Tech’s Violent, Abusive, Predatory Relationship with Children and Teens
If technology should have unifying focus, a fundamental focus, a mission, it should be about children, and it should be about helping children to be safe, engaged, supported, for their lives to be enriched by technology, to play and explore and grow and learn. But our technology industry and the products it builds don’t reflect that priority. In fact, children, by design, are abused, harmed and exploited ongoingly by the technology industry.
As an economic foundation, children and teens provide absolutely incredibly amounts of revenue to the tech industry, both in consumer spent and as the cornerstone of consumer adoption. There is a reason the personal computing revolution happened in schools, as Apple and Microsoft battled it out to see who could gain dominance in classrooms across America. You also see this in the development of social media, where the first adopters are kids, including Friendster, MySpace, Livejournal, and today, the Meta monopoly of Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and so on. Social networks are built around kids. And as social networks provide the data core of the industry, they are at the very basis of tech’s entire ecosystem, the source of the data. The entire youth market consists of 2 billion children under 15 and 1.2 billion aged 15-24 years. This is an absolutely giant market and it is also the one with the largest lifetime revenue potential of any other demographic.
If you can get a kid hooked in middle school, you’ll have them for the rest of their lives. Importantly, people think of data as a kind of lake, which makes sense in some cases, but there are various types of… data structure so to speak, and the fact of a data TIMELINE is actually crucial because it offers a look at someone across potentially decades of their lives; this enables machines and people to reason about, establish causality, compare development, observe change over time, observe central moments in a life — the loss of a friend or parent, going to college — and how they may ripple out; to see the fracture of early love and then every love ever since; to see correlations between health status, and so on. The fact of having not just a snap in time of a child, but actually having data collection follow them throughout life, lets them do the kind of long-range research that we typically associate with lifetime medical studies, such as lifetime rates of premature death in patients with a given disease, or recovery outcomes for patients with addiction over 20 years. See, these are the types of things that are traditionally administered by a consensual process, medical oversight, peer review, and regulation.
The teen girl demographic is regarded as the most important for consumer tech adoption: this is openly admitted and a tried-and-true business strategy in the Valley, leading to the improbable scenario where you have a bunch of usually white men in their 40s, sitting around and trying to figure out how to get teen girls onto a platform. Giving absolutely no shits about teen girls, often including their own daughters (Steve Jobs treated his daughter absolutely sickeningly), because they know where there are teen girls, everyone else follows. Without teen girls, no social media would have ever taken off. Studies have even shown that VCs with teen girl daughters, end up having more successful portfolios than those who don’t; and VCs admit openly spying on their children to see the newest trends and latest technology habits.
There is an ever-replenishing supply of children to get to at a young age, to make sure they are being raised with the technologies (often under the threat that they won’t be competitive in the job market or school without it), comfortable with technologies, and used to constant surveillance, to make sure that they are providing a consistent data stream, to make sure they are profiting off that child or teen (in the form of the giant amount of money advertisers pay to reach them and that various corporate partners pay to obtain the data). Data is the lifeblood of the industry and more relevantly, it is child and teen lifeblood. Recently, the top venture capitalists in the industry, have been talking about the birth rate and the drop of birth rates in San Francisco; and that must be situated in the context of the industry’s success being directly related to the number of children and teens they are able to manipulate onto the platform, get them hooked, and start profiting from.
For tech, children and teens are something to make money off of. Especially teen girls. Here’s a very important design pattern: not only is tech making money off teen girls, they are actually using teen girls as bait to attract the teen boy demographic and… the predatory adult male demographic. Girls, and specifically looking at them, drives the entire consumer market. This has been known since early academic studies on what type of behavior was happening on Facebook; and again and again, it’s all about looking at girls, in many cases, the younger the better.
