Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/sunday-review/human-contact-luxury-screens.html

by bookofjoe • 7 years ago

207 130 7 years ago

abledon2• 7 years ago

"A toddler who learns to build with virtual blocks in an iPad game gains no ability to build with actual blocks, according to Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital and a lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidelines on screen time."

This is sad. I myself am addicted to computer games but played with a TON of lego growing up. I can easily rotate 3d shapes and a bunch of stuff in my visual eye, and imagine the 'feel' of how it would interact with other physical things and I think its probably somewhat attributed to all those formative years. Internet didn't exist or when it did , ran at 14.4kbps, not very compelling. Can't believe the struggles modern kids will have growing up trying to combat video game / screen addiction.

samcday2• 7 years ago

Contrived example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk

I'm right with you. I grew up on the cusp of the internet's explosive growth. I got online every chance I could get, but until I was in my mid-teens our internet was dial-up and I wasn't allowed to monopolize the phone line.

I still spent a lot of time on computers, but without the internet it was a very different dynamic, IMHO. You had to engage the critical-thinking bits of your brain a lot more, since answering questions didn't involve inputting those questions into Google and having StackOverflow/Wikipedia/random blog posts give you the answer sans any of the process/context required to arrive at that answer.

I also spent more time interacting with things physically too. Lego (parents bought me a Mindstorm kit one christmas), physical books, even just tearing apart old computers and putting them back together.

XorNot• 7 years ago

I actually have a different concern then "screen time" which is just "play space".

High density living in cities is dreadful for providing enough outdoors / free activity space for kids to be kids - too much noise (or a risk of them making too much noise), too much communal property they shouldn't damage or can't work on.

Growing up, I have memories of my dad building things around the house (including our cubby house), having a sandpit etc. How do you do any of that in an apartment in the city? How do you even have reasonable transit distances to places you can do those things?

anovikov• 7 years ago

Well people in all of the free world have been largely living in cities for 2-3 generations now, what's new here?

crawshaw• 7 years ago

There is a city playground 3 minutes walk from my apartment with a sandpit, swings, and climbing structures. Almost always, there is another kid there for mine to play with. We go every day it is warm enough.

This is not unusual in Manhattan. Pick any apartment and walk five minutes in every direction. You'll find a playground.

In the winter we take the subway 20 minutes to a large indoor complex with better equipment and hundreds of other children. They are not quiet!

Of all the places we go, his favorite is the subway, where he gets to say Hi! and Bye! to lots of people.

I dread the loneliness of the burbs.

shhehebehdh• 7 years ago

Building permanent fixtures is right out if you don’t have a yard, this is true. However the urban environment offers a lot of other beneficial things that kids in the suburbs rarely experience (as one who grew up there): regular interaction with people from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, lots of walking and use of shared transportation resources, and a shot at earlier independence, since you don’t have to drive to get where you’re going. Also, we do have parks, they just aren’t as big as the ones in the burbs. On the other hand, I take my kids to the park far more often than I was taken as a child, since it’s less than a five minute walk away.

Anyway, it’s fine to worry but personally I’d try to hold off until there’s some empirical evidence that there is a problem. If there is (“study shows kids raised in city are maladjusted” — after controlling for all other variables), I’m not aware of it.

moorhosj• 7 years ago

People have been living in cities for centuries. Along with people, they tend to have the highest density of places like libraries, parks and museums. Those all seem like great places for kids to learn and explore.

Also, not everyone in a city lives in an apartment. Condos and single-family-homes typically include an outdoor space.

throwaway2873914• 7 years ago

I grew up in the burbs and found it absolutely "dreadful" as far as being able to do things outside without a car. Now that I live in a city, I often think about how much happier and freer I would've felt as a child growing up in one. (I had similar feelings when I actually was a kid and watched cartoons like "Hey Arnold!" set in cities. I was so jealous of those kids.)

