyte presumably such people still want to live in a world with breathable air, though; this is not a failure of personalization but a failure of short-term thinking. as mark baum put it: it never works

@glyph you may know that and I may know that, but there is a certain degree of magical thinking employed by them that makes them think they’re immune

and I’m not saying this at armchair distance: I have *directly* dealt with some of these types - I’ve seen the patterns and plans, heard the words used, the actions taken

the dangerous thing about them is how very willing (and, often: able) they are to expend resources (effort, cash, etc) in furtherance of outside-context outcomes

@froztbyte oh I have no doubt that this happens, I watch the news. I am just saying “love your neighbor as yourself” doesn’t become invalid advice just because someone has decided that the way they “love themselves” is to inflate the value of petrochemical financial securities and their derivatives. they’re just intentionally misunderstanding the rule.

@glyph I don’t think your thesis / final sentence is correct, fwiw

the kind of person I’m talking about is not one that misunderstands anything involved here. rather, the opposite: in all the cases I’ve seen they’ve spent extraordinary amounts of effort on understanding what’s permissible and doable, and how to go about getting their own way *despite* that system. in that way, they understand the mechanisms and structures far more than most

@glyph sorry I know this sounds fucking grim

but … I think it’s valuable to recognize and acknowledge, and learn how to deal. because these are some of the key mechanisms I’ve seen these ghouls do bad shit with over the last however many years I’ve been in a position to see what’s going on

gkrnours 2d ago

@glyph maybe last year, there was a pretty large ads campaign from facebook toward gatekeeping social media and locking teens phone to pre-installed apps (so instagram but mastodon).

My guess is it's because 17 years old teens have limites income so they have low value as ads destination. 22 years old woman with body image probably dropped out of school, went to work at starbucks or mcdo where they have a uniform and she now have a salary to spend on ads product.

txtx 🇪🇺2d ago

@glyph I'd love to see corporate foreign owned social media completely banned across the EU. Ban X, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and anything else with significant market share.

Their insane billionaire owners are pushing hard to wreck our democracies by platforming extremists.

France limits foreign ownership of traditional media, I think this needs expanding to social.

txtx 🇪🇺2d ago

@glyph Age restrictions for social media are highly popular in Australia and I can see where parents are coming from.

Just because it's also bad for adults doesn't mean it's therefore not bad for children.

txtx 🇪🇺2d ago

@glyph I don't support age verification (again I'd rather see a broader ban) but I think we're going to get more of it because it is so popular.

@glyph adolescents as a meaningful social category('teenagers') is also largely an artifact of modernity and post-industrialization education and social reforms.
For most of human history, most teens would have been considered more or less 'adults who haven't been through as much shit as the rest of us just yet.'
Which is not to say that was better - but that, the difference between a 'teen' and an 'adult' is not as clear as the current social-cultural context likes to pretend it is.

@glyph Some cases of categorizing them differently are reasonable - it's a vulnerable period, and having some protections to keep predators away is useful.
... but they're also basically just adults that don't have as many decades of experience yet, and pretending a 16 year old more closely resembles an 8-year-old than a 24-year-old only serves to fuck them over more.

@miss_rodent this kind of discourse is extremely fraught because it's easy to veer into accidentally agreeing with the "it's actually ephebophelia" crowd, but broadly speaking I agree with you. every day, a kid is a bit less like a child and a bit more like a really naive adult. some arbitrary thresholds are reasonable but the ones our society has constructed are not particularly well thought-out

@miss_rodent in general, a lot of what officials do is victim-blaming. they constantly substitute "how should minors be allowed to behave" for the real question, "what do minors need to be protected from", because once it's regulating the kids' behavior then it's much easier, the kids are much more vulnerable, much easier to restrict. and once you start asking what minors need to be protected from it turns out that it's the same predatory shit we ALL need protection from

@miss_rodent (and that shit often comes from their donors, or maybe even themselves personally. but I digress)

@glyph People who clamour to get into positions of power passing laws to give themselves more power over their kids and grandkids? Shocking.

But yeah 'What do they need to be protected from' - and restricting what sort of shit they can be subjected to/what adults and those and power can do *to* them, is, I think, a much higher priority than restricting what they can get up to.

@glyph Yeah, that kind of veer is why I pointed to 'vulnerable to predators' specifically as one of the cases where sometimes it *is* useful to consider them in a distinct category.
My point isn't that every 16 year old should be given a beer, a job, and a car, and treated like any 30-year-old - *some* of the limits and protections make sense - but shit's complicated and drawing strict lines often does more harm than good.

walnut 🌱1d ago

@glyph
I've seen people compare "junior engineers" to "adolescents" to put down both, so the this is a good connection to make.