Tech needs both “watchers” and “watched” to really make its revenue flow. Its business model is reliant on one group of users (boys, men), taking a position of: obsessively looking at, stalking, messaging, jerking off to, harassing, preying on, creeping on, making fun of, sexually abusing and extorting, bullying, etc, girls; and girls, being tricked and manipulated and coerced into ponying up the content and access to them. So not only does the platform need girls and women on it, it NEEDS boys and men to engage in *these specific behaviors*: perverted, sexual, violent and harassing obsessive surveillance, generating massive page views and engagement and creating the pressure on girls that makes them accord with the goals of the platform as well. The platform has an investment in actually addicting boys and men to just a never-ending feast of young girls; this is quite reminiscent of conversations that have been had about artificially generating pornography addiction, as far as the model and structure of getting boys and men hypnotized by algorithms and incentives and emotional reactivity and unlimited access, the “gamification” of getting girls. The girls MUST post the content and the boys/men MUST look in order to make the entire business model work. And while you can’t make a bad man good, you can make a bad man worse — and I think we really need to be discussing how the patterns that social media networks make for us, are propelling this predatory behavior because it fuels key dynamics for their empires. What do you think boys and men do on their phones all day? They look at women. In this scenario, there is a ongoing cycle between the girls who are being exploited, and the boys and men that are driving an entire agenda against them.
All of this behavior that boys and men do is excessive and invasive, so that girls are living under constant surveillance, stalking, pestering, unwanted messages, unwanted “dick picks”, sexual harassment constant sexual propositions, even things like cat fishing; and this is happening to younger and younger girls; the flip side of that being that tech companies are very literally rewarding girls and women for male viewership; often abstracted behind “impressions” or “page views” so the actual predatory dynamics on the site are covered up by feel-good dopamine hits. So, you have an incentive there that is generated by the platform and by other users, to continuously cater to these use cases… a big reason why we see more and more sexual content being generated by minors and broadcast by social media to the world.
If boys and men suddenly stopped obsessively reloading and getting off to girls on there and terrorizing them and hitting on them and generally fucking with them, how do the dynamics of revenue on the platform change? If girls were only posting images of themselves once or twice a week? Or once a month? Twice a year? Birthday and New Year’s pics? Social media “success” on the platform is directly tied to how much you are posting photos of yourself as a young woman, the amount of access you give to yourself — that is what it is incentivizing girls to do, using decades of psychological tricks and data analysis and gamification and reward programming, to give them a good reason to keep doing it even though the harm is so great and so palpable. This is certainly one of the main dynamics that results in the misery, eating disorders, insecurity, and body dysmorphic disorders we see caused by these platforms; that girls’ tech-extorted images are resulting in ongoing violations, abusers and harassments of them. The more they post, the more they hurt. Its well worth mention at this juncture, that eating disorders are highly tied to child and teen sexual abuse, and there is significant evidence that children are, in fact, being sexually harassed and abused in these online environments; rather than being about simple vanity, the way that teen girls feel from using the site, emerges out of the constant sexual abuse, manipulation and harassment that is going on; as well as being positioned in the panopticon, as its prisoner.
Remember that Facebook first took off among college students, anywhere from 17-23 or so, so you’re talking about a teenage demographic being the focus there as well, as far as what we now understand to be THE social fabric, clustered under Meta technology. Meta’s fundamental business and innovation model is distributing as many photos of girls and women to as many people as possible for all of them to look at as much as possible; that is the most fundamental indicator of its success, and its profit potential, and that’s the way it has always been. The teen girl is not only driving revenue for them directly as an advertising consumer (which they also maximize by creating insecurity and artificial need), but actually is used as a captive marketing and content team, that is actually creating the product, which is the ability for other people to consume them through a social media storefront. Teenage girls are not there as consumers alone; they are there as what produces the thing that is consumed. Teen girls drive the shape of the entire internet.
How can it possibly be, mathematically, a coincidence, that the most-sought demographic for tech companies, is the same demographic that suffers the most from it?
Because there are SO many harms that these kids are exposed to on these platforms, and I’ll start with the most egregious case, which is sexual abuse.
Who most wants to look at pictures of teen girls, to sexualize them, to hurt them?
