I admire the hell out of these kids. If I had a little more strength in my own convictions, a little more willpower, I would probably go flip-phone only too.
Yes, they're kind of posturing and pretentious, but in ways that remind me of myself in high school; I feel like I get them. Your average high school kid is a lot more confusing to me these days.
I did have to laugh at this:
> "I talked to my adviser, though, and he told me most revolutions actually start with people from industrious backgrounds, like Che Guevara."
I wasn't sure what they meant by "industrious backgrounds"; apparently it means "wealthy" based on Guevara's wikipedia page. She's in good company, though... Ho Chi Minh and Lenin grew up privileged too.
I don't get the 'classist' argument at all. You don't need to be rich to want to stop doomscrolling, or to put your phone down for an hour. It sounds more like the kids who call it 'classist' understand phone addiction but don't want to face the fact its actually bad for them... like when an overweight person says 'Id rather enjoy life than eat that salad, I bet that in-shape person is a bore to be around!"
Oh, absolutely. When I was a teen, you'd be called some sort of homophobic slur for refusing to go along with the current zeitgeist. Now, it's more effective to force conformity by calling people classist/racist/etc., and the kids know it too.
> We used to only have landlines and phortress phones
A few weeks ago I was at our local train station and there was an honest-to-god payphone. Walked up to it, picked up the receiver, and got dial tone. I had figured they were all gone now but apparently not quite yet.
On a personal note, it's also something that worries me for the day when I'll finally have my own children.
I wouldn't want them exposed to modern cyber-addictions from young age, but at the same time, I'm not sure how to protect them, when I can expect that all their peers will be on whatever social app's gonna be popular at that time.
It's very difficult. I was lucky to have access to the internet in the late 80s and have watched it grow, mature, evolve. I know how quickly things can change, and I don't want my kids to miss out or be left behind. But at the same time, the dangers that exist today didn't exist even in the 90s. My biggest fear then was receiving an email virus.
Now, Social Media alone is enough to make a parent take a step back and wonder what is the right time to introduce your children to the internet.
Our solution, which isn't perfect, is to use a parent control app. Kids can use their devices for X hours and only certain times of day, and we have to approve each app install or purchase made on the phone. It feels like too much control, but the alternative is too dangerous. And even still I walk in on the kids to see what they are doing.
It's a balancing act that will take time to figure out. We are evolving as a global cultural, technological race, and evolving fast.
> Social Media alone is enough to make a parent take a step back and wonder what is the right time to introduce your children to the internet.
I can't help but wonder whenever I hear this message: do you know, really?
After taking with them a little, it often comes down to pretty ... innocuous things in my opinion. Sure, there's always peer pressure and they'll be constantly judged etc, but that's just a an exaggerated baseline of what teenagers always had. Surely troublesome and not good for their mental health, but they'll probably get over it eventually.
From my perspective, the biggest danger that current social media created is that the creep factor is gone for stalking.
To make a pretty regular example, let's say there is a teenage girl that's feeling lonely. She starts a live stream to talk with people. Some people show up and are super positive! They even give her some stickers (which are literally just money on TikTok she can check out...). Isn't it great to be valued? I don't think I need to write the rest of the story, as it's quiet obvious where the grooming eventually leads.
It's especially hard to swallow because the money she could make is astronomically higher then she'd ever have a chance of making anywhere else. Good luck explaining that...
Seriously, the original social media was so frickin tame. It's so much more twisted now that money is involved and everything is moving towards 1 person with an audience vs "your group of friends" before.
That’s a serious concern for sure. There’s also the weaponization of information which shouldn’t be overlooked.
At an age when kids really haven’t learned to think critically or have the wisdom to realize they’re being manipulated particularly those vulnerable teen years, I think parents do need to consider this. It’s pretty much at least a second job to keep tabs on what kids are viewing/consuming/doing online at all times. If you have multiple children forget it. Parental controls are extremely limited, schools require access to youtube.com and google.com and facebook for events so that pretty much opens the door to view/access most adult things without ever touching a “questionable” website. “The algorithm” still forms a bias on what kids see as well, further eroding critical thinking skills.
A vast majority of parents don’t bother with any controls at all which undermines the effort of those that do which the can lead to resentment and frustration because of peer pressure.
To say that I’m worried about this is an understatement but I also don’t think the cat can be put back in the bag.
Kids were being manipulated by information long before the Internet. I was raised in evangelistic religion. It is a blight on mankind, teaching kids magical thinking, confirmation bias, survivorship bias, appeal to authority, etc. Then there's all kinds of mental gymnastics to explain "the truth", much of it written by grifters.
It's good to take care, yet at the end of the day the kids have to grow up. So they need the tools to evaluate information. This can start early and schools can help even if parents won't, or even if parents are part of the problem.
when I got my own PC in my bedroom (with Ethernet!) as a middle-schooler around 2004, sure, there was plenty of online games and game development forums and porn and whatever else to occupy my attention… but I had no way of taking any of it with me on the go, easily-accessible wherever I am.
this is the basis of my fears for introducing the children I will be having (in the next few years) to the new Internet: it's a pervasive lifestyle change. modern social media apps (instagram, tiktok) are nothing short of digital drugs that you never run out of. why do x y and z in the real world when you could just pull your phone out of your pocket, swipe your finger across its screen a few times, and instantly obtain infinite entertainment that is infinitely more engaging than anything else you could possibly do with your time?
the real challenge in my opinion is to instill the dangers of these sorts of things upon one's children in such a way that despite peer pressure—including the ambient peer pressure of everyone out in public staring idly at their phones—they come to see these dangerous digital drugs as what they are, without having to partake in order to "find out for themselves."
and of course, this all has to be done without accidentally causing the classic "well my family banned this in our house but now that I'm on my own I'm going to binge as much of this shit as possible" conundrum. which I was definitely guilty of myself as a young person whose family highly restricted access to video games for most of my childhood… turns out that's a great way to get a kid to end up becoming a game developer lol
Prediction: elite private schools will start banning social media and/or smartphone use by its students, and the trend will spread to the greater public.
I don't have kids so you can throw away my advice instantly
But if I were doing it, I'd do the same, but allowed couple of days per month of unrestricted internet usage. Just so they would experience how unproductive these days are compared to normal days
Ymmv, I hang about discords full of underperforming children and they would like nothing better than to game and chat with friends all day, as did myself when I was a child. That said, there is usually something lacking in their (and my) family culture that results in such behavior.
We recently deleted my 3 years old YouTube Kids app and the change made me contemplate my own live decisions. She likes Disney and a few other toddler style games. Seeing the difference in her behavior has made me look hard at my own YouTube watching.
I expect that - in addition to mere time restriction from the outset - ensuring that the kids are sufficiently busy with leisure outlets and spending enough face-to-face time with others their own age will go a long ways. At the core of it, the addiction we have, as social media is concerned, is to each other, excepting the mindless never-ending-scroll entertainment part of it.
Not to say I would overschedule, but would take care that they a) are registered to at least one sport for the majority of the year (intramural is fine), b) have the means and habit to make use of things for creative ends, or to get out of the house and explore. If that foundation is there from the start, might not have to pry the phones/tablets out of them.
I can't very well completely cut off any access to devices because the SO and I use them and it will just become a sore spot, particularly as the kids age.
from what? I've spent countless, countless, countless hours on the internet since 1996 when I was 4, by age 9 I had my computer on my room, at 12/13 we were laughing with my friends about the horrible shit on rotten.com and now I have a fine life without any particular issue, so what are you trying to protect them from? doing dumb shit? e.g. there's nothing you can ever do that will prevent a dedicated 15-years old to have sex, smoke joints or get drunk, but if you try hard I can guarantee you that they will resent you a lot and will have a much, much harder time when they are free from parental control and are left in the wild.