As a 12 year old in a city you can walk to a park or get on the metro/bus and visit some friends or go see a movie etc. In the burbs if your parents aren't home or are otherwise unwilling to drive you somewhere you're basically stuck at home counting the days until you turn 16.

jimktrains22• 7 years ago

High density living in cities is dreadful for providing enough outdoors / free activity space for kids to be kids

This is simply so untrue, that's it's laughable. High density, urban spaces have by-and-lqege more opportunities and places for kids than the hellhole that is the exurbs and most of the post war suburbs.

bunderbunder2• 7 years ago

My city, Chicago, is packed with playgrounds. There are four within a ten minute walk of my house. If we want to go further afield, there are also several larger parks with a bit more room to run around. Some of the community gardens set aside space for kids to play in the dirt, and the Park District is starting to get in on the "natural playscapes" thing.

Our apartment building has its own patio space, a reasonably large butterfly garden, and some gardening plots in the back yard. We've set aside one of the garden plots for the kids to do whatever they want in (last summer's cherry tomato harvest was a sight to see), and turned another into a sandbox.

We spend lots and lots of time outside in those sorts of communal spaces. For my part, I feel sorry for kids living in these intensively inward-facing suburban environments where there are no sidewalks or community spaces, and kids are dependent on adults with cars to help them get together with their friends.

pulisse• 7 years ago

Growing up, I have memories of my dad building things around the house (including our cubby house), having a sandpit etc. How do you do any of that in an apartment in the city? How do you even have reasonable transit distances to places you can do those things?

I walk across the street to the municipal park, where there's not only a playground, but also open outdoor spaces that people use for (to cite things I've observed this weekend) picnics, childrens' birthday parties, pickup sports, martial arts classes, playing frisbee with dogs, and general horsing around. There are smaller parks with playgrounds every 3 blocks or so in my part of town.

People raised in a stereotypical American suburb (as I was) tend not to grow up with common spaces that people use for individual purposes. It can be easy to end up equating space that's useful with space that one has exclusive use of, and so assume that city dwellers must be deprived.

astura• 7 years ago

This is insane... High density living provides a whole childhood of activities, both formal and informal.

I grew up in a midsized city, when I was a kid I could walk, bus, or ride my bike literally anywhere I wanted to go without really any notable restrictions, including parks with sandpits. My parents kept a draw full of bus schedules. The best part is there were literally kids everywhere, so you were never lonely even if you left the house alone. We'd organize pick-up games of soccer or baseball or kickball, etc. I even went ice skating by myself. Sometimes I'd just walk outside during the summer just to see which of the "neighborhood kids" were out. I'd spend hours just exploring the city on foot or bike, so much so that I'd come home with sore legs. All snow storms were followed by sledding in the park. I spent very little time with my parents.

When we got older it was mall and movies, record stores, arcades.

We also had a back yard, shared between six families.

Sometimes my parents would even send me on errands for them.

I had an after school job starting at 16 and I'd never be able to if I had to be driven there, my dad was always home, but without a car. I'd take the bus there.

I was rarely home, it was amazing.

Compare that to the suburbs or rural areas where the only way to get anywhere is a parent driving a kid somewhere. Sounds stifling. My parents would never shuffle me around everywhere. (In fact, I didn't even care for it as an adult, sometimes I just wanted to go for a walk! But leaving required a car, no sidewalks, traffic much too fast for a bike)

dagw2• 7 years ago

I recently moved with my family from 'high density' living in the city to the suburbs and the truth is that the city actually had more outdoors / free activity space for kids, than where I'm currently at. There where at least 3 playground within easy walking distance of our apartment in the city, a school yard with outdoor basketball courts kids could play on after hours, plus a large city park/botanical garden with huge open spaces a 5 minute bus ride/ 20 minute walk away.

jimmy1• 7 years ago

Luckily for me, they still sell legos! And you best believe my daughter will be playing with them as soon as she is old enough.

europsucks4• 7 years ago

What will earn him more money in later life, though - stacking bricks, or using a computer?

Why can't you do both?

Did they also study how much you learn about using a computer by stacking bricks?