It is absolutely no surprise that in this type of set up — the entire internet built around girls and people who want to look at them — that pedophilia occurs constantly. Ever since the internet started, tech has been quite literally generating a new, data-driven pedophile, who is able to look at millions of girls, contact thousands of them, groom and extort so many girls, often reaching just a ridiculous scale of abuse; the pedophile is given more tools than ever to commit attacks. He is able to meet other pedophiles, he is able to search for and find vulnerable girls, he is able to approach children online at a mass level, improving his techniques over time, he is able to purchase child sexual abuse material using anonymous currencies from contacts on platforms, he is able to determine the location of a girl and gain personal details of a girl, to stalk her, and so on. More and more, he is able to extort children, such as in this recent case where over 3,000 teen boys were attacked in an ongoing pattern of extortion schemes by child sexual abusers, resulting in dozens of suicides.
I’m not being hyperbolic; interests of pedophiles and platforms are very much aligned. If social media platforms are, as tech feminists have long posited, the platform for the male gaze, the male gaze at a child or teen is a pedophilic one, and that is a very important distinction to make.
While this might sound like it overly implicates tech companies in the result of child predation — there is this attitude that the blame lies with no one else but the perpetrator — I think we are far past the point where it is unquestionable that social media platforms have set up conditions that lead directly to pedophilia and that ever since my generation first got the internet, there was a giant wave of pedophile abuse as these organized, highly motivated psychopaths used it to feed on children. It hasn’t been fully exposed yet, but I feel confident that someday, the truth will come out, about how Millennials were the first victims of a pedophilic crime wave in the early days of the internet that continues to this day. There were so many girls that were kidnapped, assaulted, raped, terrorized, from that period on the early internet; what has changed? Nothing. Things got worse.
Pedophiles only grow more sophisticated. A tech business model that wasn’t specifically focused on delivering on-demand, finger tip access to young girls, focused around enabling access to them and messaging them and engaging with them and dehumanizing them and sexually objectifying and abusing them and trapping them as unpaid content laborers in an AI-generated artificial addiction, wouldn’t yield this same result. Pedophilia, like all other crimes of social oppression, doesn’t exist without a context or in a vacuum. Consistently , the “need” for social media platforms to acquire girls and to expose them to other audiences, has overwhelmed the need for girls to be safe; these apps have an inherently pedophilic design strategy. Argue with someone else, I know far too much about this.
So to descend the staircase of misery, I just cannot emphasize enough, that we have study after study after fucking study, that shows that children and teens who use these platforms:
Get eating disorders
Develop body dysmorphic disorder
Experience bullying
Become addicted to social media and gaming
Become incredibly lonely and isolated
Are harassed
Get stalked by people known and unknown
Develop depression
Develop anxiety
Experience increased stress
Suffer higher rates of suicidality and suicide
Lose a lot of money into bullshit like in-game tokens engineered to manipulate them into forking over money
Experience disruptions in sleep schedule from screen time and emotional activation from devices/social media apps
Are attacked by pedophiles and other sexual abusers
We have known this since the very early days of Facebook. Studies in recent years show that Meta is a serial offender and that both Facebook and Instagram are causally linked to a lower quality of life. There are many many studies, across the world, that have found the same results over and over and over again. A newer one indicates that Facebook, since launch, is responsible for an overall decrease in the mental health of the college students … that as it spread from campus to campus, psychological damage followed.
If this was a fucking insulation they had found in the walls of a school room, you would rip this shit out. These apps are literally toxic to children, and we KNOW they are toxic to them, and Mark Zuckerberg’s fortunes are STILL being built off young girls and specifically turning them into bait and entertainment and specifically ruining their self esteem and giving them emotional and mental problems that could easily last a lifetime; and the BASELINE of all of this, is that CHILDREN are being harmed. Without that, the whole fucking model falls apart.
Meta HAS a business model that they have ACROSS products, and they will continue to have the same business model as it rolls out the Metaverse. If it goes the way they want it to, the Metaverse will be even more potent because you spend even MORE time in it and it is far more immersive; Zuckerberg wants to make this where kids go to school, where they go to medical appointments, where they play games with their friends. The level of invasiveness goes up big time, as does screentime.
Where is the bottom for us, where do we, as adults, many of us with children of our own, say that it is not okay to make literally billions of children LITERALLY BILLIONS of children objectively and provably, feel worse?
