Look Who’s Talking

My thing with Jonathan Haidt

Now, before I begin, perhaps I have the wrong target here. Haidt is not a lawyer or legal philosopher.  He is, at best, a moral philosopher so considerations of externalities and policy might not be in his wheelhouse. He expounds on ethics, and to that end, I find myself agreeing with him more than not.  But my frustration with him starts when, after he is all done, I go, “so what do we do about it?” because his appeal to the better angels of our natures probably doesn’t work. That’s why we need laws.

His most recent attack on social media is, by far, the most difficult problem. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a problem at all. Did our ancestors wring their hands over the printing press bringing new and sometimes bad ideas to their children?  When the telephone became prevalent, when did teenagers yammering to their friends long into the evening turn from a distraction from good things into a right of passage? True books and hardlines are easier for parents to manage, but clever children could realize that buried in the stacks of city libraries were troves of books with words that were most certainly not suitable for children.  Particularly clever children realized that a person could tap the receiver of a dialless phone ten times and get the operator. Did those things hurt those children? Maybe. But now we bemoan the lack of reading of the youth, and have sentimental memories of the teenager girl with her own phone in her room. Maybe it was pink and fuzzy.

I’ve now spent the last week trying to limit the exposure of my kid to social media. She has regular, unrestricted access to an iphone, an ipad, three Alexa Echoes, an Oculus Quest 2, two Xboxes, and a PC running Microsoft 1100 or whatever it is now. That’s in addition to a gaming machine, an older laptop, a 11-year-old netbook running Linux, a Roku TV with cable, a locked down iPad 2 that I can’t remember the passwords for, a mini PC, a fire tablet, a Huawei cellphone from 2015, a ATT phablet from 2012 (probably), and my new cellphone which she’s generally not allowed to touch.  She does use these things for school, exercise, reading, listening to music, gaming and, of course, social media. So far everything seems innocent enough, but my years long attempts to lock these things down has not been simple.

The Xbox was the simplest one to lock down. By simple, I mean that it took me several calls to support to understand what the hell I did wrong. Another problem is that once it was locked down, it was hard to manage so that *I* could talk to her on our Lan Minecraft games. Generally I can manage the time from my PC, my preferred method for everything, but if the wireless is out, or something, she can still find work arounds to play games.  That’s if I don’t forget to sign out, which I do. So far, the communication facilities have been pretty poor and she’s taken a marked disinterest in the Twitch client I installed so I wasn’t too worried about her being found by some weirdo through the box. It was still, for a technically minded person like me, hard to set up. It will also demand your exact location, you can’t use a PO box, which I consider a security risk when you are dealing with a child.

The next were the iPads.  Unlike the Xbox or the PCs, iPads don’t allow for more than one account for device so I was forced to either assign the iPad as a child’s iPad or have to constantly switch the controls on and off if I wanted to use it after she went to bed.  Aside from that, the bans on certain apps, like YouTube didn’t seem to work and I was constantly having to just take the device away from her, getting into a fight in the process. It seemed easier for both of us if the device just stopped working. That breaks the spell, and she moves on after getting a little frustrated, but that never seemed to happen when I really need it to happen.

I gave her the old netbook for kicks. To make the book a little more useful, I installed Linux because it was struggling with the fact that Microsoft is a memory hog. I gave it to her, offline, to play with because I really didn’t care, thinking she would never figure out how to use it. A half hour later I walked in on her watching YouTube on it.  She had turned it on, connected it to the wireless, found the browser and was happily watching Unspeakable do something dumb.  She was seven years old at this point. 

Next, the gaming machine.  I got a brand-new laptop at the same time. I was insistent that it shouldn’t be in her room. So, we set it up in the living room and here I am typing on it. Microsoft’s OS is very nice, and you can assign downtime for all your registered PCs in the same place you do for the Xbox.  But set up in our tiny apartment we clashed over sound and she didn’t like me looking over her shoulder.  It’s by far the easiest set up, but after a while, and getting my kid a brand new drawing tablet, we managed to switch machines and now she has the laptop (in her room) and I use the gaming machine because I can have two monitors to work at home.  I think she looked over my shoulder and memorized my pin and now I deeply suspect she comes out at night while I’m sleeping to get the laptop and play on it.  She also managed to install unsecure browsers of Opera and Firefox, and do several other things that I specifically said she couldn’t do, or at least, I thought the system wouldn’t let her.