What if they found that kids who only play with bricks suck at Tetris? Would that be a cause for concern?

tonyedgecombe2• 7 years ago

Which will earn him more money in later life, though

That's a poor measure of somethings value.

barry-cotter• 7 years ago

As someone who is aggressively positive on screentime and on money, this is still sad.

Children should be interacting with the physical world because they’re little animals who should be interacting with their surroundings to learn how they work, just as you and I should be using our bodies because it feels great and helps our minds to work.

Using a computer is an abstraction that can wait until after children have a solid model for how the world works. Computers are tools, wonderful, fascinating, useful tools, but Tetris isn’t even 3D, generalising from actual blocks to Tetris is not going to tax the imagination of anyone.

clarry• 7 years ago

What will earn him more money in later life, though - stacking bricks, or using a computer?

I'm pretty sure we recently saw a study that showed a lot of kids being tech illiterate despite growing with and regularly using a bunch of gadgets.

Turns out playing with a screen doesn't teach you computers.

izacus• 7 years ago

What will earn him more money in later life, though - stacking bricks, or using a computer?

What does using a computer here mean? Playing video games? Staring at YT videos? Or coding?

marmaduke• 7 years ago

I think this incidentally also explains why we have as yet no human like AI: no computer has grown up as a toddler has, learning the same skills etc etc.

There’s a whole field of embodied cognition and linguistics that predicts this

alexheikel• 7 years ago

There is one actually. It’s human and looks like AI. Take a look at Hal in the AppStore

protomyth3• 7 years ago

As an aside, get the big (foot cube) blocks for younger children. They do help with stacking and play at an early age.

hopler5• 7 years ago

Marvin Minsky suggested that LEGO corresponded to the decline of America inventiveness, because LEGO structures are mechanically fake.

Seems analogous to the argument against video games replacing blocks.

https://youtu.be/g5vPVJsZ948

egypturnash• 7 years ago

"Mechanically fake"? Did he make this argument before or after the Technix line existed? Because that stuff will teach you a ton about how physical machines work.

maehwasu• 7 years ago

according to Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital and a lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidelines on screen time

And really, if we can’t unthinkingly trust Dimitri Christakis of Seattle Children’s Hospital, what can we believe in???

The journalistic practice of inserting quotes from official-sounding people as “evidence” is epistemologically revolting.

malvosenior4• 7 years ago

Indeed. I have a hard time believing that a child moving around in a full 3D virtual environment isn’t building spatial skills. Have you ever seen an “old” person play Minecraft or a FPS? Effectively playing a game like that takes immense spatial reasoning.

shas3• 7 years ago

American Academy of Pediatrics is a bit of a paternalistic joke. A lot of the “evidence” for their recommendations is from garbage observational studies. There’s also an ideological tilt towards whatever is the fad among upper-middle class parents (I am talking about their lifestyle recommendations and such, not obvious medical guidelines like vaccinations).

mattkrause2• 7 years ago

Sorry, what?

I agree that we shouldn’t have unquestioning faith in anything anyone says. However, that doesn’t mean we also need to assign equal weight to everyone’s ideas. If someone has relevant expertise—-and being the lead author of a professional organization’s guidelines is surely relevant here—it doesn’t seem bonkers to give their persepective a bit more weight.

Mentioning actual research would be better, of course. I would bet dollars to donuts that the next bit of the author’s conversation with him was “For example, in our 2005 APAM paper, we found that....” However, the newspaper article’s author probably doesn’t want to go on a long tangent trying to meta-analyze the existing research, all to make a point that’s incidental to the article’s thesis. In that context, a quote from an expert seems totally reasonable.

tzs• 7 years ago

He's the director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children's Research Institute, and a professor at the School of Medicine of the University of Washington, who has published over 170 research articles and also a pediatrics textbook, and whose research has focused on how early experiences impact children and their learning environments [1]. That seems like it should qualify him to offer a meaningful opinion on the topic at hand.

OK, to be fair, they didn't mention all that in the Times article, but they did mention that he is the lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics's guidelines on screen time. As far as I am aware, the AAP has a good scientific reputation, so one would expect that they wouldn't get someone who doesn't know his stuff to author their guidelines.