It cannot be overstated that this is all going on, in a very formative time period; very young children are using these tools. Even where platforms have rules around the ages of users, these are obviously “evaded” and children are getting onboarded to these platforms younger and younger. So this is a time when all sorts of changes are happening to the brain: learning how to have relationships, developing key cognitive skills and problem solving abilities, developing interests and hobbies, slowly developing autonomy and boundaries, and a host of other remarkable developments that are harvested, put into a giant petri dish and poked at in social experiments by tech companies.
As Foucault points out:
“The Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best. To try out pedagogical experiments — and in particular to take up once again the well-debated problem of secluded education, by using orphans.... The Panopticon is a privileged place for experiments on men, and for analyzing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them."
As it is oft remarked, millennials didn’t get the internet in their homes until maybe middle school or high school; this means that at least some of the important stages of their brain development, happened without the incursion of Meta’s social weapons platforms. Now, babies are already using iPads, a toy that Steve Jobs himself wouldn’t let his child use. Now, there is no hope for a tech-free childhood; I have seen so many very young people on iPads at restaurants with their parents, absorbed in some Facebook game or some other “social” bullshit designed to get kids addicted.
With the Metaverse, kids might have no choice other than to be on a Meta platform for most of their days. For a struggling and decaying schools system — a lot of it because rich people have abandoned the public school system and “higher education” has gate kept access and restricted equal access to endowment money and so on, they are a sitting duck for takeover.
I must cause you to again contrast with how rich people in tech treat their children; many of them treat technology like it is a contagion. Their kids are not taught on computers, they are shepherded by extremely high tuition private schools just for tech’s rich kids, where they learn new languages, enjoy small class sizes and the physical presence of their peers, where kids are actively engaged in the learning process as opposed to checking in and out of a robotic learning experience, likely taught by an AI.
The future promised by the tech industry is not good enough for the children of the people who design it; they know that these tools cause damage, cause isolation, they know that children in educational online programmers are experimented on and tested on by their companies, with the main motive being profit. Tech execs who raise their kids without tech include Reddit and Snapchat, surprise surprise, a sudden admission that they know how fucking dangerous these sites are; after all, they made fuck tons of money on them and watched as girls on it were violently harassed and sexually exploited.
The people who make this shit go to great lengths to keep kids away from this technology, but you can bet your ass they won’t take this similar resolve into their offices to fight for the best of causes for your kids. Increasingly, the ability to have an “offline” at all, is related to economic status. As is the ability to have privacy, not to be experimented on, to not be plunged into a 24/7 data-driven reward system designed by machine learning techniques.
The tech elite are building the Metaverse for you, but they will not be living there — they’ll be living in the real world, which for the rest of us, may be a closing window. Your average kid spends 6 hours a day in school… that’s 6 hours that the kids could be monitored in a Meta school room, that’s money on educational spending that could be going to Meta, that’s 6 hours that teen girls aren’t producing content. In what way will Metaverse classes not only harvest data but use it to drum up business?
We used to talk all the time about the importance of getting computers into lower-income families and poorer schools, of making sure there was digital equality, internet access in all homes, etc. But if this technology is actually detrimental, we’re actually advocating for a host of bad outcomes that fit in with tech’s agenda perfectly — in an all-computer school system you would expect to see problems with the development of social skills, group learning, secure attachment, with attention span, high sense of isolation and anxiety, and who knows what the fuck else will happen, especially for kids with learning disabilities and other differences. We do know that from the pandemic, that despite “remote learning”, children were developmentally delayed throughout the pandemic; while that is of course due to a variety of factors in an incredible moment in human history, it also shows the ways that teaching young children on a computer, has a number of side effects, the same side effects that we see across technology products: isolation, low self esteem, depression, and abuse.
One of the first targets of the new GPT-3 ChatBot application is… school. The institution that does AI development for GPT-3 , was funded by people with very strong views on education: notably, Peter Thiel, who has long encouraged kids to drop out of college and go to work immediately in tech/start a company; and Marc Andreessen, who has recently discussed how GPT-3 will take away the need for school by eliminating writing papers (he remarks on the waste of time of having youth write papers that will never be read; somehow forgetting that learning how to write and think and put together arguments and be critical, starts with not being very good at those things and then getting better over time BECAUSE YOU WORKED ON THOSE THINGS.) Ops, ops and ops.
