Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, what am I going to do with you? He went on breaking points where he basically encouraged people to use phones less and called for banning them in schools. And...uh....I find this to be mostly cringey.
Look, we live in phone world now. Our phones do everything these days. Yes yes yes, we can afford to doom scroll less. But honestly? Telling people to "put the phone down?" Cringe. Mega cringe. Like, oh, you can read a book. Yeah. I can do that...on my phone. I can socialize...on my phone. This is an artifact of Andrew's Age. He's like 10 years older than me, gen X, and the last generation before the digital divide. As such, sometimes he sounds like a luddite on topics like phones, or video games, etc. Despise being a pro UBI human centered capitalist, he sounds almost like a luddite at times, fearing how tech will upend existing social structures, and in this case he thinks the solution is using the tech less. Meanwhile, I'm a bt younger, im disillusioned on say, those traditional social structures, and I like tech. Heck, before smart phones were a thing, I always brought like a game boy or a book wherever i went when I had to go out, and I say, HAD TO, because my parents dragged me around wherever they went and they liked to go shopping like ALL WEEKEND. If anything, those devices were my little island of sanity through all that. I never understood the whole point of like "living in the moment", its awfully boring, isnt it? And these days, phones can do everything. I CAN read books on a phone. Hell, I've read HIS books on my phone (well, tablet, which is a big phone). Im typing this on my tablet. I can game on my tablet. Watch TV on my tablet. Play video games on my tablet. Chat with friends on it. And of course, doom scroll social media. And even that can be productive because I literally came across a lot of my best ideas like secular humanism and UBI through...reddit and the like. I know i crap on graham platner for being a reddit communist, but that isn't to say that reddit cant be useful in helping one inform their political perspective.
And oh, on polarization, because Yang brought THAT up again. Ya know, given my rough ideological association with Yang, but taking it in a different direction, I gotta break with him here too. he seems to treat political polarization as a both sides thing pushed by social media. I admit, algorithms are a problem with polarization, as is the fractured reddit environment where every subreddit devolves into its own respective echo chamber, but honestly, I dont blame the internet that much for this stuff. Here's why.
First of all, IT'S THE GOP, STUPID! (meant in the "it's the economy stupid" kinda way). Like we keep treating polarization as a both sides thing. But what's primarily driving polarization as I see it is the GOP. It's the side that's going full fash. They got this extremist worldview driven by religion, and they wanna force it on people. And you know what? For a while there, the internet was the cure. I remember 10 years ago before 2016 we were lamenting our parents being sucked into the fox news echo chamber, and then there was rush limbaugh, the rise of conservative radio, etc. These ideas have been festering in this country for about as long as I've been alive. Reagan killed the fairness doctrine and since around 1988ish, the country has been polarizing ever since (I go by 1988 since that's when rush limbaugh started doing his thing).
And while yes, left wing polarization is a thing (looking at you, graham platner, again), honestly? Yang's own ideas originated from a combination of academia and internet activism. Hell, human centered capitalism IS a polarization against the right. My own version of those ideas I came up with explicitly to fight the right and their BS worldview. I didnt come up with these ideas to make nice with the right. No, they're fundamentally opposed to their brand of christian nationalism and hard line trickle down economics BS. And if you want them enacted, you gotta fight an ENTIRE WORLDVIEW. Youre not gonna get there through compromise. That's what the dems have been doing and its just led to the right becoming more and more extreme and illiberal. If you wanna beat the right, you gotta fight the right. Anything else is capitulation. And these ideas, the ones he ran on in 2020 are my idea of how to do so. I start out with a secular basis of morality based in enlightenment values, and build up from there. My views on work, UBI, etc., is explicitly to counter right wing trickle down economics.
And yeah. Idk, gosh, Yang frustrates me sometimes. Like, he kinda gets it, but then he goes off and does cringey things. THis is also why a lot of the left doesnt take human centered capitalism seriously. When Yang is the face of it, he ends up just turning into a moderate who abandons that stuff and then the online left dunks on him for lacking any convictions at all. And I cant disagree with them.
