Category: social media

Parenting Social Media

by jcafesin, posted in addiction, ADHD, artificial intelligence, social media

Australia killed social media today for under 18. YEA AUZZIES!

My almost 24 yr old daughter came downstairs Saturday morning giggling with glee. She told my husband and I she was ‘so excited!’ Something ‘great’ had happened.

She was in a car accident 1.5 yrs ago that is resulting in a lawsuit, and I thought she’d talked to our lawyer and he gave us great news. Nope.

“I got an audition on The Button!” she said, pridefully. “It’s a really popular YouTube series.”

I went with her excitement. My beautiful daughter got an acting audition, or for her melodic singing. Or a baking show for her excellent macaron cookies!

“How many subscribers?” I asked.

“Millions! It’s a reality dating show.”

As her words registered in my head, so did dread.

“You sit at a table across from each other with a large red button between you,” she explained enthusiastically. “The show’s producers ask personal, intimate questions to push conversation.”

I bet they do. Build tension. Push the show’s platform of ‘Shaming Spectacle.’ Corrosive dread was quickly turning into explosive rage.

“If one presses the button before the other, that person is out of the game.”

“You mean rejected?” At this point, my rage was boiling over. My daughter was seemingly so addicted to her phone and social media she could not see the ugly, sick fuck piece of trash YouTube show she’d signed on for.

“Yeah. But if neither press the button, then you win a date,” she said, more cautiously seeing my expression.

My tolerance dam broke right then. “Are you stupid!? Why would you sign up for a show designed to SHAME YOU? Are people allowed to leave comments?”

“Yes, Mother, but it’s not like that.”

“What’s it like, then?” my husband asked. “How can this possibly serve you going on this show?”

“It’s not about that. It’ll be fun to be on a show I watch.”

She watches this crap!? But I didn’t voice it. “You’re supposed to be studying for your MCATs. Why do you want to go on this show that’s designed to make you feel shitty about yourself?”

“It’s just for fun,” she defended. “I probably won’t even get on.”

“And if you do, how are you going to feel with being rejected in front of millions? Or rejecting someone else?”

“Maybe I won’t be rejected.”

“And what? You’ll find Mr. Right on this bullshit show? You have MCATs in 8 wks, honey. What are you doing!?”

“I thought it would be fun to be seen by that many people,” she said flatly.

“But you won’t be seen,” my husband chimed in. “You judge everyone on the show when you’re watching. And millions will be doing the same to you.”

“Are you ready for negative comments about your looks, or things you expose when the asshole producers trigger you in front of millions?”

“I won’t read the comments.”

“Are you talking about the Red Button show?” our son comes in the kitchen.

“Yeah,” she said to her older brother. “Have you seen it?”

“Yeah. Couple times. It’s really brutal. A race to the bottom — who can push the button first. No one wants to be the one rejected. You like it?”

“Yeah. I think it’s funny.”

“She got an audition to do the show,” I filled him in.

“Your mom and I don’t think it’s a great idea.”

“Even to audition,” I said. “Won’t help your self image any if you get rejected for the show.”

“So, you don’t think I’m pretty enough to be on the show?” she asked, practically glaring at me. “You think I’m not good looking enough to get picked.”

“I see my beautiful daughter. But this isn’t about what I think. You’ve cried to me time and again you’re not pretty enough,” I manage more softly. “You’ve admitted you compare yourself with influencers, and how you feel ugly by social standards. You’ve told me you hate your nose. Don’t like your body shape. Breast size. Your face. How is this going to be ‘fun’ if you’re rejected, get bad comments, or even get a second date? At best, this show’s a distraction from your goal to get into med school. At worse, and more likely, it’ll make you feel even worse about yourself.”

“Not fun,” her brother added. “I wouldn’t do it J. Not smart,” he said as he left.

“I’m doing the audition anyway,” our daughter said, and followed him out of the kitchen.

—

Ever written a blog, personal essay, or even an email, and as you write it you realize something is fucked up with your reasoning — the point you set out to make?

I realized I may have shamed our daughter, just as the The Button is designed to shame its participants.

I wrote her an email this morning apologizing if she felt I did when I lost it after she told me she was auditioning for the game. I explained my intention was to protect her, educate her from the dangers of predatory online content. She clearly failed to understand the broader consequences of signing up for, or even frequently watching the exploitative game show.

