Monday, March 20, 2017

Scott Adams: I Declare Mobile Phone Carriers to Be Enemies of the State

An important post by Scott Adams:

Here’s the basic problem.

Kids as young as eleven have smartphones. That situation won’t change.

A kid with a smartphone has access to any illegal drug in the world, as well as all the peer pressure in the world.
Pills are small, cheap, odorless, widely available, and nearly impossible for a parent to find in a bedroom search. When you have this situation, the next generation is lost.

That is our current situation.

To address the problem, you would need the phone companies to allow parents full access to all messages on a kid’s phone. And this feature should be mandatory, not optional. Parents need to see all messages, and all photos, from all apps.

The phone companies won’t make that capability widely available on their own because it would reduce their income. So the government needs to force phone companies to give parents that level of control to protect their kids. If you want to put a clamp on drug use, the only way is for parents to have full control of teen communications. Every message, every time. And it needs to be mandatory for anyone under 18.

I know what you are going to say. You’re going to say good parenting is all you need. But my observation is that no more than 20% of kids can be “parented” away from temptation. The other 80% are totally out of luck.

Today, you can limit a kid’s smartphone and Wifi use in a variety of ways. But if a teen has 1% freedom to contact anyone for anything, that’s all it takes.

My observation is that smartphones have made half of all adults mentally ill. I mean that literally, not figuratively. The business model of phones is addiction, not value. And they addict you at the expense of the things humans need in their lives to be happy and healthy.

Kids have it worse. They haven’t developed any natural defenses. They are pure victims.

Today I declare the phone companies to be enemies of the state. They are ruining everything you love, and everything you care about. And they are doing it right in front of you.

If this is not already obvious to you, it probably means you’re a smartphone addict. A normal person’s brain will spontaneously generate a protective illusion to support an addiction. If you see no problem with smartphones causing drug addiction in kids, or you think I am exaggerating, you’re probably in the illusion.

If the Trump administration were to regulate the mobile phone carriers to add mandatory child-monitoring of communications, perhaps we can save the next generation. The current generation of “digital natives” is already lost. The majority of the current generation of kids are doomed to be drug addicts, either legally or illegally.

And that’s on us.

I’m going to delete any comments that say good parenting is all you need. That opinion would not be worthy of this topic.

Update: Disqus locked me out of commenting on my own post after a few.

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