What We Have to Teach Our Children About the Internet?

Millennials haven’t been thought how to use the internet and here we are…

Real-life Tony Stark of the third millennium — Elon Musk has launched a private school called Ad Astra for his 5 sons back in 2014. Not only that — this school is located on the premises of SpaceX and has been accepting candidates, making this unique education institution “not so very private” after all.

Ok, I might have lied on this one — visit Ad Astra school page and You will understand how not private this educational project is. But just the existence of it raises a deep question…

What’s Wrong With Education Today?

It doesn’t reflect the world of today. Moreover, the education system we have today is not taking into account the future that today’s toddlers will be living in. Heck, in most places it’s not even taken into account what the world looks like today.

My best friend and idea-analysis buddy… My wife works in a company that collects returned and defected garments from huge clothing brands then fixes them and give clothes a second chance. This way this particular company is trying to solve the problem of waste made by the clothing industry.

From my point of view, this approach solves nothing and just justifies the current way the clothing industry rapes the planet, without actually suggesting or fixing any of the actual problems of overproduction. In other words — it’s a way to act all “green” while barely healing the symptoms, completely ignoring the actual disease. In the industry, wise folks call it “greenwashing”.

I say all of this because it’s a great way to think about what challenges the future might bring and what our children will have to do in order to feel fulfilled.

Here’s a list of things nobody thought us at school. And we have to deal with all of it today, whether we like it or not.

Kids Have to Learn to Use Content and Not to Be Used by the Content

I remember signing up for Facebook years ago. Like all of us, some of my friends just said — “You are not of Facebook?” And I casually replied… “On face-what now?”

Minutes later, I had a goddamn Facebook account that, as we all know now -will later become my “internet passport”. Or at least part of my full internet passport…

It took me 6–12 months to notice one serious thing about Facebook. People were not censoring their thoughts, pictures, and content they were publishing. This bothered me just a little, but it paved the way to notice a bigger picture behind these weird societal behaviors.

The best minds of today spend time thinking about how to make us spend more time looking at our phones. Watching videos. Being triggered and commenting.

Most users were are not thinking about what they are liking. They are not unliking shit. They were just adding more and more eggs to the basked without ever throwing anything out. That’s why years ago, I came up with a term… Social (Media) Hygiene.

They Have to Learn About Social Hygiene

They say the best way to deal with toxic people is to cut them out from Your life. Be it, close friends or family, You have to explain to them that they are toxic to You and You gain no personal value in giving them mental space in Your head. And then just never see them again. Period.

It’s a truth that is hard to comprehend for most of the world, furthermore, we all know how hard it is actually to act on it. To stop talking to Your mom, Your boss, Your friends, or any other toxic person whatsoever.

But rules online are the same. You have to block and unfollow shit. Period.

I will never forget showing one of my coworkers my Instagram feed (I never used Instagram for personal reasons, always for business or professional purposes). While his feed was filled with girls, asses, travel pictures, food, and groups of people partying…

My feed was filled with animations, tattoos, illustrations, high tech movie props, and other similar, curated content. No asses, no girls, no beaches, no food… No friends. Just professional works.

Ok maybe an occasional pic with a bearded dude drinking beer, because some animator posted a picture from a convention party or something. But that’s it.

They Have to Learn to Train Their Algorithm

I have been “training my algorithms” ever since I remember. Every time I work on a new project, I create a new Chrome account and a dedicated Gmail address for exactly that purpose. Ads we see are always aimed at the actions we take online. You can (somewhat) use this invasiveness of big advertising corporations to Your advantage.

“May the ads be ever in Your favor.”

By using dedicated “ad-profiles” for various project research and tasks, I have found many amazing tools and solutions that I would have never stumbled upon if I have just used my personal Gmail connected Chrome user.

Because after You spend hours researching and analyzing something on a “fresh” user account, the algorithm knows only so little about “what You like” and pushes very direct solutions to very direct topics You are working on.

So many times I got just the right Youtube ad for exactly the problem I was researching to solve, that it’s not even funny anymore.

They Have to Deal With Drugs of the Internet

Memes, porn, fake websites, games, infinite-scroll feeds, videos, gifs, comments — You name it. Everything on this list is just as addictive as most street drugs. And You don’t have to go to the dealer to get Your next hit.

It’s always in Your pocket. Your drug dealer is Your phone.

“…Only motivation for what the dealer’s supplyin’ That rush, that drug, that dope Those pills, that crumb, that roach…“ - Otherside (written by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis)

When people get in deep with drugs or alcohol, usually the first step is creating some distance between You and the substance You are abusing. Making sure there is no alcohol in Your cabinet or not hanging out with Your stoner friends. But You can’t do this with Your phone, can You?

