• she/her

Principal investigator at an undeserving midwestern university. I am ill-tempered and well-endowed. Beware.


I have a Cohost for art and writing!
cohost.org/lab-reports
profile pic by Xīn Jīn Mèng!
cohost.org/xinjinmeng

At the risk of appearing to be one of those, I actually feel like Florida inadvertently did something sensible by trying to ban kids under 16 from the internet. Like, maybe in the 90s it would've been okay for kids to be there, but now it seems like the worst most rotten environment imaginable for a kid to forge social connections, though mostly not for the reasons I'm sure were given. School bullying now follows them home; business can constantly try to sell stuff to children without restraint; they can be fed propaganda from every direction. The internet is a fucking wasteland and it is no place to grow up.


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in reply to @doctorwednesday's post:

So Windows 95 comes out, with the full SOCKETS layer that was implemented back in 1993. Now an app can request the OS for permission to talk to the Internet. People become concerned when kid's software for solo use like "Arthur Teaches Typing" suddenly asks for Internet access without any prompting. The corporations were already making spyware to report on what the kids were up to. It wasn't illegal, after all.
The Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act doesn't go into effect until 2000, and of course it's only for 13-year-olds or less, and even then they're still allowed to give up their privacy if they're asked "correctly." They can't even vote or die for their country yet, but it's okay for Amazon to know if they're pregnant or not and for Meta to build that huge dossier to sell to their would-be employers to find out who wants to work.
While double-checking myself before double-wrecking myself, I found out that just last year, the federal tried to raise the age from 13 to 16, and apparently this wasn't the first attempt to do so, a point of light in all this darkness.
I am so glad I didn't grow up on the Internet. Mister Beast is a monster far worse than any of Fred Rogers' nightmares.

Around the 2000s, broadcast networks were giving up on their Saturday-morning cartoon blocks, especially because they had to comply with "E/I" and put something of value in them. Before they were gone, they were filled with Pokemon (a commercial about toys you can buy) and Yu-Gi-Oh (a show literally about a toy has taken over all aspects of society and whose common good will never be questioned). The kids who watched these grew up to be our thought-leaders, our politicians, our police. 🤔 Ooh, they're serving jello with dinner today! 👵