Yes, "how can we simultaneously protect while also healthily socialize children?" is a difficult question to answer as a potential future parent. Social acceptance (to a degree) is critical to healthy development, while some of the most common uniting social tools (for previous generations, high levels of consumerism and signaling; for now and the future, near-constant technology use) are viewed by some parents as unhealthy and lead some to want to abstain entirely.
IMO they need to be exposed at a young age but need guidance to make sense of it... much like most things in the world. If you shelter them from it they won't learn how to deal with it and will be forced to figure it out themselves. As a parent I think it is my responsibility to expose them to as many of these sorts of things as possible and teach them to deal with them in a healthy way.
Depending on how long you wait to have kids, it may not be social media apps, but literal digital drugs, depending on how far along brain/computer IO has gotten by that point.
If you're interested, read the books "the pleasure shock" and "towards a psycho-civilized society"
w.r.t. "what will you do when they get older and jealous?", learning to deal with jealousy is a good lesson to teach kids. Giving a kid everything they envy and demand is how you raise an entitled brat.
They aren’t jealous of the tech. They are jealous of not being included. They might not get invited to events or understand their friends jokes because they weren’t part of the group chats. This can make them resent their parents and give them social anxiety. Kids can be very cruel and lack the empathy skills to understand why their friend isn’t allowed a phone.
Overdoing it either direction can be a serious mistake.
It's better to instill in kids early that it's important to cultivate deep rather than wide social connections. Teaching your kid to stand up for themselves and make friends that don't care about blue chat bubbles or fashionable clothes is necessary. Because there's always gonna be some group you're not going to be cool enough to be a part of. Maybe you're not pretty enough, athletic enough, maybe your parents aren't rich enough to send you on the holiday trip the other kids can go on, sooner or later everyone's going to learn the lesson that this isn't how you build genuine connections.
I noticed this even as an adult in my 20s, people who hadn't ever learned to deal with social rejection carry that teenage group behavior into their own adult life and can't deal with exclusion.
But they aren't standing up for themselves. They're standing up for decisions forced on them by their parents.
> make friends that don't care about blue chat bubbles or fashionable clothes is necessary
It has nothing to do with being cool (and I've never heard of anyone referencing blue chat bubbles that wasn't using it derogatorily like you are). It's about not being unable to communicate with people. Like, they may have friends who want to invite them to a party but don't because they put the event on (whatever app is cool). Your kids don't see it and therefore don't go to an event everyone wanted them to go to.
>They're standing up for decisions forced on them by their parents
That is quite literally the point of being a parent. They're children. They're not supposed to be raised by other children or by social media personalities they want to be like, but by you.
If that means having to be the bad and unfun parent who they get mad at because they can't get to do the thing everyone else is doing that's the job. Good parents give children values that last a lifetime even if the kid doesn't understand it or like it.
Kids can be naive and selfish, but even most kids aren't so unempathetic as to not understand that their friend doesn't have a phone because their parents won't buy them one. The addage "if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?" seems relevant here.
Oh I’m sure they aren’t consciously, but are they going to make the effort everyday to communicate with the person who makes it hard to be reached? It will be harder to maintain/build relationships. I’m not passing judgement either way, I’m just stating a reality and that reality can be dark.
For sure. But I think the reality where everything kids do is being watched under the microscope of their friends and their parents is a dark one too. It's for sure also fostering social anxiety, but that seems to be the reality that's more culturally acceptible.
Your comment was downvoted to death but I vouched for it, and leaving this followup comment to make it less likely to get killed again, because I think this is the Right Answer (or at least a big part of the Right Answer).
Sounds pretty easy to do at that age. But how long are you going to protect them? Until their 18? Or 16? Or 12? When do you see yourself allowing a phone. Are you keeping iPads away too?
Some of my friends with kids gave them cell phones around 12-14. But most of the kids had iPads prior.
I'm not sure that's a good long term solution. Like, once they see that all their friends have a smartphone, I think it's natural they'll feel jealous. What are you thinking of doing at that point?
This is interesting but I can't help but notice how intensely performative these kids are as well, at least how they're characterized in this article. They're wearing Carhartt (an unusual choice for a metropolis like NYC), reading Dostoyevski and gathering to "listen to the wind." I will say most teens are like this and I certainly was myself, but I hope they are careful not to cultivate their own "artisan" brand of snobbishness (as I also did as a young punk).
One thread they're touching on that I think is healthy and good is the DIY aesthetic, and the resistance to tools and media that primarily serve to make you a passive consumer, and to choose and live ones values more consciously & proactively. These features are (or ate least were) prominent in the punk scene, but also in many other subcultures including many religious groups.
I am glad to see "the kids" continuing to question & challenge and try to take more control of their own lives, so this is great in my opinion. A bit of pretentiousness is a small price to pay in my opinion.
I think there's a selection bias here; the ones who are performative are more likely to cross paths with a NYTimes journalist than the ones who aren't. People who keep it low key don't often rise to the notice of others.
Look up their parents. It's not a coincidence they crossed path with NY Times reporters looking to profile them. Nepotism teens doesn't have the same ring though.
Another interesting angle related to their coming from money—I don't have enough data to really even call it, well, data, but the limited glimpse I've had into properly upper-middle (as in the Fussell, social-class sense, not the "I make $130k/yr as a middle manager and live in a McMansion in a nice school district, so I call myself upper-middle class" sense) and upper classes' kids and schools, they're giving their kids phones way later than the public-school set. Like, 20% or less the ownership rate by 5th grade, I'd say. Nowhere near universal personal smartphone ownership by 8th grade, even, unlike the public schools, where nearly all the kids have one by then.
But I'm mostly seeing a single school, so it may just be that that school operates in some kind of techphobic bubble, not that the better-off are generally exposing their kids to cell phones and the Internet way less than the middle-class and lower.
... then again, maybe what I'm seeing isn't a heavily biased sample, and that's exactly what's going on, and this article is a manifestation of a real tendency of the upper classes to curtail tech exposure for their kids, compared with the general population.
yeah I was wondering how a small group of say 5-8 teens made it to NYtimes. The paper tries to fool you to think these are just organic encounters that are part of a massive movement(anti-tech) when its really just hand picked people close to a friend of someone that works at the paper. Remember it was discovered this year the editorial desk of the NYtimes has a mandate that all stories must paint tech in a negative light.
This is common in reporting "human interest" stories. If you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who is up to something unique, is that any different than getting a tip from your community?
This is not a story of consequence but it does speak to an important issue of our day. It's not as though this is the only kind of reporting NY Times does.
> Remember it was discovered this year the editorial desk of the NYtimes has a mandate that all stories must paint tech in a negative light.
That's not at all what happened. There were rumors that tech reporting should be critical[1], instead of gushing and repeating claims from press releases without actually investigating. Real journalism is critical, and critical doesn't mean "bad" or "negative".
While there’s definitely a performative aspect to it, I think there’s a genuine & sincere interest in rejecting social-media manufactured-reality. These teens, regardless of sincerity, are rejecting a demonstrably negative & harmful activity in favor of reading, art, music, & engaging with their local community. I’m thrilled that this is catching on at all. I’ve had a deep hatred of owning a smartphone for years, but always feel like I need it (slack & email for work, immediate news/link aggregation, etc.), so I’m jealous/happy that they’ve gotten a head start at rejecting it outright so young.