The Times also has a good reputation, so I'd expect the journalist to have looked up Dr. Christakis and seen that he appears to be qualified on this subject.

You are right that we shouldn't unthinkingly trust...but we also to avoid being excessive about it, because no one has the time to personally check everything. This is why reputation matters. If you get your information from reputable sources, you can delegate more of the checking to them without much risk. This is one of those cases, especially since they gave enough information to trivial look up more about him if you don't want to go by the Times and the AAP reputations.

[1] https://www.seattlechildrens.org/directory/dimitri-a-christa...

ekianjo• 7 years ago

"A toddler who learns to build with virtual blocks in an iPad game gains no ability to build with actual blocks,

Based on what ACTUAL evidence?

mondo9000• 7 years ago

Video game playing has at least one notable crossover to real-life in the case of race car driving. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jann_Mardenborough

traderjane• 7 years ago

I've seen parents effectively control childrens relationship to digital entertainment by having a specific gaming console like Xbox, and having a computer that isn't that suitable for culturally in-demand games like Fortnite.

m3nu• 7 years ago

Not surprising so many IT people choose a "low tech" second career. Personally I'm looking into restarting mountain guide. Lower pay, but lots of healthy exercise in the outdoors.

cs02rm0• 7 years ago

I'm seriously considering my move out - currently thinking about doing the chateau thing in rural France.

Frustratingly, I could do my job from rural France and strike some sort of imperfect-but-preferable balance, it's only really company policies that prohibit it. I'm sort of hoping for a shift change that makes more places more open to offering a more mixed lifestyle.

badpun• 7 years ago

Define „so many”. I personally know of only one such person, and his low tech idea (diving school in Egypt) failed so that he had to go back to tech.

tonyedgecombe2• 7 years ago

I've known quite a few over the years, probably the most common profession I've seen them switch to is teaching.

maxxxxx• 7 years ago

I think quite a few including myself have dreams about this but only a few actually do it.

samcday2• 7 years ago

The voice is whatever the latest Android text-to-speech reader is. Mr. Wang said people can form a bond very easily with anything that talks with them. “Between a semi-lifelike thing and a tetrahedron with eyeballs, there’s no real difference in terms of building a relationship,” he said.

Welp. The dystopia is here folks. We're living in it right now.

Lonely old people are being cheered up by tetrahedrons with eyeballs employing harsh lo-fi guttural noises approximating human voices.

I mean I'm not rushing out the door right this moment to go find a job working in elderly care, but I wish our society had a better answer to how we take care of our older generations than this.

abledon2• 7 years ago

I think cultures like pre-ww2 china had a good thing going (they kinda still do!) with outdoor tai-chi groups.

A slow healing exercise that exercises functional movement in the body, acts as meditation[1], acts as a source for human bodily contact (pushing hands exercise/sparring routines) and creates community ties with other practitioners. This last point also being important in staving off dementia-related diseases.

maybe in another 100 years well have gotten over this hurdle. Go humanity!

[1]https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-health-be...

C14L• 7 years ago

Those groups are still everyehere, at least in all the cities I lived in or visited in China. Its not a hard thing to organize, just meet up in front of the building, play some music, and do some slow, syncronized dancing movements. Call it Tai Chi or whatever.

kodz43• 7 years ago

Social science/psycology departments world wide are doing their best work today, given the amount of data pouring in.

Give it time and don't focus too much on the doom and gloom crowd. The solutions never come from that crowd. I find following the work of actual ecologists, social scientists and psychologists a source of much more hope these days.

jdietrich2• 7 years ago

Social science/psycology departments world wide are doing their best work today, given the amount of data pouring in.

Ahem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

HNLurker22• 7 years ago

I kid you not. The latest Google TTS, the woman one I use it to listen to audiobooks, workout timers (tell me exercise etc) and yes. I actually do really like it and don't want to switch to anything else.

hopler5• 7 years ago

This is much of the plot of the movie Her.

nabla9• 7 years ago

It's possible that modern technology creates similar conditions that Harry Harlow used in his social isolation studies with monkeys. Social isolation was used to create animal model of clinical depression.