‘Game show’ my ass. Nothing playful about The Button. I wanted to protect my beautiful baby from being publicly shamed.

Some raw facts (I didn’t iterate to our daughter, but likely should):

  • Social media addiction amplifies low self-esteem leading to higher rates of depression and suicide, especially in her age group.
  • Watching and engaging with shaming, bullying, predatory, and exploitative content increases low self-esteem, depression and suicide rates.
  • The development team of ignorant, arrogant, short-sighted, self-serving slime, AKA, the Cut: David Alvarez, Blaine Ludy, Marina Taylor (former), and Desmond Vieg, are making bank on what they call “a social experiment.”

‘Experiment?’ Get real! No science. No controls. These parasites are profiting from exploiting shame and destroying self-esteem of young people establishing their self-images. How ugly is that!

Regardless of my faulty approach of admonishing our daughter for signing up for The Button, my heart was in the right place. The Cut developers are clearly heartless. Would they entice their own kids into some twisted social ‘experiment’ for their profit? I pray they never have children. Narcissists generally make suck parents.

I’m ashamed, feel I failed as a mom that my daughter signed up to be on The Button, or even chooses to spend one minute of her life’s time watching it, essentially promoting it with her views. I thought I taught our kids to be aware of the consequences of their actions. Parenting the perils of the internet seems a constant work-in-progress now, coming up against social platforms luring kids in like the Pied Piper, and addicting them like Purdue Pharma with OxyContin.

The Cut founders are young, naive, arrogant, and ignorant in the extreme. (So is most social media, from Insta to Snap that blows away your life’s time). Ugly games like The Button teaches watchers and participants it’s OK to torment, mock, insult, shame people, for profit.

The Button creators get richer with every hit to their “mean‑spirited,” “cruel,” “superficial,” “shallow,” YouTube channel. And ‘Seen by millions’ if you join their cast of fools won’t make you rich like they’re becoming on you.

Modeling cruelty spreads it. When you View or Engage with The Button, or any online game, platform, or app that makes it acceptable, (profitable, and therefore admirable) to be cruel, you are participating in becoming so.

Globalization and Getting a Job

by jcafesin, posted in business, children, family life, Immigration, social media, sociology, technology, Uncategorized

Took a family vacation to Yellowstone last summer. After a day of exploring the spectacular park, we ate dinner at Canyon Village, a sprawling commercial development amid the natural wonders. The kids wanted some souvenirs so we stopped in the gift shop before eating. The clerk at check-out was a kid, no more than 20, as was most of the customer service staff in the park. His name tag said Mal-Chin, and under his name was his country of origin: Korea.

Seated inside the restaurant we were served water by Jianyu, his country of origin: China

We were served rolls by Mi-Cha, Korea again.

Earlier in the day, when visiting the geyser, Old Faithful, we stopped in the mini-mart at Yellowstone Lodge. The check-out guy was Yeo, China again. At breakfast, at the restaurant in the lodge, our waitress was Fedheeta, country of origin: India

Our waitress at dinner was Kathy, her country of origin: USA. She was probably 1 of 10 Americans out of the 50 or more employees of the park I saw that day.

Yellowstone is the United States’ first national park. Over 2 million acres of pristine, protected wilderness reside in a massive cauldron of a dormant super-volcano in the states of Montana and Idaho, with the majority of the park in Wyoming. The USA preserved this land for families and fans of natural beauty to come explore, discover, and study nature’s wonders for present and future generations. Tens of millions of taxpayer dollars go to maintaining Yellowstone National Park annually.

So why are most of their service staff from everywhere but the USA? I asked our waitress, Kathy, at dinner in Canyon Village. Why are our kids not landing these jobs, which provide a great opportunity to acquire sales and communications skills, add to college applications…etc?

The American kids get fired here constantly, Kathy told my family after taking our order. They party a lot, don’t show up for work, and they’re rude to the customers. They write the orders wrong or charge people the wrong amount because they can’t do simple math. The management can’t keep them for more than a few weeks into the summer because they’re mostly irresponsible and lazy.

Her words literally hurt me, like a weight on my chest because I knew they were the truth.