I think they're no more performative than other teenagers, who are almost developmentally predisposed to be preoccupied with in- and outgroup signaling.
>This is interesting but I can't help but notice how intensely performative these kids are as well, at least how they're characterized in this article.
I mean, they are teenagers. I said this in a longer comment in this thread, but teenagers tend to be performative. That's sort of the point of growing up and finding yourself.
> They're wearing Carhartt (an unusual choice for a metropolis like NYC), reading Dostoyevski and gathering to "listen to the wind."
I don't know, to me it all seemed exceedingly genuine. If they're spending lots of time outside in parks—"rain or shine, even snow"—their clothing choices make sense. They like reading, and their reading material has made an impression (as good books are wont to do, especially for impressionable teenagers), such as by convincing them of the value of activities like "listening to the wind".
It’s genuine insofar as we have gone too far one way as a society and now people, even young people who have no concept of the old days, are exploring the opposite again.
I guess it seems a bit pretentious since those of us who were around as young adults when mobiles and the internet took off, and then worked in the industries that made the current situation happen, realise there is a happy midpoint. “The only thing better than a flip phone is no phone?” I can’t roll my eyes enough.
I dare say “our generation” started the idea of removing technology again and getting back some of the good old days.
In many ways the article feels like it's documenting kids with the freedom to have an opinion. Looking at the pictures in the article, it feels like a pretty uniform demographic. And in New York City, no less.
Also, they idolize Chris McCandless - he was also a child of privilege who wanted to reject society. Chris didn't have to die but he did because he went up to Alaska woefully unprepared. That doesn't make his death any less tragic, of course.
I guess my point is that this phenomenon is not anything new, if anything we've just gotten for enough into the 21st century that the 1970s ethic is making a comeback.
I think the Krakauer book does a great job of describing the nuances of McCandless's level of preparedness. Of course maybe the author has a bias, but it certainly doesn't seem that way to me. McCandless was fairly unlucky despite having done quite a bit to prepare and try to ensure success. He ate a plant that was categorized as edible in a respected source book, but the actual part that he ate (in the season that he ate it) was poisonous. Once that happened and he realized what was going on, all his prior efforts to make sure he would remain isolated (including dubious choices like not bringing a map) spelled his doom. To me, McCandless made a conscious choice to try to live off the land without help. That is also a conscious choice to die if things go too wrong. Did he want to die? I don't think so, but he had to know it was a distinct and not-so-insignificant likelihood. I think I would NEVER do something like that. But was McCandless woefully unprepared? I personally don't think so. I am aware that I might have a minority opinion on that, because he did die.
Without commenting on McCandless in particular, pretty much every mountaineering accident report as well points out things that, had they been done differently, would have led to a better outcome. This becomes less true as you know you're going to be pushing limits if you go to climb K2. But lack of preparation or just shouldn't have gone out that day are pretty common themes.
> Also, they idolize Chris McCandless - he was also a child of privilege who wanted to reject society.
Idolizing McCandless is such an odd thing; Alaska is filled with people who rejected their past lives like he did, but who didn't die because they had more humility and respect for the land.
His death wasn't a freak accident, it was a predictable consequence of him going into Alaska unprepared. He shot a moose and let it rot because he didn't know better and didn't bother to learn first. This was hubris; Alaska is not the place to fake it until you make it.
Anyway, my critique of McCandless is mild, talk to some Alaskans if you want to hear some proper vitriolic criticism of him. I barely scratched the surface by accusing him of hubris.
If you mean my criticism of teens idolizing McCandless, I don't know what to tell you. He isn't a good role model. There are obviously worse role models, but he isn't a good one.
Nice. Nah I was talking about you generally roasting teens in comments on this thread. Just seems weird. Maybe you are a teen and it’s not? Idk who cares I guess
I really have no idea what you're on about. In this thread I have discussed: my suspicion that most teens are not as performative as those who get interviewed by the NYTimes, my preference for boots, my theory on TV shows outlasting their quality, my belief that children are better off without smartphones, and my criticism of McCandless.
Where is the roasting of teens? The closest I've come to roasting teens is saying that teens idolizing McCandless is 'odd'.
Does one always risk a bit of "pretentiousness" if they act/live contrary to the "main stream"? Just by having a flip phone, for example, someone will be called a "hipster" or whatever name. It's like a group social phenomena or something - just by being vegetarian (or being more "pretentious" by being vegan) people experience this sort of stuff
Basically, yes, because a lot of people don't really know what being pretentious or a hipster actually means. The passage of time has lead to both terms being misunderstood and simultaneously conflated.
In order for someone to actually be pretentious, there has to be a pretense. Being purposefully non-mainstream doesn't make someone pretentious as much as a more normal individual would like to believe. Hipsters aren't necessarily pretentious, even when they have a pattern of rejecting the mainstream. A hipster might be pretentious if their image is disingenuous (ex. wearing some article they don't actually identify with, pooh-poohing something publicly while appreciating it secretly), but that doesn't have to describe all or most hipsters.
I get called a hipster because I often reject or have no interest in many things that most people consider good on that basis alone. When something becomes mainstream, I like it less because I believe something going from unknown to mainstream is usually a bad sign, and that instinct is almost always right. Breaking Bad was way better until everyone started slobbering over it and chanted "get back to cooking meth bruh", and look how it ended. Such a long way for a ham sandwich. haha
I've got a theory that the TV show Firefly is appreciated today because it got cancelled before it was popular; they quit when they were ahead and before popularity ruined it. But most Firefly fans seem to hate my theory.
I think you're absolutely correct. The show was campy, and in time, would have become grating and fallen apart.
Star Wars, once lauded, has been milked dry. There are a few good works, but by and large they're beating a dead horse.
The same thing is happening to Marvel. People checked out after Endgame.
Game of Thrones was so near to perfection. It had an unusually large cast of a hundred characters and an expansive world to draw down. But even if the new show is good, the magic is gone.
The mystery of Stranger Things after season one ended. We're getting a rehash with common character tropes you can find anywhere.
The allure of Westworld softened after season one attempted to open up to bigger themes, but actually cut down on the possibility space.
The third Godfather. Dexter. Every single Jurassic Park but the first. Jaws. On and on.
Chiefly, it's simply a function of multiplied probabilities to continue with a success streak. Eventually the odds do not pay off in your favor.
But I think another contributing factor is that our brains begin to fit the shape of the setting, the motifs, the character arcs, the narrative world - and we just aren't surprised or pleased any longer. Few people would ask for twenty seasons of a show. Or ten movies in a given franchise. Our brains learn the shape of the landscape and grow bored.
> The same thing is happening to Marvel. People checked out after Endgame.
First, it would be weird to say that was because Marvel was falling apart. It was the conclusion of a decade long movie franchise. Of course people might watch something else once the story they had been following was done. It doesn't mean they won't come back or didn't like the new movies, it means they wanted a break.
But mainly, it's also not true. Leaving aside 2020 (when Marvel released their movies all online), let's look at 2021. 4 out of the top 10 movies were Marvel movies (including number 1).
In 2022, they have 3 of the top 10 slots. They were beaten out by the Top Gun reboot and the latest Jurassic Park
Disney operates at a scale none of their peers can match. They have the most well tuned pipeline of any production company. I'd expect this.
Nevertheless, metrics point to declining interest. If I had time to write a longer comment, I'd be able to cite sources and offer more than just a suggestion to google "marvel fatigue".
Wanting something different is not the statement that you were originally making. Your original contention was that quality goes down, it "becomes grating and falls apart".