Google "cloth mother", "wire mother" and "pit of despair" if you want to learn more about Harlow.

hopler5• 7 years ago

Another alarming recent trend is people filling their homes with dogs, cats, or hamsters, replacing human contact.

moneytide12• 7 years ago

Welp. The dystopia is here folks. We're living in it right now.

I thought the same thing after reading:

Mr. Pedraza said. “The human is very important right now.”

And these lonely old people you're referring to are likely seen as burdens by their own families who regard every last scrap of their time as means to advance a career.

MasterScrat• 7 years ago

There were a lot of articles in 2015 about something similar for "fake relationships":

When you sign up for the service, you can design a boyfriend (or girlfriend) to your specifications — kind of like picking the genes for a designer baby, except for an imaginary adult. You pick his name, his age, his interests and personality traits. You tell the app if you prefer blonds or brunettes, tall guys or short, guys who like theater or guys who watch sports. Then you swipe your credit card — $25 per month, cha-ching! — and the imaginary man of your dreams starts texting you.

-- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/01...

orthecreedence2• 7 years ago

I wish our society had a better answer to how we take care of our older generations than this

Devil's advocate: the baby boomers are going to be (and already are) such an immense resource suck on the younger generations that I think it's good we're attempting to automate some of the burden away.

rhn_mk1• 7 years ago

Regarding tha avatars manned by strangers to help people feel good, they fall into a strange area where I don't know what to think about them. On one hand, it's clearly a fake relationship if the other half of it is in it for the money. I would not want that upon myself, as I view it as somewhat meaningless. On the other, it seems to have a positive effect on one's happiness, and hiring caretakers seems to operate on the same principle.

Is there a conflict of interest, where paying for someone's attention would incentivize that someone to become a disproportionate part of the other person's life?

If there's a difference between "real" and "fake" relationship, then that difference reminds me of filling a need (of stimulation?) using drugs: the drug makes the need go away, without the taker being stimulated in any useful way, "Brave New World" style.

iguy• 7 years ago

As you say, this exists with real humans too. Not just caretakers, but psychologists, talk therapy.

Seems like a similar thing, except that instead of the product being hand-crafted one-on-one by someone with a PhD, now it's mass-produced elsewhere by the mechanical turk.

hopler5• 7 years ago

Also spouses and grandchildren, in many many cases.

foxhop• 7 years ago

I sort of feel this way regarding my therapist relationship, he is my "friend" for money. I pay for his time to listen and talk with me.

pjc502• 7 years ago

I think the word is "parasocial", although that usually implies one-way. There's a big rise in "not quite one way" relationships with streamers, youtubers, camgirls etc.

plankers2• 7 years ago

Let me answer your question with an anecdote.

When my grandfather was approaching the grave and had to battle several serious medical issues, he hired a live-in nurse to help him with everything from cooking dinner to helping him on and off the toilet (she was a large Samoan lady). She took care of him full-time (not on a live-in basis, though) for a couple years, occasionally having someone from her family fill in if she needed to take care of something. The whole family got to know her quite well, and in a way she became a part of the family, performing the duties that the rest of us, for whatever reason, could not.

Would she have been there had she not been getting paid? No, but part of that has to do with the fact that had we not been paying her, she wouldn't even be able to afford a place to live or be able to fuel her car to come over every day.

Similarly, if insurance companies weren't paying the company that creates these avatars, which in turn pays the people who operate the avatars, these relationships would never have an opportunity to form in the first place.

As for my grandfather's nurse, she attended my grandfather's funeral with the rest of the family. Even brought her young granddaughter along with her. She wasn't being paid that day.

In other words, I think you're worrying too much.

gubbrora• 7 years ago

1. She was taking care of him as herself not as an avatar.

2. Because she was herself no one could replace her. If she is a shape with eyes. Then the next week someone else could take over. This makes the relationship way faker.

stringgames• 7 years ago

On one hand, it's clearly a fake relationship if the other half of it is in it for the money.

