[First published 3 March 2019.]
Richard Godwin’s article in yesterday’s Guardian is largely clueless, but a reading of it may bring up some aspects of what’s going on, at least for those who have the wit and self-respect to want to notice:
“‘You can track everything’: the parents who digitise their babies’ lives“
“One-year-olds hypnotised by creepy Baby Shark ephemera on YouTube; two-year-olds who can swipe before they can talk; my own five-year-old trying to ‘pause’ me when he goes to the loo.”
“A few weeks before Jenny was born, her mother, Aoife, downloaded a free ‘breastfeeding and baby tracker’ app called Feed Baby and began playing around with it. The developer, Penguin Apps, describes it as ‘the only app you will need to care for your little one’. It has been downloaded more than 1m times.”
“You set up your baby, you say when your due date was and when they were born. You can track when you’ve fed. If you’re breastfeeding, what side you’ve breastfed on and for how long. If you’re bottle feeding, how much formula they took. You can track a nappy, what was in the nappy. You can track sleep. If you’re giving medicine, how much medicine you give. You can track growth, you can track length and weight, teeth, baths. You can track everything.“
We are talking about psychosis, a complete inability to recognise consciously the direction of an action: who is the doer and who is the done to.
Make no mistake: technofascism is here, and it’s schizoid.
“(T)he app stores are full of products with names such as Baby Manager and Glow Baby Newborn Tracker.”
“(T)he latest version of Owlet, a baby sock that measures temperature, heart rate, oxygen saturation and movement (…,) has already become a must-have item among Hollywood parents.”
“Unsurprisingly, the mothers she observed turned to Google and Facebook”.
“The Owlet changed the type of information parents gathered about their children, which changed the way they interacted with them.“
“What you’ve done with the Owlet is create a digital version of your child.”
“Comments on this piece are premoderated to ensure discussion remains on topics raised by the writer.”
Yeah, well they would be.
Do you think billionaire profiteers from smartphone fascism let their own children be subjected to it? Of course they don’t!
“Take the 2014 study from the University of California Los Angeles that found that kids who went five days without exposure to technology were much better at reading human emotions than kids who had access to televisions, computers and phones. Too much screen time can permanently dull kids’ abilities to read nonverbal cues, accept delayed gratification, and actively engage with the world around them.”
“Tech giants like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg knew it; according to a 2014 New York Times article, Jobs didn’t let his kids use the iPad, and strictly limited how much technology his kids used at home.“
Ever noticed how stupidity and illiteracy are on the rise as emotional intelligence is falling?
Mark Zuckerberg keeps his own child off Facebook, but he wants your children on it. The smartphone plague is similar in scale to a position in which 90% of the population were heroin addicts. It’s that bad. It’s worse.