I mean, rounding out the top 10 of 2022 are the latest Minions, Batman, Harry Potter, Sonic the Hedgehog (for some reason) and a sequel to a Chinese movie which was in the top 10 in 2021. Nothing original at all in 2022, and the big things that may still break into the top 10 (e.g. Avatar 2) are also sequels.
In 2021, the only original things were the highest production cost Chinese movie in history that glorified the Chinese army vanquishing their enemies (South Korea, the US) in the Korean War (this is the one that got a sequel) and a Chinese comedy. The western movies were the latest Bond, Fast and Furious, Kong vs. Godzilla, and Sing 2.
(A Chinese movie series also was in the top 10 in 2021)
Yeah, some of the sometimes literal Wild West in space was fun given appealing characters. Even Serenity worked pretty well. I'm not sure how it would have played out longer term. I certainly probably appreciate it better as a brief fan fave than something that maybe wore out its welcome sooner rather than later.
How does something being popular ruin its quality? The reason people diss hipsters is because they’re reacting to what other people enjoy instead of just liking something for its own sake.
Several mechanisms. For one, a show running to long simply squeezes all the juice out of the premise. Popular shows are kept running too long to extract all the money out of them, but they become soulless and formulaic towards the end.
Another mechanism is flanderization, in which writers simplify characters or other aspects of the show for various reasons, mostly laziness and to conform to expectations the audience develops about how characters should act. Characters with depth become shallow shadows of their past selves as one aspect of their personality starts to dominate the others. When characters are driven by audience expectations instead of the writer's internal muse, they become soulless and predictable.
Another is overdeveloping the setting. Throwaway lines in earlier media get needlessly turned into developed storylines. It leaves less to the imagination. This is often related to the first mechanism I mention; the writers squeezing all the juice out of the earlier media.
Popular songs are ruined by being ubiquitous. They're everywhere for a period of time. Over concentrated. Inescapable. And from that point, ruined.
Popular movies get discussed to death and over-mis-interpreted to the point where just the mention of it causes a mental effort to ignore the assumed sycophantic rambling that's to follow.
Popularity ruins perceived quality by the nature of media to seize upon it and, as someone else said in a slightly different context above, squeeze every last cent of profit out of the opportunity that's presented by it's popularity.
Technically it doesn't affect the quality, but it adds a thick layer of media slime that can take years to dry up and fall off.
Lastly, popularity and quality are two scales that have interesting intersections. It's a concept I'd actually like to investigate further.
I suppose popularity could inflate the creators' egos, leading them to make unilateral decisions without any advice or input from others. Not necessarily a bad thing, especially if the creator was already making unilateral decisions, but if before the popularity there was a group of people making decisions (such as a writers room for a television show) and after popularity they stop doing that, then there is a risk the quality goes down. Of course that's just one possibility of how popularity could lead to a reduction in quality, and its not the popularity itself that is the cause, it is a change in decision-making procedure. So in general, I would say it is disingenuous and pretentious to dislike something because of its popularity. It's not a valid reason
> I suppose popularity could inflate the creators' egos, leading them to make unilateral decisions without any advice or input from others. Not necessarily a bad thing, especially if the creator was already making unilateral decisions, but if before the popularity there was a group of people making decisions (such as a writers room for a television show) and after popularity they stop doing that, then there is a risk the quality goes down.
And even if not become bad... For myself I have something called the 5 season rule. Not literal (quite) but somewhere around 5 seasons I just get bored--even if the show if still on a good trajectory, which it often isn't.
Rejection of the mainstream / establishment properties is the pretense.
It isn't that you like something, it's that you don't want to be associated to some other things. And you don't want to be associated to those other things because of some pretense about what associating to those things means.
That's not a pretense. The word you're looking for is pretext. Rejecting the mainstream is completely a legitimate position on its own. The only way it can be a pretense is if it's done for appearance only. Well, maybe there are other ways, but that's the only one I can think of at the moment.
Maybe this is confusing because of the phrase "false pretense", which is redundant and can lead to some people thinking that there's such a thing as a pretense that isn't false-ish.
At the end of the day, I think the pretentiousness comes from superiority signalling. When a vegan talks about how eating meat is wrong the implication is that they feel morally superior to those who eat meat. And when someone rejects things generally, as opposed to just liking their own things, it implies that those things they reject aren't worth consideration, and hence anyone who does has some inferior judgement or taste.
The statement "I would never listen to disco music" implies there is something wrong with doing so, and hence something wrong with those who choose to. "I would never listen to disco music" is a pretentious statement.
I feel "hipster" can be boiled down to something which is leveled only as a mildly pejorative epithet, and frequently by those who are secretly envious of the subject's aesthetic, or their freedom to exhibit it.
Didn't read the article, but I wish I had friends who made listening to the wind an activity growing up. There's a lot of performance any direction you take, surrendering time to the elements is a lovely little angle.
Fear of coming across as performative has overall hindered my ability to coexist within certain subcultures. I wish I cared less about this and I admire people who manage to find cultural unity through performance.
at some point you have to realize the overwhelming majority of people you're worried about being judged by aren't people whose opinions you'd care about if they were offered to you, and that being an authentic you is more important than the judgement of strangers.
A lot of people's lives could be way better if they internalized this.
> This is interesting but I can't help but notice how intensely performative these kids are as well, at least how they're characterized in this article. They're wearing Carhartt (an unusual choice for a metropolis like NYC), reading Dostoyevski and gathering to "listen to the wind." I will say most teens are like this and I certainly was myself, but I hope they are careful not to cultivate their own "artisan" brand of snobbishness (as I also did as a young punk).
Also, does the NYT Style section have a reputation of elevating some tiny little clique into a "trend" that goes nowhere because it's not a real trend, just a clique that got written about?
I'd love for something like this to be an actual trend (sans the snobbish performance), but I'm skeptical this anything at all.
it's the 2022 version of "kill your television" and i love it.
in practice: i wonder how practical it is to survive as an adult without a smartphone. uber has decimated cabs and i don't think you can telephone for an uber.
i wonder what else is unreachable/unworkable/etc...
I don't carry a cellphone. The rates are atrocious in Canada, and I don't like being rung when I'm out and about.
The biggest problem is 2-factor. Many services are starting to require it, which has led me to losing access to various accounts. Looking at you, Paypal.
Otherwise, it's fine. I make a paper shopping list. I schedule meetings in advance, and show up at the expected time. Uber isn't even in my city so there's no loss there.
In the UK, you can get texts sent to landline numbers. Not sure if it's carrier-dependent, but my Mum would occasionally get texts sent to her landline. She'd get a call saying that she'd received a text and the text was read to her by a computer. Perhaps that might work in Canada?
SMS 2 factor is terrible anyway and is on the way out, although it may still be the only choice for some services for quite a while. A hardware security key is best, and TOTP (Google Authenticator and similar) is very good and both can be used without cell connectivity.
In Brooklyn now, it's cheaper to use a car service than Uber/Lyft, so I think you could get by fine without those apps. Getting around without Google Maps would be pretty challenging, I think.
> Getting around without Google Maps would be pretty challenging, I think.
I learned to drive before smartphones. I can assure you its very possible to find addresses without a phone. Heck, I still sometimes do it for fun! Nothing wrong with a little u-turn here or there.
Before smartphones I would use a street map, which were sold at every gas station. And if I was still having trouble, I would call for directions from a public pay phone, which were located on street corners every few blocks.