You still have to call Your mom, read messages in the messy Work Whatsapp group, and reply to emails on the run. You can’t just throw away Your phone and live a normal life.

Well, You could delete Twitter, Instagram, and other toxic apps from Your phone that mess with Your brain chemistry (dopamine). But we all know it’s more complex than that… Our best bet is to learn not to abuse it.

My therapist once explained, that completely giving something away, while sometimes necessary is an unhealthy decision for our brains… Because when things go bad, and they will inevitably will one day — this makes it easier to go back to the bad habits immediately.

“…Don’t you ever tame your demons But always keep ’em on a leash…” - Arsonist’s Lullabye (written by Hozier)

It’s harder to control Your bad habits without cutting them out entirely than to give them up. And unfortunately, when it comes to phone addiction that we all have and our children will have also… Well, we will have to learn to live with it. Not to cut it entirely.

They Have to Learn to Fact-Check Sources

This one really hurts my brain, actually. I see people that are into conspiracy theories and lizard people (yes, we have those in Amsterdam also…) sending me obviously fake links from fake media outlets. I immediately fact check it and… Well, You have to be trained to notice tiny details about something that is off.

I tell them this is fake and send them a simple screenshot of first-page google search results that don’t match up. They send back to me a screenshot of their first-page google search results with exactly the same keywords… And I lose all hope.

Their results match up better. The only thing that allows me to know I am right is that the websites with all those “published articles” have odd domain names that mimic well-known media outlets, but not exactly.

What do You do now? Nothing, something had to be done while these people were growing up. They should have trained to spot it. We all are responsible for this.

As a European, I can only imagine how much worse it is in countries like America, where it’s a norm to give equal rights both to opinions and facts. I call this weird phenomenon “opinionizing facts”.

From a philosophical perspective… Facts are actually closer to beliefs than actual truth. This is true because reality is nothing more than a hallucination of experiences and points of view that intellect possesses. Doesn’t matter if this is a singular intellect (a person) or plural (internet, maybe AI in the future).

So it’s kind of natural that this process is happening… But!

It still doesn’t mean that we should give up on truth. To look for truth requires to strip down of ego, bias, culture, religion, even past “facts” and much much more. And even then, the truth will be biased. Yes, even if You strip bias down (which You can’t!) to the highest extent possible, it will still be true to us as a species, not in general. It’s a somewhat parabolic oxymoron, that can’t be avoided just because of the nature of things.

Getting back to the fact-checking… That one clown with an orange wig and childlike presidential features might be the natural outcome of what is happening to us, due to irresponsible use of the internet.

Random opinions can be factualized. If we add emotional instability of greener culture (green as green from spiral dynamics, not green as if eco-friendly) and the ability to get triggered and we get…

Time for Change

Our children will not have the luxury of having lived before the internet, like some of the millennials still had. Most of the parents will give an iPad to their babies, just to make them shut up. Most of the people using the internet today understand nothing about what they do there, nor they will be able to explain the importance of content quality to their children.

I had this theory a couple of years back about the history of the internet.

1990–2000 was the bronze age of the internet. Realizing what beneficial tool it can be and how far this could go (not realizing that actually, but thinking that we understand it).

2000–2010 was the renaissance age of the internet. It has been fully understood as a tool, and now even skeptics can’t ignore the importance this amazing tool brings us. Resistance is futile.

2010–2020 has been the witchhunt age (yes, I understand that is like going back in time to the middle ages from the renaissance, but it happened due to wast adoption). Everybody could become internet famous, everybody could write shit about everybody and troll people. Some even could use it to win elections and much much more.

Basically, this first actual decade of fully developed internet was a complete mob time. Just gather a big enough mob against whatever and do whatever You want then (how about flat earth?). It’s called a witchhunt because burning the “witch” is what united bubbles of people were doing during these times.

Do you want my prediction for the next stage? Wild West. There are no actual laws and trust me, there will be laws soon. At least this decade is gonna be actual progress forward, and maybe someday we will actually be able to witness the true renaissance of the digital age.

Wild West of the internet is already happening — pseudo-knowledge and (almost) no rules keep this thing together. Copy, steal, rob, use, reuse, post, publish, rate, review, and everything ends with an affiliate. Or it starts from affiliate to start with?

The Internet is getting rules, whether we like it or not. Whether those rules are laws or not. Let’s make sure we explain this to our children enough, so they are ready to manipulate those rules.