And, wanna know what's driving left wing polarization like you get on reddit? The economy not working, and the dems and powers at be doing F all about it. When our choices are between christofascists and these super moderate libs who wont stand for anything and are actively hostile to those left of them, including social democrats, human centered capitalist, democratic socialists, you end up with these people "reading theory", doubling down and going full on "bourgeois democracy is a sham." And thats why the dems, for the life of them, cant motivate people to stop the trump threat. Because all they've offered is this soulless brand of corporate neoliberalism and tell us it's that or trump, and people stop giving a crap and stop voting. Again, human centered capitalisms should be an antidote. It's a vision that works within our current system to solve the biggest issues with the economy from a humanist left wing perspective that gives contrast to the right. I dont wanna play footsie with the right, or meet them half way. No. I wanna oppose them. But I want to do it productively and from within the existing capitalist, liberal democratic framework. If theres anything about left wing polarization that frustrates me, it's this. The actual social democratic left is nowhere to be found. Everyone is either a socialist a la platner or a craplib a la mills. Like there's no healthy middle ground. And this happens as a result of the political forces that exist.
Quite frankly, all the internet did was remove the veil behind our politics. It removed the cave so to speak. It gave people access to information that they never had before. Before the internet, you got your views from the news and that was it. Most people werent as informed or educated on politics like many people online are now. THe information was just less accessible. When we talk about throwing away our phones and going back to some kind of shared idea of what america is, whose idea of america is it? Not mine, and I doubt it's yang's either. Because that entire political establishment is rotten to the core. And people dont understand that. No one likes soulless centrism. I'm sorry, they dont. The left realizes it doesnt fix our issues and is discussing new ideas, sometimes things like socialism, but also things like UBI, which Yang ran on. And the right has been radicalizing for a generation and building their own media infrastructure to keep people there. And it isnt just online. They did it offline too. They had radio programs, tv channels, the internet is a new frontier for them. It's new for us all. And people fear that maybe it's polarizing us and making us miserable, but that's just how life is now. And I dont think it's even a bad thing. I actually see it as a good thing, even if i recognize that the algorithms that feed us content have to go (they're the real problem).
As for teens in school and phones. I'm agnostic here. Look, I'm in my late 30s, I havent been to school (as in, K-12) in almost 20 years. Back then, electronics were banned. We used actual notebooks and textbooks. Phones and computers were a distraction. Sure, we had homework where we had to type papers, that started in middle school and got mainstream in high school. But other than that, classrooms were time to put the phone away and pay attention.
Nowadays...idk. I dont have kids. I dont want kids. I dont go to school myself. I know A LOT has changed since then. You got zoom during the pandemic. I know they give students laptops and tablets now. And with technology that can do everything, you introduce new challenges. The tech can be used responsibly to help learning. Transcribing a whiteboard full of notes can be made 100x easier just by taking a picture of it. Powerpoints for school can be distributed online, there was even a tool called "blackboard" which we used in college for that. Papers can be submitted online too. You can read your textbooks on a phone or computer. You can use that stuff to study. But you can also use that stuff to distract people too. I cant tell you, when I wanna write my book sometimes, I end up just doomscrolling social media instead. You can chat with friends, open up a video game, and the next thing you know, its night and its time to go to bed and you didnt do what you had to. So do I have an answer here? No. Again, I'm not a parent OR a kid in this digital age. But I also aint gonna impose my outdated perspective on a younger generation that does things differently, seeing things as a problem simply because i dont relate to it, and wanting to go back to how things were. Yang seems to have a bit of this anti tech streak when it comes to social media and kids that kinds irks me. It reminds me of like, jack thompson wanting to ban GTA 20 years ago. And I cant help but cringe just based on him embodying a similar vibe to that. I feel like every generation freaks out about how the kids arent like they were when THEY grew up and they fear that it's the downfall of civilization or something. THen the next generation turns out fine and it was all old man yelling at cloud. So idk. Again, I remain agnostic on that which I know little to nothing about. I can see where the concern is coming from, and I do think if I had to give a position I'd probably support banning phones during class hours at least unless there's a valid reason to engage with them. Again, simply because in class you should be learning and phones, while they can be useful, can be a distraction. But do I support lower phone use on the whole in society? Not really. We live in phone world now. Deal with it. Youre old man yelling at cloud if youre against it in my book.
And yeah, that's where I stand on that.
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