I'm old and I love the Carhartt tee shirts I bought a few years ago...thick cotton, softened through wear and washing, the best shirts I've ever owned. These kids have good taste.
Having read the rest of TFA I think my initial reaction is not fair. What they said about kids not being able to put the phones down for a 1hr meeting was surprising to me and made clear how bad the issue is. More power to these kids and to heck with people calling them classist; what are they obligated to have iPhones for the sake of class solidarity or something? Sounds silly.
Carhartt isn't unsusual at all, it's trendy and has been adopted as streetwear.
And I think you're overthinking the performative aspect, it's bog standard teenage behavior that diminishes over time but persists forever. Every branded piece of apparel, every vanity plate, all interior decorating are in the same performative vein.
I do think it's a significant price to pay. While a lot of teens are indeed like this, plenty aren't, and I'd (admittedly without evidence) guess that there's actually a negative correlation between wanting to be part of such a performative group and liking the idea behind the group to the extent of being willing to participate in it and make "sacrifices" for doing so. Maybe it's just personal bias but back when I was a teen, I'd have loved the idea behind it but definitely not joined it for that reason. Especially as a teen, being the only one not participating in the aesthestic would made me feel left out.
Streetwear has been associated with luxury/higher fashion/snobbery in the mainstream for at least a decade (though its influence both on and by high fashion goes back to the 90s). The biggest fashion trend of the 2010s that has extended into the 2020s was the rise of the streetwear and sneaker culture from the streets and into the mainstream, often at luxury price points.
Considering this is a piece in the style section I find that almost impossible to believe. Seems much more likely that they're just being a bit dishonest about why these kids are "luddites" because it makes for a better story.
I picked up on this a few years ago and mentioned it briefly in
Digital Vegan. What struck me while researching was that the
accusation of "Luddite" is levelled mainly against older (Boomer,
Gen-X/Z) people and comes from the same group. Whereas younger
people, glorified as "digital natives" by our older group, actually
have more critical attitude towards gratuitous connection and
consumption.
It made me realise that the mythologies of tech (an inevitable,
ubiquitous force of progress and 'convenience' that we must slavishly
follow or be "left behind") resides in my generation.
Anyone who thinks reading Dostoyevski is an acomplishment must be borderline illiterate*. None of his works are a hard read. Dostoyevski is the acomplishment, not the reader. Almost all fiction is a passive medium, the "work" has already been done by the auhtor. Tens (hundreds?) of millions of copies have been sold, and his works are required reading in many high schools.
>I am glad to see "the kids" continuing to question & challenge
They are the children of (rich?) Brooklyn hipster parents at a Performance arts school[0]. Who exactly are they challenging? If anything, they are being congradulated and pushed along on the hipster path. There are Brooklyn hipsters who unironically use 1980's antenta phones. If anything this is a worn out trope.
>Anyone who thinks reading Dostoyevski is an acomplishment must be borderline illiterate
It's not an accomplishment, but it's definitely more, as parent commenter said, "performative" than saying they read any popular author of today.
As you yourself pointed, Dostoyevski is a required reading in high school and as anybody who had the "pleasure" of attending school, knows required reading usually isn't something what appeals to the youth (killing joy from this activity is another problem).
> As you yourself pointed, Dostoyevski is a required reading in high school and as anybody who had the "pleasure" of attending school, knows required reading usually isn't something what appeals to the youth (killing joy from this activity is another problem).
That's true of a lot of students, but not everyone! A couple of classmates in particular come to mind who definitely, genuinely loved the books we were assigned.
Heck, while I didn't like most of the books we read, there were a handful I loved! Montana, 1948, for example, was amazing.
What I think many people would argue about Dostoyevsky is that it is easy to read at a surface level, but invites critical thinking to reveal layers of subtext and deeper meaning. Maybe you don't agree, which is fine, but I'd suggest this is why some people may associate it with high reading comprehension.
I loved Crime and Punishment, but I struggled to grasp some of the long monologues in The Brothers Karamazov. It’s not hard to follow the plot, but because it deals with challenging ideas through monologues which completely stop the plot, I found it challenging to fully engage with. Hardly a very difficult read but not always an easy page-turner either. Maybe I just needed a better translation.
Most of the handwringing about tech is the middle-aged projecting their anxieties on their children. It's not necessarily the kids who are threatened by social media. It's them, whole fucking 40 year olds, scrolling on tiktok (wtf!) and feeling queasy about it. Kids these days yeah right.
Listen to this kid subtly rubbing it in:
> “I still long to have no phone at all,” she said. “My parents are so addicted. My mom got on Twitter, and I’ve seen it tear her apart. But I guess I also like it, because I get to feel a little superior to them.”
Anyway, that aside. The article is complete cringe though. NYT really is 95% lifestyle branding and 5% factoids. Also, these kids, I don't know if they realize, but it's always just that little skeevy (not necessarily in a sexual nature, more generically, as-in, unseemly, too familiar, think "cool teacher"), when adults - journalists, artists, ...- worm their way in kids culture, package their growing up for the entertainment of jaded, passe 50 year olds.
Are you suggesting a link between his lack of phone and his loneliness, or his moving and his loneliness?
I know our generation (you can guess) is painted with the "too obsessed with social" habit.. and I'd say the preponderance of people staring at their phones during all moments of life (driving, shopping, dining with their partners) makes them no less lonely. You can pretend you're not lonely as long as you have a graph to pulldown-reload.
I have a phone, no one has called it in years, I wouldn't say I'm lonely.
Even if they're orthogonal, there's something seemingly off with people staring at their phones all the time, during every moment in life. My last gf would pick up her phone the minute I paused a show to pop into the kitchen or go to the restroom. That didn't bother me.. what bothered me is when she didn't notice my return and put the phone down so we could return to our show or movie. I'd have to do the "I'm back" cough or shoulder tap. It became increasingly objectionable.
Can't say that I love the praise over Chris McCandless, given the amount of deliberate self-sabotage and the fact that hikers have literally died trying to recreate his pilgrimage.
> We’ve all got this theory that we’re not just meant to be confined to buildings and work. And [McCandless] was experiencing life. Real life. Social media and phones are not real life.
I'm nitpicking, just think there are way healthier examples. Overall I love the mentality and really hope the next generation or two embraces a major shift away from tech addiction. Feels like growing pains from head-spinningly rapid technological innovation and availability.
What people describe as "tech addiction" is I think better described as "consumer product addiction".
Technology has created an unprecedented opportunity for us to turn the world into a human friendly imaginative playground.
That opportunity is squandered by people who think in the short term about control and money and status and grievance.
Call me what you will, but I have a hard time watching old videos like this and not getting emotional -> https://youtu.be/Uz__bJTlOjk?t=37 Great engineers using the most advanced technology of the day to make childhood fantasies a reality is one of the most beautiful uses of our time on Earth I can think of. Tech could make the world the ultimate fantasy adventure. We have so much capacity to alleviate material want and create amazing dreamworlds and make people happy, but laziness, greed, ego, jealousy, and resentment all get in the way.
Technological complexity obfuscates and entrenches a lot of existing problems and creates lots of room for abuse, but at root most modern problems are not fundamentally tech related. They're rooted in our difficulties cooperating with each other.
I never got the impression that it was deliberate self sabotage. I understood that he simply had over confidence going into the woods, and that he stayed a bit too long in an unfamiliar area and consequently couldn’t make his way back due to snowmelt flooding.
