Arbiter Articulate
I'm a fully prehensile lawyer; the best mental gymnast
Romeo and Juliet and duckstack
Go to your freezer and your ice cream scooper, because its the newest limited edition flavor, duckstack. The frozen duckstacks inside have freshness guaranteed and because they were cryogenically frozen they will be just the same as when we first published it, unlike other newsletters which age with time, growing musty and stale. I mean, nothing against other newsletters, they just aren’t like us. They aren’t ice cream.
Digital Children
On surfing the net and Drowning
I, as a red blooded american male1, play a lot of video games, and so I am highly qualified to talk about the dangers of screen time, which I nevertheless think is overall a good thing, or maybe I am just content in my vices, but you can’t give them to children.
The first thing most parents notice when giving their kids “screen time” is the kid develops what I affectionately call “personality issues”. They start screaming, flailing violently, they lose their composure over minor things, and they’re meaner to their siblings for no apparent reason. If you’re in tune as a parent, you notice the change and it horrifies you and you naturally impose all sorts of strict limits on screen time. But then you realize that screen time is incredibly convenient. No parent in all of history was so blessed as to have their kids come with a built-in off button.
So what I would like to propose is a sort of tentative manifesto, or a set of guidelines to mark out an approach ramp for families grappling with the issue. By no means comprehensive, but by some means useful. It is first necessary to map out the territory, then to propose a set of hard rules that parents may rotate and negotiate, but must keep in mind.
First, the internet is dangerous. You can easily encounter “concepts2” far before you have the world context to parse or integrate them. And make no mistake this can be a good thing, if it forces you to mature faster (as in social communities where the child ends up hanging out with and therefore socialized by people much older and more mature than them)- or a really catastrophically bad thing if the kid ends up socialized by insane dysregulated schizophrenics, who on the internet are equal to well adjusted normal people3. Not only that, but the internet can force “specialization” into niches both in interest and in culture. The kid who loves trains can now spend 100% of his time looking at trains. He won’t even know what cars are. Your kids can watch TV shows (usually old shows) that show how to get along, or they can watch literally 24/7 fart on your mom destroy property and punch each other content. And if they are left alone with a remote control, they will find this content, likely in less than 10 minutes.
Hard Rule #1. You cannot count on other parents to be lucid. I wasn’t raised to play violent video games but quickly learned where to find it, I knew which friends had “the hard stuff”, blood-and-guns wise. I saw porn for the first time at 8 years old at a friend’s house when we were trying to download something for some computer game. Porn is on youtube. Porn is on your game consoles. Porn is in your library. Porn is in advertisements for mobile games. I guess its in magazines at other people’s houses too but that’s not as common anymore. Even innocent activities like watching cartoons are bad in excess, and your kids are going to learn extremely quickly which houses have the TV on 24/7.
Whatever your rules about screen time, every other house in your neighborhood is thousands of times more liberal. This means you have basically a choice between hermit withdrawal from society and raise your kids without friends, or inoculation. If you can think of a third option, let me know.
Inoculation means “preparation”. It means your kids must understand, at a much earlier age than their peers, exactly what is out there, how to avoid it, what to do when they run across it, but more importantly they must know why. I tell my kids “there’s stuff out there that looks fun but is actually bad”, but without me there he will just see “bright colors, lizard brain likey”. Kids rely on their parents to be their conscience, and you need to be doing this much earlier. Kids should be given not just rules for screen content at other people’s houses, but principles, as well as canned, recitable lines for why.
However, raising kids without screen time may also run a risk- most modern careers, even in construction, require a great degree of interfacing with technology. And the “turn off your kid” switch is really nice. But when you do so you must select the content, and preferably enjoy it with them, so they can model screen time behaviors off of you.
Hard Rule #2: Screen time must be restricted to long form, guided content. Kids left to their own devices will watch the most spazzo crap imaginable. They gravitate to it.
A huge part of the reason kids become wild and aggressive after screen time is that they have difficulty re-adjusting their attention spans. If kids are allowed to switch videos rapidly when bored, they will maladjust to the excitement, and act out simply to keep more excitement going. Movies beat TV, TV beats youtube shorts. You can show your kids shorts but they should be forced to return to reality after. If you play with them this helps. The goal here is to make screen time as similar to books as possible so that they can transition seamlessly while feeling minimal loss.
-Hard Rule #3: Games should be restricted to social, creative games, then single player / local multiplayer platformers, in that order. Games are an essential part of human socialization, and video games are increasingly a part of that. But not all games are created equal.
Kids actually have a lot more drive than adults. If given motive, they can learn all sorts of skills at an accelerated pace, meaning if you can find a game that has modding (for coding skills), video sharing (for editing skills), level building (for spatial/geometry skills), and so on, that game should be encouraged over others. However, even simple platformers teach things like spatial awareness, hand eye coordination, problem solving, and dealing with failure, (or even just reading lol), all of which are valuable and highly transferable adulthood skills. Purely competitive games, however, should be avoided- anything with a “meta” will restrict creativity, corral social interaction, and often expose your kid to verbal abuse- and not even the productive kind.
Furthermore, the meta and repetitive nature of competitive games leads to a much lower return even on enjoyment. For every hundred happy memories a child will make playing a creative/social game, a child will make one happy memory in a competitive game. Winning means very little, long term, and as such competitive games should be more restricted until the child is old enough to appreciate serious tactics and spreadsheets.