The metaverse promises to bring a permanent switch to remote schooling for struggling school systems; after all, this saves so much money on facilities and staffing and maintenance and training and teachers and sports fields and field trips and computer labs. As usual, it will be sold as “leveling the playing field” or “promoting equality in education”. Meta profits the most when we are all on our devices using its products, a captive audience in our houses; there’s a reason why Meta’s data and power and money more than doubled during the pandemic. The longer that Meta is strapped to our faces, the better for them. Having kids go to a physical, human school room represents losing a lot of data that they could be capturing if the kid was operating in the Metaverse for all or much of the school day. Think about it the experiments they would be able to run! The Meta world is just one big testing ground to see how to make primarily young people do whatever corporations want them to.
A piece someone wrote for my magazine years ago discussed how surveillance in schools primes children and grooms them to accept a life of perpetual surveillance — its still a vital read today and just as timely as when it was published in 2014. We don’t have to wonder what the result of more surveillance and more data harvesting will be on kids, more war on billions of children with data weapons that knowingly ruin lives as a standard and ongoing effect. We know what this Metaverse will be like: eventually, it will be known as one of the worst and certainly largest-scale human rights abuses, of our generation.
I think this point speaks to the sadism that is expressed by tech companies. Meta has never done anything about the “kids kill themselves because of Facebook” problem, often waving away concern under the idea that well, it’s bound to happen with any technology and with such a big system, it’s hard to control; this is just an organic feature of operating a global social media network, what can you do. But it’s not. A massive, deliberately controlled machine is making SURE it happens. It’s a life-long psyop and we have to make the experiments stop.
Schooling brings us to the “teach kids to code” movement. Younger and younger, and more and more commonly, children are put in coding bootcamps and join kid-sized hackathons and are taught computer programming in school. This has had huge proliferation and is regarded as a common good, especially if it’s about getting girls into tech. Much of the learn to code build-out, took off on the idea that girls specifically were not exposed to computers at a young age, resulting later in a “pipeline problem,” meaning there just weren’t enough qualified/experienced women to go to work in tech.
Yet another place where we see the girl/women in tech movement providing the justification for morally suspect directions, such as, forcing kids in middle school to begin job training for a Facebook gig, and all along Meta is the bootcamp “sponsor”. It seems clear now that the “pipeline problem” was something tech companies made up and promoted to explain why fully half of women who do join the field, quit by year 10, and many much sooner than that, I myself dropped out of the industry before 10 years and know many others who did as well, irrespective of the “success” of our careers.
Conveniently for tech companies, the “pipeline issue” has justified this entire build out of an industry training program, that begins far before children are able to reason critically about technology, especially as these are industry-controlled programs and … we don’t even think critically about technology as adults in the tech industry.
In the proliferation of so-called pipe-line programming, I wonder if we stopped to consider the motives of the tech industry; after all, if they didn’t want these things to happen, like not having enough women in tech, they would… hire women in tech and treat them well enough that they would stay. It was a classic example of a problem that was with the industry, that was pushed out to the corners of the problem… and onto young girls once more.
It would make a ton of sense to keep the teaching of programming independent from these corporations’ agendas — I.e., so you aren’t shoving even MORE tech in kid’s faces from the same predatory companies. A focus on independence was simply never present, important because this would theoretically be a way for children to envision a new type of technologist and industry. Like, one with some fucking baseline moral principles.
But no, the industry has come to control the full range of coding programming even from elementary on up; Girls Who Code, that works with kids as young as middle school, was recently sponsored by Raytheon — this is straight up child abuse to let the war machine into their heads in fucking motherfucking middle school are you kidding me. The funding comes from them, and the efforts become tainted by the dominance of industry perspective, and the organizations become dependent on the large checks. Important to note that while these sponsorships are large checks for the (primary non profit) coding programs, they are very small sums for the companies. From the perspective of tech’s labor and employment goals, we gave them an astronomically low price an entire pipeline of talent. Their donations were tax deductible anyway, meaning tech didn’t actually spend a penny. For that, for a minor tax write-of, we offered a country-wide pantheon of FREE multi-year trainings for the industry’s talent needs.