These 'fake' relationships aren't new. Therapy, counseling, coaching, tutors etc. They _can_ be incredibly rewarding and fulfilling.

lordnacho• 7 years ago

If you're a plutocrat who can do whatever he wants, you're still going to be using a phone or laptop to run your empire. Sure, you can decide to take time away from it, but I still haven't come across anyone who brags about how they don't use a screen.

The other thing is the nature of human contact. It's one thing to be close physically to someone, which until recently was the only form of contact. But I find that having internet services allows me to contact more people than ever before. You can reach out to find exactly the people who interest you, regardless of where they are. You can keep old friendships alive with a few minutes of typing each month.

Back in the days before the internet, you had to very wealthy to have friends in faraway places. It's not everyone who could do a Grand Tour of Europe while writing poetry and meeting a variety of interesting people.

frou_dh• 7 years ago

I remember reading an interesting observation that it's not particularly unusual that someone on minimum wage uses the exact same model smartphone as the richest person in the world.

Bearing in mind, it isn't some trivial object like toenail clippers. It's likely one of the more important objects in both of their lives.

bookofjoe4• 7 years ago

I remember realizing when I was younger that the richest person in the world's Coke is exactly the same as mine. Made me happy.

pcl• 7 years ago

This article strongly evokes the Primer in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. I wonder to what extent the Element Care folks think about that when designing their avatars and their interaction policies.

It's stunning how prescient Neal Stephenson's writings have been, both in terms of technological progression and also our human responses to those progressions.

hprotagonist• 7 years ago

Yep. The poor can’t afford ractors, and only the very rich neo-vikkies can afford people.

bookofjoe4• 7 years ago

From https://www.inc.com/yazin-akkawi/what-science-fiction-has-ta...

"Shortly thereafter, in 1992, just as Berners-Lee's World Wide Web had come to fruition, Neal Stephenson was inspired by the recent invention, which led to him publishing Snow Crash, a science-fiction novel that illustrated much of today's online life, including a virtual reality where people meet, do business, and play.

Even today, many of today's greatest innovators reference Snow Crash as inspiration for their work. Google co-founder Sergey Brin named the book as one of his favorite novels. Google Earth designer Avi Bar-Zeev has said he was inspired by Stephenson's ideas. At Facebook, the book, alongside Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, is also given to anyone who starts a job at the virtual-reality company Oculus.

What's funny, Stephenson, who is now the Chief Futurist at the VR startup Magic Leap, told Vanity Fair that he was just "making shit up" when he wrote the novel.

hopler5• 7 years ago

It raises the question, if Snow Crash and Diamond Age hadn't been written, what would have techies invented?

dougmwne• 7 years ago

Yes, I was just remembering diamond age as I read this. The similarity is quite striking. In the book, the computer was able to generate an interactive script and render an avatar, but couldn't replace the nuances of human speech and body language, hence live voice actors in your video games if you could afford it. The poor had to make do with the more robotic computer generated performances. And to take this parallel to the book even further, a voice actor ends up as a sort of invisible surrogate mother for the main character and ends up seeking her out. So just as in the article's care avatars, the human connection, no matter how tenuous, survives. I guess we're already living in Neal's dystopia.

europsucks4• 7 years ago

What a silly spin. Do they even provide any evidence that "the rich" use less screens? There were some reports about some specific rich people not giving their kids phones (I think mainly Zuckerberg). But "the rich"?

And what is the message they want to convey? The rich use screens to exploit us? Or to get rich, don't use screens? Both notions are completely ridiculous.

The main takeaway I guess is that there are "the rich", and the rest of us. So unfair! I feel the rage building inside of me already. Hate the rich! My internet addiction is strictly their fault! How dare they build addictive services like Google or Facebook, and thereby ruin my life?