Hard Rule #4: Children should not be allowed to rely on video games for entertainment. The reason for this is that imagination and creativity are a childs biggest assets. Their lower exposure to the world allows them to act in contextless ways that take surprising and delightful angles, and are also some of the most joyous parts of being a child. If video games become a staple, rather than an occasional indulgence, you risk crippling the child’s imagination due to restricted franchise.
Many children’s happiest memories come from playing out silly elements of video games or shows in the real world. Too much video games restricts this, such that children will simply default to screens in any environment, and without them won’t know what to do. Possibly screen time can be gradually increased with age, but you should think about it like “exposing” your kid to video games, not letting them swim in it, at least without floaties, until they are thoroughly taught to swim.
Hard Rule #5: Parents must parent their children4. because screen time is an off switch, your kids are spending less time with you than kids at any point in your ancestors history. They were not genetically prepared for this. This effect doubles because parents, too, are on screens.
This means things like parental discipline will be more of a shock to kids, who have spent a fraction of their day’s time less acclimating to their parents environment. Parents should deliberately spend time talking to their kids and telling them about what they are doing and why, and actively block out personal time with them. Especially fathers, who kids look to for structure and boundaries.
Hard Rule #6: No Touch Screens. Do not give your children Hell Rectangles. Do not plug them into the matrix. Do not rip their souls from their bodies through their eyeballs. Do not give them out of body experiences when their spirits are just merged with it in the first place. Children are not designed to be beings of pure thought.
I recently bought a new phone, a Unihertz Titan Slim. Its cheap chinese hardware with tons of issues, and I will never again buy a normal phone.
The Titan Slim has basically everything a normal android phone has including a touch screen, with two distinct differences: A physical keyboard, and a very small screen. I immediately noticed a difference- this phone felt healthier. The difference is literally the buttons, where it no longer feels like action is divorced from body, but the screen size helps too, where it feels less “swallowing”. This power is too dangerous, and children must be taught that the body correlates with action, even with use of machines. I do not, necessarily, recommend this particular phone, but I do recommend sticking to mouse and keyboards, joysticks, arcade machines, and anything governed by actual machine.
I don’t believe parents need to “parent all the time”, in fact I think that’s probably counterproductive, but more intentional use of technology will go a long way in the environment kids are going to grow up in. With some intentionality, technology can even be a huge boon, with AI acting as a personal tutor for all sorts of subjects. The future is bright, you just need to keep your eye on the ball, lest your children get stuck in the sandpits that are now available to them.
You cannot count on other parents to be lucid.
Screen time must be restricted to long form, guided content.
Games should be restricted to social, creative games, then single player / local multiplayer platformers, in that order.
Children should not be allowed to rely on video games for entertainment.
Parents must parent their children.
No Touch Screens.
Duckstack Technology: Cell Phones
What are they? They aren’t made of cells, and they aren’t made of phones
We sent our best duckstack scientist, Alfonzo Jr. III, back in time with a cell phone to record the rise and fall of the Roman Empire for our high school science project. He hasn’t returned and we have no idea what to put on our trifold display board. Please we really need this grade.
History
We went car shopping this week, and our boy decided he “wants a car.”
One of the dealerships had a bright purple jeep on their show room floor. Our son loved the color. “I love love love this car and its tire tail”
Unprompted: “I don't like bad guys anymore”
Unprompted: “oh my gosh. I wasn't born yet when mama was a baby.”
We got him a sort of chocolate egg, and after he had eaten it he told us he had eaten his “chocolate chrysalis”
My wife commented that our house was about to be 100 years old, and our son wondered, “why does this house have birthdays? I want a young house.” but then he thought about it for a moment and ran into a problem: “but, where is the house store?”
Our son, hopping from pillow to pillow: “The floor is lava!” his little sister, utterly failing to hop from pillow to pillow yet nevertheless following him faithfully: “Lala!”
Alfonzo Jr. III Update
thank goodness he’s alive. Well he’s dead now but he was alive in the past. No problem
We have discovered near our lab a carrier snail, similar to a carrier pigeon, injected with one of Alfonzo Jr. III’s four emergency immortality potions. The snail was well trained, and also very slow, and so only made it a few yards from Alfonzo Jr. III’s original past location, with an important message explaining his absence, which is that apparently the ancient Roman Empire didn’t have cell towers, and Alfonzo Jr. III has been wandering around without service for all this time until he died of old age, happily married to a nice lady duck named Aurora. Alfonzo Jr. III describes her as “old fashioned, but practical” and requests that she be cloned in our lab once we bring him back. Good for him.
So that’s good data, but Alfonzo Jr. III notes that the ancient Romans didn’t have charger cords, and so once his phone ran out of batteries he’s been unable to continue his mission, and he used all of his spare batters making sparks and lightsabers and other such things in order to secure a place in the Empire’s palace structure as a court magician. He says the job pays well, but none of the Roman grocery stores sell charger cables, nor do they even know what an “electrical outlet” is.
To fix this, he invented a new religious character in their mythology he named “Zeus”, who was known for charging cell phones and things like this. Hopefully that doesn’t alter history too much, Alfonzo Jr. III writes.
So we sent Alfonzo Jr. III a care package consisting of 30 or 40 more cell phones, and instructions to copyright his new religious myth immediately, we’re going to be so rich. Once we graduate High School.
Ducksnax
lightbulb
possibly the red blooded american male
“concepts could be here”, he thought
Sometimes, even higher ranking
Brand new for the internet age