Kathy went on to describe the programs that land the out-of-country kids the jobs at our national parks. They pay thousands just to get here, she said, which is generally less than the salary for six days of work a week, including the food and lodging during their contract with the park. They clearly want to be here very badly, usually to acquire work skills and develop their English fluency. And they do an excellent job. It’s easy to see why management prefers them.

Heavy sigh.

World News Tonight on ABC has a segment they called Made in America. It’s a joke, an embarrassment to any sensible, educated, aware adult who knows that China produces over 1/3 of all global manufacturing, with Mexico and Korea close behind them. The World News segment is touchy-feely, saccharin and all smiles with David Muir interviewing American manufacturers of unique hats and scarves, or a cupcake maker gone viral, and then touts these businesses as being the cornerstones of our future success.

Hats and cupcakes won’t cure our supply-chain issues. The USA will never reclaim our manufacturing base when we charge more than ten times as much to do the work other nations are willing to do, and do well, for so much less. Global agreements like NAFTA, (now USMCA), make it tariff-free to import from Mexico and Canada for our produce, effectively killing the American farmer. 

The internet has united our world, as it allows almost everyone to see how others live. It’s easy to find the American lifestyle attractive. Most families generally have warm houses with running water, safe electricity, computers, entertainment systems, cars in almost every garage, and freedom from religious and/or political persecution (sort of). Most countries still aspire to be US, to model our independence and luxuries.

Watch World News Tonight’s entire broadcast, and David Muir will tell you all about rising inflation, families charging groceries and gas just to get to work and feed their families, maxing out their credit limits. He’ll tell you about our personal debt crisis, where the average American has over $15,000 in credit card debt, and he’ll introduce you to one of the many families bankrupted from a medical catastrophe not covered by their insurance or Medicare.

Like it or not, we are a global world now. Today’s manufacturing, trade, and technology bind us, and gives us the opportunity to thrive as a people, and a planet — or we can destroy everything we have here through indifference and greed.

Our K-12 public education system is failing our kids, regardless that we keep pumping more and more tax dollars into education. The U.S. now ranks 36th out of the 79 countries and regions in math, behind China, South Korea, even Canada. It is no wonder U.S. kids aren’t hired for even the simplest retail positions at our national parks. Most of our kids are unprepared to compete globally. According to our server, Kathy, at Yellowstone, who went to a private school back home in New York, the American employees have demonstrated their lack of education in math skills, reading and writing, and poor interactions with customers.

Cutting school hours of instruction with “teacher furlough days,” short days, and extending ‘teacher workdays’ has not, does not, and will not produce a nation of creators. To produce anything valuable takes education, practice, and focused persistence. For the U.S. to achieve the potential our parents’ achieved — have jobs, and retain the lifestyle to which most of the middle-class has become accustomed, we’re going to have to limit our play/relax time, and work a hell of a lot harder.

Partying, with attitude, instead of doing their work, like the stream of U.S. kids fired from Yellowstone; playing Halo, or killing endless hours on TikTok or Insta, or binge-watching Netflix instead of studying math and science won’t help our kids compete in the job market locally or globally beyond low-level, low paying gigs. The current unemployment rate of 3.7% by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a joke. It’s based on service, gig, and administration positions that pay crap salaries that don’t keep up with inflation. H1B visas requested by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other tech companies reached a whopping 758,994 H-1B registrations for 2024, which does not include H-2B visas, or the plethora of other visas available to work in the US today.

Greed, laziness, the-world-owes-me work ethic so many Americans possess won’t win us jobs, or help us keep them here in the States. We must teach our kids that PRACTICE is the only way to get good at anything. Instead of investing the time and energy it takes to achieve good grades or find that great job, they’re on their iPhones scrolling social media, or playing video games, which means parents need to pay more attention and invoke more discipline, including limiting screen time. It means educators need to step up to the plate and give more homework, harder tests, teach at least normal business hours for the same money because giving more money to education shows little improvement in student performance.

Raising a generation of spoiled, unmotivated, under-educated Americans cannot, does not, and WILL NOT compete in our global economy.