Wait, did I just waste 15 minutes reading the NYT? I guess they are to blame, too, if I don't become rich.

christkv• 7 years ago

This seems very tied to individual countries culture. I’m pretty sure a study in Spain for example would get very different results.

zokier• 7 years ago

As human labor becomes more expensive, it is only natural that there will be large portion who can not afford it. I would say this is fundamental nature of increasing equality, even if that is somewhat paradoxical. Lots of services previously enjoyed by smaller middle class are becoming commodized, which means that some aspects of them is going to get cut to be sustainable/affordable.

pjc502• 7 years ago

He knows she is operated by workers around the world who are watching, listening and typing out her responses, which sound slow and robotic

Emotional labour is labour. That means it can be alienated, commoditised, intermediated by an internet platform, globalised, and provided by the lowest bidder.

The sharing economy sucks this out still further. Why spend your time being nice to an old person uncompensated when a VC-funded platform will pay you a few cents to perform niceness to a stranger across the world? "Sharing economy" replaces "belonging economy".

I'm not sure there's a way out of this without society as a whole moving away from money as the value of all things.

And let's not overlook the role of culture wars in all this, where old/young has become a particularly strong axis.

(Of course, if we look back in history at who used to be performing all this emotional labour uncompensated, we tend to find that it was women. And they were socially coerced into doing so...)

AznHisoka2• 7 years ago

“Why spend your time being nice to an old person uncompensated“

Sometimes I wish that Black mirror episode where you got reputation points for doing good deeds became real.

archibaldJ• 7 years ago

Well in China, we call it the social credit system

whatshisface• 7 years ago

I'm not sure there's a way out of this without society as a whole moving away from money as the value of all things.

The reason we do not already live in the dystopia you describe is that money is not actually believed to be the value of all things. People do not usually act as if it is.

sailfast• 7 years ago

This article presents no evidence that human contact is a luxury good, and by conflating the fact that some wealthy folks take “analog vacations” with an overall trend to try and improve quality of care in medicine / productivity / education via screens, the author muddies the issue and does people a disservice. In general right now, I’d say the trend is much worse in-person care and not screen-based care at lower prices. That said, those interactions are only a small piece of “human interaction.”

Stay close to family. Say hi to your neighbors. Play with blocks. Go outside. It’s dirt cheap. Your phone can even ride along with you in your pocket!

Education trending toward screens is troubling but at the same time it allows for totally custom learning paths for kids that scale better than a teacher. Blend it with playtime and interaction with other kids and that’s not always bad! Most of my education was learning in books, after all. Headline: “books are taking over human contact for the non-wealthy!!!”

I would also suggest that for most people the issue is not “cost” but “difficulty.” Screens are easy. You control them, and they’re not as difficult as people. Interacting with others carries risk. Take the risk!

malvosenior4• 7 years ago

"The rich do not live like this. The rich have grown afraid of screens. They want their children to play with blocks, and tech-free private schools are booming."

In my experience, the rich are misguided. They do indeed believe the above. Every rich person I know is raising their child to be anti-tech, and they cite a lot of the same things as this article (unsurprisingly written in the NYT). This is a mistake though. They are venting their own frustration with the lack of power the internet and computers have brought to their world on their children. Technology has removed gatekeepers, destroyed old media, turned politics on its head, devalued classically valuable roles... By turning their children against tech the rich are drinking their own kool-aid if you will.

Make no mistake. The future will be designed, commanded and operated from and through screens. Technology is power and the best thing you can do for your child is have them embrace tech head on.

mntmoss• 7 years ago

This is the take I was looking for. There are a few things about human interaction that need to be supplemented with time offscreen, but I'm imagining the rich children of tomorrow getting on social media for the first time and immediately self-destructing in spectacular fashion, because they haven't learned any etiquette or rules of engagement. They'll try to get their careers started by finding traditional gatekeepers and hierarchies to bypass, but most of them will have been absorbed into networks. Their education will have a lot of book knowledge and not a lot of hands-on with any technical issues or real teams(increasingly likely to operate in remote fashion). They'll know other rich kids, but they are likely to be climbing over each other to keep up the status quo of a crumbling system. A good portion will spend their twenties reconstructing their entire world view.