I loved film Into the Wild and read up on McCandless afterwards. If I remember correctly, he died within a day’s hike from a road but had he decided to bring a map with him, he would have known how to get to the road. I got the impression that he wanted to see how well he could survive on his own with the least amount of help from society. While I admire the spirit of the man and can sympathise with the romanticism of his endeavours, I would consider not bringing a map of the area or preparing adequately for life in the wilderness to be deliberate self-sabotage.
"They marched up a hill toward their usual spot, a dirt mound located far from the park’s crowds. Among them was Odille Zexter-Kaiser, a senior at Edward R. Murrow High School in Midwood, who trudged through leaves in Doc Martens and mismatched wool socks."
Wow, these kids sound like the new beatniks.
"The club members cite libertine writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac as heroes,"
I looked up a 1950s advertisement for similar boots and saw a pair for $12.95, plugged that and 1955 into the inflation calculator and it came out to $144.41. So not too far off really
What did they wear? Sandals or something? I tried birkenstock sandals before but they only lasted about a year before they became too gross to wear.
$150 doc martens seem like good value to me. They last about 5-8 years at the rate I wear through them, or about $20-30 per year. Certainly more efficient than any sneakers.
Maybe Im missing out but Ive never felt the need to spend so much on shoes.
There’s countless of alternatives to boots/shows that aren’t name-brand Doc Martens with that aesthetic.
Personally, I just shop at the clearance sections or sales (ive never seen doc martens there ime)
I always feel like a fool if i drop money on something expensive.
From reading On The Road, I just remember that they were always broke, drunk, drugs and chasing experiences and not aesthetics. at least thats what I took out from the book
Ever hear of the Sam Vimes Boot Theory? Terry Pratchett in the Discworld novel Men at Arms has the Vimes say:
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness"
I've tried some other brands of boots, the quality is hit or miss but I've yet to find a brand that had a durability:price ratio better than Doc Martens. I'm sure such a brand exists, but I'd hate to find out how many pairs of boots I go through until I find that brand by trial and error.
I've sworn off sneakers entirely though. Unless you're buying sneakers for a specific athletic purpose, I think sneakers as a default footware is something of a scam. They're all built to fall apart after months, maybe a year or two max. They're usually made with fabric instead of leather, with thin and soft rubber soles. Even the ones made with leather still have thin soles that wear out fast. I've never had nor heard of a pair of sneakers that didn't disintegrate before two years of daily use.
As for the broke, drunk and drugs lifestyle, I think dependable boots are a great choice. Even if nothing else in your life is stable, at least you can rely on your boots.
> Maybe Im missing out but Ive never felt the need to spend so much on shoes.
It’s something you can’t understand unless you actually buy and wear a pair of well-made boots or shoes.
A mall store pair of leather boots might weigh 1-1.5 lbs because it’s made of bad leather, EVA foam, and adhesives. A pair of well made boots, one boot will weigh almost 2 lbs because they use good leather uppers, real rubber or leather soles, a steel shank, and cork footbed.
A $300 pair of boots with last 5x longer than a $100 pair of boots if you take care of them and don’t wear them daily.
Sir, please try a good pair of footwear, for your sake! If you need convincing, look up the Boots Theory. Personally, I live in my boots and have worn out many cheap pair. Sometimes 2 a year. Invested a little more, my body was never so happy, and I didn't need to replace them for 4 years. Easy math.
My first pair of Redwing Heritage boots (and the only ones I've paid full retail for) have seen probably 800-900 wears over seven or so years. I expect they'll make it to at least 2,000, and maybe a lot more, though they may require a resoling somewhere in the 1200-1500 range.
I've worn them up mountains a couple times (OMG don't, they're so damn heavy, it was such a bad idea), while tiling floors or drywalling or doing other DIY housework, building a fence, moving house, working on cars, bicycling (not the best, but they're OK for a quick ride), around town in general, to the office, everywhere. Haven't babied them a bit. Snow, rain, I make sure they don't sit around totally soaked after I'm done, but I don't shy away from wearing them in those conditions.
They still look plenty presentable for slightly-fancy-casual, a hair below smart-casual, which is about the "highest" wear they were suited for to begin with.
Meanwhile, the cloth sneakers I used to buy would look like shit after maybe 80 wears, and be trash no later than 200.
They're also my most comfortable shoes that aren't house-slippers. It's like they're part of my foot. After the ~2-week break-in period, anyway :-)
They make doc martens in China now. I imagine the 8-year old who made your shoes was a master craftsman, however...they start them young.
The original factory still makes boots, they aren't quite as "cool" though. The people at your Communist reading group might not even heard of the brand.
Care to enlighten us as to who is now operating the original factory producing less “cool” boots? RedWing has started outsourcing to Cambodia and the quality has dropped significantly. I have been searching for a replacement. White’s are all I have found.
Solovair. The original Dr Martens was actually made out of parts of Solovair shoes.
Btw, there are still a lot of manufacturers operating out of this region of Britain: Barker, Church's, Cheany, Edward Green...some of these are way too expensive, they are often handmade (and tbh, probably not worth it)...but there are options.
Heh, I can't say I've ever been to a communist reading group. I've had some people tell me that my boots are for communists or for lesbians, but that doesn't bother me. Such associations are silly memes.
You're right that I don't care for the style of their UK made boots. I like their brown burnished leather "crazy horse" boots, or ones styled similar. Their UK made boots seem to all be black, red, white, or brown but suede (which I don't consider durable.) These are bolder / punkish designs which I don't care for.
If you can suggest an American brand that holds up to Doc Martens, maybe I'll buy those in a few years instead. But I think most boots are made in China or some other country with exploitative labor.
I've been experimenting with a "no phone" protocol for a few months now. It has been amazing. Only occasionally problematic/inconvenient, mostly miss the GPS and music. Most things I used to do on phone I simply do on a laptop. But not constantly grabbing for a phone and staring at a screen... priceless.
The next step after this epiphany is to realize you can do this without actually giving up the phone. Just because it's in your pocket doesn't mean you need to pull it out constantly and look at it. It's just a tool, relegate it to that position in your life and don't use it like a pacifier.
That's not realistic. The phone is calling out, begging you to pay attention to it, and makes itself more difficult to use the less you want to be entangled.
You just have to put it away. If it's a tool, treat it like a tool. You don't carry a hammer in your pocket all day.
Obviously it's actually your brain doing the calling, not the phone, but the effect is the same: it has an effect on you just by existing that you cannot control. It has nothing to do with notifications settings.
I don't think this would work for me, absent some sort of brain surgery. Even if I'm not looking at my phone, my brain still knows I could look at my phone, which colors my experience.
I think these kids have the right idea, going back to a flip phone. (Or maybe the modern variant: go Apple-watch only.)
And the next step after this epiphany is that you still have to remember to take the phone with you places, not to leave it behind, and worry about it getting dropped in the toilet by a toddler. Not caring this tool still has a lot of benefits.
I still use a small mp3 player - no video just a tiny digital display. They're so superior to any smart phone for actually playing music. Tiny, fits in any pocket easily, volume and be adjusted and tracks changed without looking at it...
It's possible to argue that dispensing with the habit of carrying and using a music player is also a potential win. What's one of the reasons smartphones can be a problem? That they distract and disconnect you from your environment and absorb you in something other than what's around you. Music players can also do that. If you turn the music off, it'll open your ears to the sounds of your environment. If you try it for an extended period of time, you may develop a greater attentiveness and auditory acuteness.