And outside of the contracts with the tech companies, the COMMUNITY was subsidized these programs through often really significant support and donations, we thought that this was a way to positively contribute to the role of women in technology, but if you think about it a certain way, it means *we * were funding programs that primarily benefit tech companies in the form of previously-trained, custom-built programmers. Since the main purpose of these programs is employability in the industry, that becomes their measure of success, so it was the companies that have ended up dictating the curriculums — what computer languages to teach, what types of apps to sample with, what infrastructure to use, what tools to use — to learn about crypto and Web3 as opposed to any other possibilities that take place in a context BESIDES a highly-corrupt industry that we know has a huge sexual abuse problem, putting the entire question of getting girls into tech in new light. (Here’s a good read on letting the tech industry dictate curriculum from years ago; since then, this problem has at least 10xed)
You might argue that this isn’t child labor, fine. It is clearly some type of child exploitation, to essentially be training them for a corporate or forever-war job that might actually start 10 years later, during a time when the only priority should be the child’s development, not solving the industry’s manufactured talent shortage. I think that brings us into some pretty serious questions about exploitation and control and agenda and at what age the corporation enters the child’s life as an authority and how a child learns how to accept that authority and think and build in a way dictated by, again, an industry that is renowned for super-powering cops, fixing markets, generating giant wealth gaps, inventing new means of warfare, resulting in large scale mental health problems, and ruthlessly bulldozing cities filled with children. The entire training of people is outsourced, yet very much in accordance with corporate and industry desire and maybe whim and yes, experiment; these people are constantly experimenting on children and teens and they absolutely are doing it in these educational settings.
This is all happening at an age where children are very, very impressionable. What is being delivered in this pipeline, and to who? Kids that are ready to just strap in and go to work building a drone or an AI or a robot that is going to automate tens and millions of workers out of jobs, or blow up a residential building in a city far away?
This entire pipeline has been presented as “we’re getting more girls excited about code so in the future, we’ll have a more equitable industry!!.” But in my opinion, a more honest description would be “we are going to start training kids from 12-13 for the jobs they will have at a FAANG company so when they finish high school they’ll be prepared to start their first coding job, age 18.” (It cannot be overstated how much tech hates schools and has longed for years and in many directions, to interrupt school) So with tech highly encouraging kids to drop out of colleges, and those kids soon trying to “decide” between racking up ever higher levels of student debt in going to college, or going to work immediately, maybe even from their parent’s house, making six figures at FAANG, well, it’s not much of a choice, is it?
This is basically FAANG putting its claws around children and teens to ensure a cheap labor source — the desire for tech companies to drive down the cost of programming is reflected in their rapid move into coding AIs, huge rounds of layoffs and firings, and they are thinking about how to supply the industry with talent for the next 50, 60, 100 years; they work on long timeline, but even to look at it microcosmically, if you start someone programming at 13 and have them working for tech by 18, that’s only a five year turnaround on a training you barely paid for; giving them the skills at an early age means they don’t HAVE to go to college to learn it, one of their pipeline hubs has already take care of that.
This is another way that technology futures are being dimmed; if you dictate an industry curriculum, you’re not even giving kids the opportunity to dream, play, tinker, explore, and learn how to use this cool thing to do something different. I wouldn’t be surprised if kids actually start working for the industry earlier and earlier, even if its only in summer camps framed as mentorship where kids spend several months embedded in teams, and so forth.
We DEFINITELY have child labor all over our history and all over the supply chain to our companies. Multiple tech companies have been implicated in child labor abuses. In 2020, Tesla, Google, Apple and Microsoft were all named in a lawsuit for “knowingly benefiting from and aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children in Democratic Republic of Congo (‘DRC’) to mine cobalt,” resulting in devastation to the child miners of 14 families. Six of the children were killed. And child labor continues to be a core part of the cobalt mining industry which is vital to the industry’s critical lithium-ion batteries. Here again we see the absolute sadism which tech expresses towards children, knowing full well that this human rights atrocity is the basis of the cobalt supply chain.
Children die from the toxic effects of tech products and in the making of them.