Wealth and power will still certainly be a thing, but in such a dynamic, connected environment, a simple hereditary transfer of power is likely to become harder in many venues.

blfr• 7 years ago

The wealthy can afford to opt out of having their data and their attention sold as a product. The poor and middle class don’t have the same kind of resources to make that happen.

This is a silly exaggeration. A paid email account is well under 10$/mo, domain included. Not using Facebook is free. Great, aggressive adblocking software is free.

Not only can the middle class afford it, it's not even a noticeable cost. You don't have to be a president of your own company with two secretaries to take basic control over your digital experience.

kareemsabri• 7 years ago

Also, who's "the rich"? Silicon Valley and NYC seem to have more people on screens, wearing airpods etc. than when I'm in rural Arizona, Louisiana, or California.

microtonal• 7 years ago

Yet, many people in the world cannot afford iPhones and have to use non-pristine Android versions where Google siphons data, along with a multitude of other shady parties that paid the vendor enough to put their apps or spyware on their phones.

Also, in a lot of parts in the world $10 per month is a lot of money.

jcfrei• 7 years ago

While I have only anecdotal evidence that this is indeed happening, it shouldn't be a surprise. It's an example of a class divide that has been discussed and outlined in many dystopian science fiction novels. I think once virtual reality becomes mainstream it will only become more pronounced, where rich people can afford the real experience (eg. travelling) while poorer people will have to settle for a virtual one.

781• 7 years ago

Human work was for a long time a luxury product.

It's the reason a hand-made swiss watch is so expensive, because you are literally paying a person to waste his time working on a trinket. Basically you "own" his time, and this is a luxury product.

eropple• 7 years ago

Historically it's been the other way round. Human labor has been profoundly cheap for most of human history, whether through work levies or slavery (or, today, wage slavery). Rich Westerners had live-in servants for centuries past slavery because they were cheap. In the West, such labor is not now expensive because A Wizard Did It; it's expensive because we decided that people deserve a life of some minimal standard and shouldn't be in thrall to one rich family their entire lives. (This doesn't always work. The delta in cost speaks for itself, and to the positive. It's a better goal than the alternative and you never find the people who'd be that underclass doing the advocacy for a return to it.)

The results of extremely specialized labor shouldn't be conflated with the work of humanity at large.

daenz• 7 years ago

My sense is that if an article is telling you what the rich are doing, they're really telling you what you should want to be doing. I get it, screen time and lack of social connection is hurting us. It's forcing a human evolution, and that isn't comfortable. Who will survive in a world where people willingly avoid eachother as much as possible, and who get all of their social interactions through technology? I don't know, but I do know it is too late to "walk it back" unless there is a massive solar flare that fries all of our tech.

carimura• 7 years ago

my wife pointed out that I sent this article to her one room away and was talking to her about it over imessage.

like boiling a frog, even the "aware" forget.

nostrademons• 7 years ago

On the social class issue:

I'm wondering if that's actually an example of social signaling and countersignaling. When PCs were expensive, the only people who bought them were those who a.) had a lot of money and b.) derived significant benefit from them. As they get cheaper, constraint a.) gets relaxed, and everyone derived significant benefit from them. Now that they're a commodity and used by the masses, one way to distinguish yourself from the masses is to adopt behaviors that say "I don't need to be plugged in to maintain my place in society." Computers are still a significant advantage, but one way to demonstrate resources & status is to conspicuously go without the advantages that the majority of the population enjoys, showing that you don't need them after all.

In this regard, it joins phenomena like eating organic; buying sports cars, or a Prius/Tesla; owning a big home (larger than the living space you actually need); and acting like an asshole. Most of these give neutral-to-negative benefits to the person in question, and cost more, but are frequently done by upper-middle-class or wealthy people because they can.

Ironically, reading the NYTimes is itself a class marker, one for upper-middle-class coastal elites. This happens to be exactly the group most likely to jump on the no-screen-time bandwagon and have leisure time available to spend on real human contact. So in some ways, this piece is telling their readership "You've arrived now. You can afford luxury goods."

Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good

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