Clearly alcohol is poison to anyone. The earlier it’s applied the worse the longer-term effects. Sure. But, em-dash, we don’t pretend it ever stops being poison, and yet there’s a widespread understanding, created and pushed by alcohol manufacturers, that it’s OK to enjoy in moderation. Despite it being poison, in the literal sense. We see the borderline cases of people binging “now and then” and hanging on to a job regardless. We also see winos on the streets who appear to continue to live exclusively for the next purchase of a chewing-gum sized bottle of the cheapest, worst, liquor you can imagine.
Elite members of Sparta brought up their children in a bizarre way: the kids were taught to live communally, but constantly compete with their packmates, fed sparsely and encouraged to steal from the market, which was considered good, but being caught stealing was punished severely. It’s unclear to what degree cruelty as such was inculcated but I suspect it was widespread. Almost all Greek states were slave states and apparently a traditional event involved going to the slaves at night and terrorizing them. With the almost post-hoc addition of warrior training, this was all done in the hope of creating a competent warrior class, for the benefit of the state.
According to the guy that wrote The Bronze Lie, it didn’t work. Sparta lost most straight-up battles it engaged in, was inflexible in adapting to enemy tactics, (such as “walls” and “naked people slinging rocks, running away and then slinging rocks again”,) and the battles it did win usually involved deceit of some sort, sometimes not even the warrior-commander screwup kind, just straight up bribes. Spartans were alleged to disdain money, but multiple kings left either in pursuit of wealth, or after their financial malfeasance was made public. (I think this has to do with teaching children to steal to thrive, despite coming from families of relative wealth.) The most competent moves, like avoiding battle where it would have been ill-advised, were met with public shaming. Their great strategic victory —total hegemony over part of the world— came at the cost of surrendering their reputation, letting the Persians do what they want with peripheral islands, and it would all last them about a grand total of one calendar year.
What’s good for the goose: if you want to tell children that social media is poison, (and you should,) you have to accept that it doesn’t stop being poison the moment you turn 16, 18, 21, or whenever your state religion says you had your warrior menarche.
The computer is a tool, inherently neither good nor bad, but on 9/11 2001, George W Bush ended the world in a satanic ritual, and gradually, more and more true sociopaths began to use the computer for evil. Shrinks were hired to create addiction mechanisms in network-enabled software like games and social media websites that were intended to keep attention forever and produce revenue for companies forever, unlike the humble predecessor softwares that were satisfied with holding attention so long as they were entertaining, for a lump sum paid up front.
I think the analogy to alcohol ab/use holds. A child shouldn’t use alcohol, it causes non-trivial damage to their further lives. It’s also obvious a modicum of alcohol abuse happens, especially on the cusp of adulthood. It’s an experience, something of a rite of passage and should result in a painful, embarrassing, head-pounding hangover afterward. It should leave anyone free of illusions about the poison, its social function and effects on the human body.
But the adult drinkers also need to be told they have a problem. Spending the day at the office job moving from meeting to coffee to lunch can be boring, and it’s no surprise many an OL fried her brain with facebook. This isn’t “one quick drink at lunch”, you should be playing solitaire or something instead of injecting everything some under-socialized tech CEO wants you to believe about the world directly into your eyeballs, Karen. (This isn’t just me being resentful at coworkers of other castes at — off the top of my head— a minimum of two jobs I’ve held.)
The “extremely online” wastoid that spends 18 hours a day on twitter “just to be informed” for their job in legacy media needs an intervention. You’re not doing “OSINT”, you’re imbibing PepeFren1488’s alt account. These people need the rapid-detox-under-coma procedure you see in medical dramas, and since we’re already imagining this taking place within a socialized medical system, the imagined better society ought to find a more dignified way of earning a living for them, of participating in society again, too. Thank god Jeffrey Epstein’s 4chan is dead, but now we still have to kill off all the others.
This goes for grandma and grandpa too. Cognitive decline is par for the course. If your immune system is already weakened with age, it’s not wise to pile on with high-proof shrimp videos describing all the things the Jews have had a hand in lately.
All of these categories, by the way, are considered valid voters. These people are allowed to participate in the legitimization of ruling class decisions, by means of handing a vote to one or the other side of a foregone conclusion. Regardless of cognitive decline or other failings, unless the state decreed otherwise in a very special court-martial. Kids are not allowed to participate here! I wonder if that’s because they haven’t been inculcated enough yet. I wonder if there’s a ruling class conflict between a faction reliant on legacy media, and a younger faction plugged into tech CEO worship, and laws banning one or the other hope to push a demographic into indoctrination favorable to one side. I should probably find a state-certified expert’s opinion to rely on.
One important practical note I want to add is that where carding at a liquor store is a momentary intrusion of privacy at a physical location, any age verification on the internet is kompromat kept forever, regardless of what is alleged in user terms and conditions. It thus exists solely for the benefit of the ruling class institutions holding the data: verification companies, social media companies and states. Instead, one can improve the situation that children deal with on the computer simply by re-implementing pre-facebook rules of internet use: don’t share information about your real life online, except to people you know and trust. Be wary of websites and strangers asking for your real name, or other details about your real life. They might be creeps who’ll use it against you. Historically this resulted in simple grooming, but the children ought to be informed about today’s 764 and Russian SNS-based crowd-sourced espionage activities. You shouldn’t hand out photos of real life ID cards online, even if the website asking for ‘em claims to have the full support of the pro-pedophile or extremely-pro-pedophile wing of a government.
The answer is of course forums. It’s always forums. And if the forum sucks? You split off with the people you like and you make a different forum. It’s a never-ending cycle. It’s how nature works, it’s how society works. Just make a forum. Fund it with member donations, not anything connected to google’s ecosystem. Don’t host it on AWS. Don’t use cloudflare or anubis. Hang out with friends in a mumble server.
In summary, all social media is poison, children usually have a much better moral compass than gen-x-ers, and if you want the computer to be good again, start treating it the way you did last time it was good.
