opso

This is a bit tangential to the article, but the first paragraph stuck out to me.

    For a 12-year-old girl, playing games on an iPhone is pretty regular behavior. Almost all of my friends have game apps on their phones, and we’ll spend sleepovers playing side by side.

Back in my day, I was playing video games all the time, hacking them with debug cheats and GameShark. This was universally called a waste of my time by every adult I met, I had to go to great lengths to convince people I should be allowed to do it, and it's what on-ramped me to a super lucrative (and I hope useful to society) career in tech.

Yet here we've arrived at a state of affairs where most western children regularly spend inordinate amounts of time on walled-up instant-gratification video game platforms designed to vacuum money out of their parent's wallets, entirely detached from inspiring them to hack at things and go into technology. Somehow this state of affairs is perfectly normal and okay.

Yeah, I'm a bit bitter about it.