The Cost of Convenience

by jcafesin, posted in saas, social media

It’s surprising how little I think of my daughter now that she’s living 2,000 miles away at school. We talk on the phone frequently, but since she’s not involved in my daily life anymore, she’s more of an abstraction (when we’re not directly talking), a pleasant thought when she crosses my mind.

I figured she was having the same experience I was when she went off to college. The thought of me made her feel glad (or angry, or… since I’m her mother and that comes with mixed feelings), but I didn’t consider she thought of me often in her busy life. So, when I recently had exploratory surgery looking for cancer, I did not realize she even remembered me mentioning the appointment on the phone a couple of weeks ago.

This morning I’m in my office going through my email. I find one from my husband letting me know he and our daughter signed me up for online notifications of my medical records, including test results, last night while I slept. They gave the MyChart app my husband’s phone number and his email because they both know how much I hate putting my data online, never stopping to consider that my husband would be notified of my test results likely before I would by snail mail.

I’ll be getting my test results by snail mail because I do not want my medical information online. I get that it already is, which my daughter reminded me when I came at her full bore with anger on the phone this morning for signing me up without my permission (after coming unglued on my husband).

It isn’t just my medical records that shouldn’t be online, sitting in a cloud, accessible to everyone from Walgreens to United Health Care [insurance]. It makes my skin crawl that almost every time I want to access anything on the net now, the site attaches ‘cookies’ to my machine that track my usage. Many sites require I fill out forms for entry, collecting, aggregating and categorizing even more of my personal data to sell and/or exploit with targeted marketing.

My daughter is on the medical track studying to become a physician. She works as a scribe in a medical practice, and is an intern at Palomar Medical Center and uses MyChart on the job. So do the patients of the practice and the hospital, she assured me. They all love the convenience of being able to look up their medications and/or test results as soon as they’re posted on their e-chart.

She was trying to sell me on the real world, the one she, and most everyone else lives in daily—perpetually attached to the net via cellphones, laptops and tablets. Banking to paying bills to shopping, my daughter uses these online ‘services’ (which is kind of an oxymoron since these apps make it self-serve), to ‘keep it simple’ while juggling two internships, a job, and a full course load every quarter, including this summer.

Do you understand there is a cost to convenience? I asked her on the phone, after she apologized for setting up the account without my permission and promised to delete it when we disconnected.

She did, she assured me. But she really doesn’t. She’s too young, too many generations removed from WWII.

“The Third Reich was a diagnosis regime, obsessed with sorting the population into categories, cataloging people by race, religion, politics, sexuality, criminality and purported biological, mental and behavioral defects. Nazi officials created massive population indexes that compiled individuals’ medical, financial, educational, criminal and welfare records — even sports club files. By 1942, approx. ten million Reich citizens had been indexed. These files, then, established the grounds for sterilization, deportation and extermination.” (https://lnkd.in/d9txaahS)

Nothing to hide? I rhetorically asked my daughter on the phone, still admonishing her for signing me up for an online account of my medical information and then giving access to her dad via email. She placated my perceived conspiracy theory with, I get it, Mom! I do. It’s likely dangerous to have all our personal information online, but it already is, Mom.

1942 may as well be 1642 to my daughter, and [ostensibly] most of her gen— too far back to remember or care.

I didn’t care about using internet-based services either until the ‘cloud.’ It was mid-2000s and we were all on the free and open information highway when Amazon introduced its cloud-based storage service, but I didn’t get its impact until my bank started offering SaaS [self] ‘services,’ like Direct Deposit and online payments ‘for our convenience.’ At first I didn’t care about that either, as I had no intention of banking online since putting my bank account numbers through unsecured servers didn’t, and still doesn’t seem wise to me. Banking security is another oxymoron, and my internet connection through Xfinity isn’t exactly an impenetrable firewall.

By the mid-2010s cloud computing had scaled, especially with the advent of the ‘smart’ phone. Bank of America started making it hard to come into their branches in-person, cutting its staff in half and forcing customers to wait in long lines to talk to a teller. Many young people adapted quickly to avoid the hassle the banks created, which left a lot of older folks, and holdouts with old tech cellphones like me, having to wait sometimes 45 minutes to deposit a check.