The harm to children outside of digital space, extends ESPECIALLY to those in Oakland and elsewhere in the Bay area, where the industry’s new surveillance systems, body cameras, tasers, gunshot detection and more, make it easier than ever for the racist cops, to criminalize these kids, commit violence against them, and lock them up in juvie or worse. Latino youth are 3x more likely to have been arrested, and for Black youth, that’s 4x. 300,000 LGBT kids are arrested each year - 13-15% of kids in the juvenile system are queer or trans. The US incarcerates more youth than any other country; and 15% of these are girls, majority Black and Native girls, many of whom have experienced sexual violence.
Tech is at many points in that process.
We must always look to the way that tech impacts children outside of consumer offerings, but also, how technology as an economic and political force is operating on them and being used against them. These are always related and parallel. So, I will direct you to Silicon Valley itself, where tech has had a huge, negative impact on the local communities and particularly children, by significantly widening the wealth gap, by subjecting their parents to exploitative working conditions and poverty wages, leaving them in poverty and without medical access; forcing their families out of the area and not being able to receive a equitable education and missing school. Oakland officially became white-dominant in the past few years, ultimately surpassing Black people in demographics after tech companies had waged war on Oakland since the first bubble. Anything to take it over.
Black children are in so many ways, so many outlets, so many systems, so many places, victims of tech. From an important 2020 report on poverty in the Bay Area from Tipping Point, we know that:
1 in 3 families are out of money before the month is up
1 in 5 people, majority Black people, have less than $400 in emergency funds
Black and Latinx families are twice as likely not to have 4 months of savings
Despite often working for the same companies, “the prototypical tech worker may enjoy free food, private commuter buses, and stock options, [while] more than one million workers in the Bay Area lacked the basic benefits that many of us expect from employment.”
Tech has knowingly and deliberately depressed wages to these families, took away benefits, chased them out of their homes when they couldn’t afford them anymore, took over their neighborhoods, gentrified their living. And this CONTINUES. Despite this being one of the most monied regions in the world, with an incredible concentration of capital and with an incredible amount of wealth, the People live in worse and worse conditions. This oppression exists and happens only because tech wishes it to. It could very easily make sure all Bay area workers are paid fairly and have benefits and emergency savings; its easy to stay out of their neighborhoods; easy to make sure all children have housing and clothes. Ruling the Bay since the 70s. Yet consistently, the People of the area have been pushed down, extorted, robbed, policed and criminalized. And children have been the hardest hit once more.
In all, you are looking at a very comprehensive harm that is being done to children, by design, by tech. In so many ways, technology is making the world worse for children and teens and it will do that forever. This is how they make their money. This is who they are. In their own homes and private lives, they openly treat technology like poison — tech is something for YOUR children to have.
In the long run, technology may very well end up being the story of how one small group of people put all the kids onto a platform they control, leaving them powerless to escape the technology, their lives becoming ever more dependent on it and subject to its rulers, who themselves, continue to enjoy a far emptier “IRL” world, where privilege is in NOT having to deal with technology. After all, they’ve done everything they can not to inflict on themselves the future that they are making for others.
Treating children brutally: this is fundamental to the tech industry. It is fundamental to their technology platforms, to their revenues, to their business models, to their economic dominance over others, to their history, to their supply chain, to how they interact with communities that they invade and take over. This is the result of their work: killing kids in mines and with inflicted suicide, interfering with their cognitive development, criminalizing them and hunting them with tech-powered super-cops, experimenting on them like lab rats, using them as bait, delivering them to pedophiles, destroying their self esteem and sense of self, giving them mental disorders, taking their money, going in their schools, forcing them to learn code from the tenderest ages, so they will be good employees for FAANG someday.
These should not be the results of tech for children. It is suggested that this is “the price we pay” to stay connected to each other, but it doesn’t have to be that way, it is absolutely preposterous to suggest that the only way to connect us together is by subjecting us to these horrifying “side effects”, which are in actuality, the point in and of themselves.
They *extract* from our children; they EXTRACT our children. You can’t reform that, you can’t fix it. You’re not going to teach people who have been exploiting children as the core of their business model, for 20 years, to give a shit about humanity’s future.
They must be removed from leadership and the technology platforms must be turned over to the People where we can lead an inquiry into all of this and start working on getting children into a safer world and into safer technology, and give them a place in deciding the direction of the future, rather than the future being imposed on them and built on their degradation.