Each of these devices, while not bad on its own and in itself, does provide an opportunity for the device to lay claim to one or more of our senses. The multiverse is a step further in that direction, a further bubble of engineered experience disconnected from reality and yes almost posing as reality. This does not bode well for the intellect as nothing in the intellect was not first in the senses. Our intuitions are at their best when seeded by the passive experience of the world, and if our experience is constantly flooded by media and engineered simulations often of a very unhealthy variety, then our alignment with reality will be off. This sort of passive perception of reality is at the heart of contemplation which is what true leisure (not recreation) is all about.
To quote Josef Pieper[0], "the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul."
Being someone with rather extreme "misophonia", in a noisy city environment disconnecting from the sound of my environment is a necessity for my mental health.
Also as a life-long musician, music is one thing that makes life worth living for me in the first place. If I don't have a music player with me I'm playing music in my head anyway unless some noisy car horn, screaming child or even the sound of someone else talking takes me out of it, triggering an autism/misophonia driven rage.
But if I'm out hiking in the backcountry, which is a something my wife and I do a couple of times of a year to escape the city and connect with nature ... absolutely we leave the music player at home.
One of the big things keeping me from going down this road is the need to carry around a phone for 2FA purposes. Is there anything that can fill that gap?
Many sites don't support hardware tokens, and some sites such as banks require and only allow SMS 2FA. I even planned to switch banks and the two others near me also required a cell phone SMS 2FA for online banking with no other alternatives.
Online banking is far too beneficial to give up (traveling abroad, checking balance, moving funds around) and there are other sites besides banks that do this too. It's infuriating.
Yeah, around here (EU) every bank decided you need to have an app to be able to do anything with your account or pay using card online. You don't need just a phone, but a smartphone.
I mostly go phoneless if at all possible. I use an old ipod nano for music. It's much better at it than the phone because it is so tiny and thin (and has a headphone jack).
Yep, my 10-year old uses a 17-year old nano for music. I've stockpiled a few 30-pin cables. With a USB A-toC adaptor it works fine on M1 MBP and is fully supported! It blew my mind that just a year or two ago I plugged it in and it got a firmware update.
The only worry I have is whether I'll be able to replace the battery when it finally needs it.
Its great that people are starting to wane off algorithmic money maximizing social media, but you can do this without switching to a flip phone.
Just remove all social media and you will be set, even chat apps are OK, its really the rapid attention grabbing content that is the issue.
Also the books and the weird connection to wanting to stop the industrial revolution is just r/im14andthisisdeep material
> “I still long to have no phone at all,” she said. “My parents are so addicted. My mom got on Twitter, and I’ve seen it tear her apart. But I guess I also like it, because I get to feel a little superior to them.”
Nothing more cringe than a young student reading great works of literature. What ever happened to hacking together an ecommerce side-hustle on the weekends? What has happened to our youth?
If this is a real thing then maybe I feel there is hope for at least a small pocket of society. Good on them for taking back some control of their lives. Color me impressed.
I'm glad, some teens are doing this, I hope it become a mainstream trend. It's marvelous that each generation question everything and start this type of counter-trends. I have three young kids and I do my best to keep them away from smartphones. This gives me hope that my older daughter, when she becomes a teenager, will not ask me for a smartphone.
A simple tip to reduce usage. I would guess that a lot of smartphone usage happens within your home, which most people spent a lot of time in, even more so if you work from home.
Put the phone in the next room. As simple as that. Break the convenience of having it with you. Working in a home office? Put it in the next room. Watching TV on the couch? Put it in the next room. Driving? Don't mount it.
You'll still check it, during natural progressions of the day. Lunch. End of the work day. Before you go to bed. But that's still quite a lot better than the 100-200 times that people check it per day on average.
IMO the real problem here isn't the technology itself, but cultivating an unhealthy relationship with it and not using it maturely
The most interesting thing in this article to me is the classist accusation. I wonder if this luddite trend is just some sort of counter signaling, where if rich kids decide to not use smartphones it's provocative (and they get flip phones from parents on a whim), but if poor kids don't it's because they're poor
We like to think that technology is value neutral, and we, as Olympian gods, are just applying it in good or bad judgment. Technology (the actual material thing) shapes the world around itself, it creates the conditions of its use _in absence_ of our judgement. The very existence of a bleepy bloopy thing that fits in a pocket, which constantly grabs your attention with gossipy, antagonizing content. That _thing_ in itself creates the nurturing conditions for phenomena like cyberbullying, meme-addiction, declining attention spans, political polarization...
Another example; the very existence of power tools created the aesthetic sensibilities where we aspire to large expanses of perfectly trimmed bushes and leafless virginal lawns. Our aesthetic desires did not proceed the technology. It is the technology that engendered it.
Let's run down more: easy-to-obtain guns, heavy and fast-accelerating cars, cheap mass-produced food, disposable furniture and living arrangements ... They all shape the world (and our minds, our relations to others) in _their image_.
We can be equal slave to the machine as well as master to the machine. Modernism is the submission to this slavery. Humanism is the celebration of our mastery. Now answer the question; do we live in modernist dystopia, or humanist utopia? A leading question to be sure, but I reckon the contrast is instructive.
Technology sometimes _is_ the problem itself. Fixing the problem, in many cases, will mean forceful rejection of this technology, rather than just finding the correct application of it.
When I was a teen in the nineties it was the teens who really got computers and the adults who were the luddites. Being into computers wasn't cool but it was exciting to understand something that most of our parents didn't. Seems like things have come full circle now! As much as I admire the rejection of social media I hope this generation can still be fascinated by the possibilities computers can bring.
How is wholesale rejection of the shitty companies and websites that prey on your attention span to sell adverts in favour of good literature and genuine connection a “fad”?
I’ve deleted social media from my phone and it’s been…amazing. I don’t know what to do and end up staring into space instead of giving into my cravings for fresh content. You start to pay attention to your surroundings and think. It’s wonderful.
Your body hates boredom, because traditionally, it meant you weren't doing anything to better your life. Today, we won't die if we're not filling our boredom with farming/hunting our meals by hand. It's too easy to live nowadays. Now, we plug that hole with social media and entertainment. Rather than adapting that caveman survival instinct to something else: improving knowledge, personal health, or real relationships.
That's not to say these things as a whole need to be banned entirely. Like all things, they can be enjoyable in moderation. But too much is unhealthy. Even water has this caveat. The problem is we don't moderate.
Rather than doing/creating something useful and/or memorable, you're stuck scrolling a feed, watching other people improve. It's actually quite sad.
I should have been more detailed. I don't mean just the hunting and gathering. My primary point was that it was a harder overall life. Upkeep on your living space and belongings (now we just buy a new one online or, God forbid, drive to the store), preparing food often (no such thing as long-term preservation at the time), adults actually had families to take care of (increasingly more people are single / childless)...
There were more, urgent responsibilities to tend to.
So many of these NYT pieces are a character study framed as though it were describing a small part of a larger movement. I'd like this sentiment to be widespread and robust among the upcoming generation of young adults, but will it be? It's difficult to believe.
I held out on this after a factory wipe on my phone invalidated my authenticator keys. The IT guy ended up using his own phone because cheapskate companies won't pay for real security.
I was at a coffee shop yday and made the mistake of sitting next to their huge decked up christmas tree. Wasn't crowded but there was a constant stream of teen girls shooting selfie with the tree. Each one taking literally hundreds of pics to get the 'right' one.
Personally it wasn't very hard for me to go down this path because I never found social media (which lets face it is the big driver of phone overuse) to be all that interesting in the first place.
That said I treat my phone mostly like a phone. I have my calls and texts whitelisted. If you're not in my contact list, the phone won't ring or ding. Then if I hear it ring, I know it's someone I know.