I had a red slide phone with a real [small] keyboard and no internet connection until 2021 when AT&T switched to 4G and forced me to “upgrade” to a ‘smart’ phone [like the rest of the known universe did a decade earlier]. I’ve yet to enable an internet connection on my new cellphone, and don’t use location SaaS apps, ever. I navigate using printed maps, or use my memory the second visit to anywhere I’ve been. With my phone offline and not accessing any location services, at least it stops communicating with nearby cell towers so Google and State Farm [car insurance] doesn’t know where I am on the planet (GPS), or how fast I’m driving. They also don’t know whether I’m in my car, or on a plane, through the accelormeter sensor now inside our ‘smart’ phones which detects motion—whether we’re still, walking, biking, driving, flying.

I used to be among the 2+ billion frequent users of Amazon’s marketplace until every bookstore, hardware store, curio, card and gift shop in my neighborhood closed. And while it’s ‘convenient’ to get things delivered to my front door, not so much when it’s snowing out and UPS won’t deliver to our house on the hill and I need a specific tool to fix my irrigation pipe that froze and busted open. I now drive 12 miles, instead of the 3 it used to be before the local hardware store closed. I’m back to buying my tools directly, in-person, as I do for most everything else I shop for now to support the survival of local businesses.

Intellectually, I know I am fighting Goliath with a slingshot trying to retain even a modicum of my privacy from the Content Monster we call the ‘cloud.’ Stalking us everywhere we go IRL, and visit online on our devices, to everything we buy, to our marital status and genetic offspring, corporations have created and continue to create—unobstructed by laws or ethics—“massive population indexes that compiles individuals’ medical, financial, educational, criminal and welfare records — even sports club files,” or lack thereof since most Americans don’t exercise. Insta, Google, FB, TicTok, ChatGPT and every other big data SaaS app out there is “sorting the population into categories, cataloging people by race, religion, politics, sexuality, criminality,” including biological and mental characteristics of behavioral and genetic health.

Many, in fact most large corps these days are marketing us into buying, and believing (religion, politics, social views and values) by targeting their messaging using the very data we give them with every click on a webpage, swipe on a screen, every text or IM, every form we fill out, every poll we take, questionnaire we answer, and every medical exam or procedure we have now is stored on a cloud, and not just one cloud, but many. Redundancy is key in data storage.

I feel like the Borg is trying to assimilate me into submission of my privacy for the convenience of becoming part of the hive—i.e. ‘cloud’[ed] mind, I tried to explain to my daughter on the phone this morning. And the convenience [of self-service] turns out to be for the corps, killing customer service, tying us up in phone loops, and making their mistakes our problems to fix while continually charging our credit cards their monthly fee. So much for the convenience of AutoPay.

Mother, my daughter proclaimed in all seriousness, all our information is already online and in the cloud, or separate clouds that are all connected, or whatever, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. I signed you up for MyChart last night because I want you to get your test results as soon as they’re posted and then share them with me so I can stop worrying, or, at least know what is going on with you. I love you, Mom, and I feel really scared about your biopsy results.

Heavy sigh. She played the Love card.

Assimilation is hard to resist when delivered by those you love most.

I apologized for making her worry, and again felt surprised that my daughter remembered and was concerned about my biopsy. I promised to tell her the test results as soon as I get them, which is likely a lie, unless they’re good. I’ll need to privately process bad results before making her worry even more.

Regardless of whom I choose to share my biopsy results with, they are mine alone to share, or they should be. The fact is, my insurance company will know if I have cancer before I will. If my doctor prescribes me drugs, Wallgreens will know what kind of cancer before I will by snail mail. Under the Affordable Care Act, my insurance can not charge me more, or exclude coverage for pre-existing conditions, but get another Republican president, and that can change. We’ll go back to leaving diabetics to the disabled uninsured.

My world growing up was much like my parents. In my day, corporations worked for their customers and clients. With the advent of SaaS and the ‘aide’ of apps, we are now all products of these corporations selling us on using technology with the lie of ‘convenience’ while hording our private information to maximize their profits.

Nothing to hide? Nazi Germany won’t ever happen here?

  • Trump, and his millions of minions.
  • Fox ‘News.’ Newsmax. Breitbart…etc.
  • Conservative Christians
  • Catholic Supreme Court (8 out of 9 justices)
  • Neo-Nazis
  • White Nationalists/Supremacists/Warriors
  • …etc.