And last, but not least, is the iPhone.  I know, I know, but she begged me for the phone. Every single day it was “can I have a phone? Why can’t I have a phone? So and so has a phone! What if I start walking home by myself, I’m going to need a phone!” Over and over again, every single day. To be fair to her, she’s made some pretty cute videos for school and it’s been super convenient to text her during the day if I need to tell her something or she needs something from me. It doesn’t have a SIM card, but we live in a very populated area where there is wireless practically everywhere and she’s never needed the card. It was a second-hand phone anyway and its location finders and convenience make it the ideal cheap first phone. If she loses or breaks it, I lose nothing in the deal and she learns a valuable lesson.

But it is also a pain in the ass to lock down. Mainly, I want all her tech to bail out at certain times of the day when it’s chore time or when she needs to be sleeping. She’s not so bad that it distracts her from her school work or anything like that. I occasionally check up on her to make sure I know who she is talking to. She is forbidden from locking me out, and she doesn’t. But I know I am not catching everything.  I know that she gets messages from Discord that aren’t from her friends, another app I didn’t like but acquiesced when

we couldn’t get the Xbox to work properly. I know she has a work around on my laptop that has something to do with asking for time on top of time. I suspect she stays up at night on the iPhone or the laptop and does whatever, probably something innocent, but that leaves her exhausted and difficult in the morning. If I had to work outside the home, I would be late everyday or simply have to berate her constantly to get out the door.

I can’t manage the iPhone from my desktop, only another Apple device, both of which now belong to her or I can’t remember the password that I set ages ago when she was a kid. I keep meaning to go to the Apple store and see if they can give me a little training on how to manage all three devices, or maybe take the old one in as a trade in on some Apple tags, but I’ve never managed the time to do that. Recently, I decided that maybe I need a more holistic approach, a nuclear option, where I stop all traffic at our shitty router the cable company “gifted” us. This is useful because the fact that it habitually drops out of service is going to cover my tracks when her machines bail on her mysteriously at night.

And here is where my tech knowledge ends because I’ve never managed things at my router (I mean, why would I) other than to maybe change the name and password of my network. So I have spent the last week trying to figure out the best way to black out time on the router on her three devices and leave all the rest of the devices alone, either because I use them or they are “uninteresting” like the fire tablet that never worked quite right.

Of course, this router doesn’t come with any kind of instruction manual or help file, it’s just me pressing buttons, trying to figure out what to do. So far I’ve managed to find two of her devices, shut myself out of the system, learn that I probably should get a new router, that the router I have is a modem/router, that a “pass through” is bad for gaming, I can use my phone to shut off the devices from it’s browser, what my public IP is, and that her iphone uses randomized MAC addresses. If you try to shut that off to make the blocks at the router work, it says in gigantic letters under the wireless connection that there’s a security risk. So much for subtlety. I have not learned how to do what I want, which is nothing and every night at 11 pm her phone, ipad and my laptop go, “hey, we can’t get on AMERICAROX, I guess you will just have to go bed.” It’s been weeks. Short of demanding the devices from her at a certain time of night, devices that if I don’t squirrel away she finds like a junkie looking for last little rock of crack in the carpet, I’ve reached my capacity to deal with the ever-changing protocols and locks and apps and webpages and hacks and YouTube tutorials. Just don’t go anywhere with strangers, kid, unless they are driving an Uber.

So here is a modest proposal: we need to make this easier for parents. There needs to be some kind of digital clearing house that no device can circumvent, no device can claim exclusion by right of privacy. I heard Disney and some other manufactures make devices to do this, but I should be able, with the intelligence I have, and the devices I have, design a system that is workable without having to result to getting a degree in computer networking. A help file with instructions for my router would be a good place to start. Like the list of side effects they put into every bottle of aspirin, step-by-step instructions with my router would be a good thing. If there is a security system on a phone that prevents apps, then it should work, not give special permission to native apps that the manufacturer wants to favour. I should be able to manage all these devices from one device, one machine, one account, whatever I choose and this clearinghouse, whatever it is, an app, a device, should be secure and easy to use. And fo the TV, maybe Netflix, Disney, Crave, and Amazon Prime might think of setting some sort of boundaries on their profiles, so my kid doesn’t watch “The Witcher” or “50 Shades of Grey” while I’m out running errands. Maybe I am asking too much, but if things were clear and consistent across platforms and devices, parents would be able to really make a difference in what our kids watch and who they talk to.

We can’t control everything.  I can’t explain to another parent why their nine-year-old shouldn’t have an unsecured phone at school and posting videos of them and my kid on Tiktok (happened) if they don’t want to hear it. But I should at least be able to teach someone when they ask me, “oh how do you do that” or maybe run a seminar at the PTA.  As it is, I would need that seminar, and then, when everything changes six months from now, another one.  Telling me that my kids need to “stay off social media” just feels like useless, guilt inducing hectoring.

I know Haidt means well.  He’s probably right about many things, but understanding the problem doesn’t solve it, not on its own. That’s my thing with Jonathan Haidt.