I remove most of the apps on my phone and keep it on my desk at all times. No different than a phone you would have hanging on a wall. I treat it the same, so I don't feel the need to really "use" it.
I will take my phone with me when I go places, and use it for music or maps in the car, but because I mostly treat it as a phone, I don't really see it as anything other than that.
When I started doing this I was admittedly pretty bored, but over time I just found other things to do and am never bored now. You just get used to it. Humans are pretty adaptable.
I'd be curious as well. I realized in the last few months that I rarely enjoy looking at anything on my phone. I like it when my friends and family text me. I like the discord group I have with my friends, especially now that we all have kids and have moved away. I started by deleting apps that weren't essential, keeping the utilities or the things I don't do compulsively, or do situationally.
With Twitter in particular, I don't know a better way to find artists, writers, and podcasts. I have never enjoyed Twitter less than I do now, but it is unfortunately the best way I currently know. I guess it's time to start digging.
I've taken a different approach: I spent about a year silencing anything that grabbed my attention and shouldn't. Ad blockers handle that job just fine. On social media, I just unfollowed everyone, and blocked every related content feed. These websites are empty, but accessible. They can be queried, but not browsed.
It worked great. I sometimes just don't know what to even look at on my phone. It's as exciting as an old flipphone.
That took care of the impulse. Beyond that, it's just a matter of self-discipline.
All I do is put the phone on vibrate and put it in my pocket. Other than taking out the phone to capture a photo, I never really feel the urge to pull it out and waste time on it unless I am actively waiting and there is nothing else to do. I like to be 100% engaged in what I am doing whether that's socializing with friends, enjoying a hobby or walking somewhere. Maybe that's my secret? The desire to feel fully engaged and present?
All that being said, I work on a computer all day long. I am in front of the computer all day and do a fair bit of "time wasting" there.
This describes my usage too, I also am on a computer all day long, its also where I waste my time. I see my phone as a less useful computer, with the worst typing interface possible and try to use it as little as possible.
I'd be totally content to replace my physical phone, with a virtual one on a computer, provided I could make calls and send/receive text messages. Maybe I need to look into Google Voice...
When I attempted this I did a flip phone and transitioned the rest to my laptop. As a result, I just carried my laptop around all the time. Didn't solve the problem!!!
This is a unique form of privilege. Most people don’t have the choice to “disconnect”. It’s engage or die. Not that I think technology is the be all and end all, but I think we are lucky if we are in the position to be able to shun it. That’s all I am saying.
Edit: OK, I am probably wrong about this. Sorry for the stupid opinion :(
Imagine, for example, applying for a job with no social media presence. OK, maybe “engage or die” is not the right phrase, but you get the gist of what I’m saying.
I can imagine - because I did it about six years ago. And since then I've hired some team members who may or may not have had social media presence but I sincerely doubt that their presence or absence had any impact on being hired. And the same with the candidates not hired -- I don't think it came up at all.
I would suggest a lack of social media presence is better when applying for jobs than having a potentially problematic social media presence. I have long considered giving my potential future children "unsearchable names" so if anyone puts "jack smith" into Google they are unable to get any accurate hits by which to judge them on.
I once applied for a SV company, and recruiter told me I need at least 100 FB friends. I created an account and played some stupid game that gave bonuses for bringing friends. After couple of days I had 400 friends. Manager emphasized my social acumen to everyone's cheer when introducing me to my new team.
Were they bilking you for contacts? Why on earth would that be a requirement? I'm wary of any job that requires me to disclose connection to non-employment related parties. It's a pretty well known scam technique used by places such as multi-level marketing to exploit someone and then toss them when sales channels through their contacts are exhausted.
No, that was a company with ~$5B revenues, they didn't need my contacts. My guess management thought people with many friends would be better team players.
if what you are saying is that any deviation from the norm incurs a cost to your life, I agree. Some people are already abnormal so they can't pay that cost, but others can't pay simply because of some of the other choices they have made. I personally wouldn't call the latter a lack of privilege
It just seems like a bit of an exaggeration. If they weren’t using the internet or phones in any sense I might understand, but not having social media or 24/7 access to it does not seem like an absolute prerequisite or something only “privileged people” could get away with.
That's a bit of a stretch. They have phones (some of them still have smart phones - the article mentioned them putting away their iphones when they met). I think a phone is as much as you need to get by in the world and get a job
I've never had a job that requires or has even asked about social media. You don't need a smartphone to keep a LinkedIn account or Instagram. You can simply log in when you're at home on a desktop or laptop.
In these discussion threads I always see people mixing call/gps functionality (which is genuinely useful, especially in case of an emergency, and not addictive) with social media. You can have one without having the other. Instagram didn't come with your phone, you installed it. So, don't.
There's a lot of people who show up in these threads whose only coping strategy is to go cold turkey. Maybe that's good advice, but it's not the only advice. There's no reason you can't carry a smartphone in your pocket without it becoming a pacifier.
Devil's advocate here: addiction is tricky. There's no reason you can't carry around a pack of cigarettes and not smoke them, either, but in practice that strategy would not work for many smokers. Cold turkey isn't the magic bullet, but try whatever you suspect might work.
I respect the teens that are doing this, for whatever reason, but I think reading too much into a trend piece is a mistake. I don't know these kids, and maybe they are 100% genuine, but the whole thing strikes me as being about the aesthetic and the fashion above all else. Wanting to be different to be different, and the best way to do that is to reject that digital society that we are all in now.
When I was their age, I was similar -- down to wearing the trendiest of trendy clothing items (that were designed to not look overly trendy, but anyone in the know would know that they were), while still thinking myself some sort of "outsider." We had a communist club (despite all of us really being capitalists and having rich parents and benefitting immensely from capitalism), we rejected television as a lesser medium (despite secretly loving our favorite shows), upheld the virtues of "arthouse cinema" (which, you know what, fair -- I still love arthouse cinema) and we only listened to certain types of music -- on vinyl (some things never change) -- and this was just ahead of the vinyl resurgence. But secretly, a lot of us still listened to pop music on MP3s in our bedrooms, watched the same trash TV we claimed to reject, and enjoyed the same populist commercial films. It was an outward rejection, but not who we really were. It was aesthetic and fashion and came out of reading and loving Kerouac and Salinger and Thompson (authors I still love) and wanting to feel like we weren't part of the suburban bubble we were painfully part of.
I look back at my pretentious, self-important 16 year old self and I don't feel pity or regret, but I see it for what it is, and it was about fashion and aesthetic and wanting to signify to the world that I was "different." But the irony is that feeling different is one of the most universal feelings a person can have.
Again, I don't know these teenagers. And maybe they are completely genuine. I don't judge them or think less of them if it is all an aesthetic. Or if some of this is a purposeful troll. But there is still an irony about a Luddite club being profiled by the biggest media organization in the world and going viral on the very platform they claim to reject.
I do dig the aesthetic tho. I would absolutely carry a flip phone for just the aesthetic today (you can tear my iPhone from my cold dead hands).
You can buy 4G flip phones these days. Poke around the corners of the displays at an AT&T store or a Best Buy, there's usually one or two hiding somewhere.
While not, strictly speaking, a dumbphone, this one sold under various branding can be used as one, and my never-smartphone-using dad and aunt are satisfied with it:
It has proven reliable in middle-of-nowhere West Texas over the past few months on both T-Mobile and Consumer Cellular, likely using T-Mobile’s network.
I have no idea how any of the other functions stack up, but neither my dad nor my aunt care about anything other than making and taking dialed phone calls.
