In Defense of Algorithms
The Social Dilemma
Amidst the pandemic there is another fear swelling up, the fear of algorithms and sharing private data. There are concerns being expressed about iGen’s mental health and how it’s being effected by living their lives online. The popular 2020 docudrama The Social Dilemma, portraying the big tech as the Frankensteins of surveillance capitalism using intentionally addictive social media design for data mining, ends in an anticlimax with several of its featured interviewees, Facebook like button and infinite scroll creators and former Google employees, saying “screen time” should be severely limited for children and teens.
The relentless teenage suicide curve creeping up at a steep angle is indeed a frightening piece of statistics. Suicide has become the leading cause of death among adolescents (10–19 years old) in low- and middle-income European countries and the second leading cause in high-income European countries and the US. Depressions and anxiety (serious suicide risks) in American teens and young adults have nearly doubled since the mid-2000s. So something is going on and we should indeed be concerned about young people. But isn’t it a bit simplistic to blame these skyrocketing suicides, depressions and burn-outs on “the screens” and the algorithms?
Back to School
Why haven’t the makers of The Social Dilemma asked themselves why suicide attempts and mental crises in teens and college students are so tied to the school calendar? Several recent studies have revealed that suicidal thoughts and attempts spike in the spring and fall, when school begins and ends. A 2015 study of California children and adolescents concluded that they “are more likely to present with concerns for danger to self or others while attending school compared with while on vacations”.
Psychologist Peter Gray, who has been monitoring this connection between psychiatric emergencies and youth suicides and the school calendar for years, believes it’s not only the bullying that makes schools toxic but the system of compulsory education itself, leaving children and teens no freedom of unstructured play, micromanaging and evaluating their every move.
In today’s affluent countries, millions of children who could have been learning joyfully and at their own pace as part of their natural curiosity while growing up, millions of young minds who could have gotten a kick out of the amazing new tech to help them make their learning journeys truly personalized, are feeling trapped and increasingly burnt-out in one-size-fits-all schooling institutions.
The children are sensing the gaping abyss between the rapidly changing world with its imminent threats screaming to be addressed and the anachronistic schooling machine that continues to persistently tweak and package them up ready for the Industrial Age work market that is no longer there. It is that inconsistency, that discrepancy between their natural drive to learn what’s really out there and the decomposing gruel they are being force-fed at the compulsory schooling institutions that prompts young people to shut down or seek escape in unhealthy tech abuse, a little like in my native USSR, people sought escape in alcoholism to escape the schizophrenia of everyday compulsory routines.
Many children who feel that way also feel like they have nowhere to go: all the places claiming they’re there to help them and to protect them actually form pieces of the same machine set to getting them “back on track”, back on the assembly line. It’s not the big tech that has become the greatest monopolist, it’s the compulsory schooling system that has monopolized all facets of young people’s lives, even their chances at meeting other kids and, for poor families, getting warm meals. Once that monster monopolist also employs the new technologies to extend its control over children’s development even deeper, we have reached a very dangerous point. And that is now.
Shades of Big Brother
During the covid-19 lockdowns, many families across the world have already experienced first hand what the disruptive, dehumanizing micromanagement that compulsory schooling institutions impose upon young people actually feels like, once those institutions entered their homes via distance learning. “Distance learning with shades of Big Brother", The New York Times spoke up this month, describing a video parents received, featuring an adorable little girl demonstrating correct and incorrect strategies for attending school while staying home. A video that very much resembled prison, advertised with a smile.
Distance learning is a lucid example of how tech mirrors and exacerbates every society’s existing systems.
Tech can be a tool of total control and suppression of individuality if you live in a society where freedom is (getting) scarce. Where children are marshaled into highly structured, achievement-driven institutions with restricted schedules at increasingly early ages, with no right of refusal in some countries, under the threat of government fines or even placing the children in foster care. Where institutions create cognitive dissonance in children’s minds, training them to juxtapose learning and play, while humans have evolved to learn through unstructured play. Where children, evolved to snuggle up with their parents for comfort and safety, aren’t given a proper chance for attachment, as co-sleeping and prolonged breastfeeding are being discouraged.
As those children grow older the society enforces more and more control upon their behavior out of risk prevention - something that could easily be avoided had trust and attachment not been uprooted. Even more alarmingly, individuals who are conditioned through constant external control are more susceptible to manipulation. It’s the children whose screen time is being vehemently restricted that never learn to discriminate between educational and idle resources, between accurate information and conspiracy theories. They acquire poorer programming and other digital literacy skills and remain secretive about their online social interactions.
All the World’s Knowledge
Progressive psychologists and sociologists tell us that all children need in order to become the best versions of themselves is freedom and unconditional love. Freedom and unstructured play helps build up resilience to life’s turmoils and prevent mental crises. When you are a free individual enjoying your right to learn freely, tech can be your best source of inspiration, of social enrichment and unfathomable knowledge. If parents are unable to provide exposure to the world’s knowledge, there are dozens of examples of successful natural learning centers, safe hubs where kids and teens can meet and get access to knowledge through interest-based, self-directed, unstructured learning. Young sociologist Nikhil Goyal, himself recently a prisoner at one of America’s top ranking public schools, has researched multiple empowering alternative educational routes in his book Schools on Trial.
Many children around the world don’t have access to the world’s knowledge. What is stopping us from creating such safe hubs of unstructured learning for them? After all, there’s a lot of money being donated to promote education in developing countries, but most of it is channeled into reproducing the compulsory assembly line school system with little to no respect towards individual children. In many parts of the globe, that institutionalized school system has become the elephant in the room, irreducibly bloated, meaning that you can hardly push it back and no one even dares to touch it anymore, except for occasional cosmetic reforms that don’t change its nature.
In places where such irreducible institutionalization doesn’t yet exist, wouldn’t it be wiser to kickstart something more humane instead? For kids of all ages, it could be free libraries, with friendly staff, computers and warm meals instead of testing, humiliating competition and strict schedules. For older teens, it could be internships and in-house training instead of grades and diplomas. In fact, this is exactly how Indian tech giant Zoho was created, its founder Sridhar Vembu having realized that talent can be found in anyone if you invest in individuals, not in diplomas. Zoho has raised hundreds of people across the globe out of poverty and into the modern world.
I don’t have to go far from home to observe how algorithms reinforce whatever societal norms and relationship patterns one adopts. My son, who is quite an accomplished young programmer and mathematician considering his tender age, could rightfully say his educational path has been largely determined by algorithms. We have never restricted his screen time but always made sure that from the very start, he experienced tech not as a treat but an essential discovery terrain. Today, when he tells me he has just published a new Node package, I can absolutely guarantee no schooling institution would have taught him that. Most primary and middle school teachers don’t even know what a Node package means. And if by some coincidence, a teacher at his former school knew what that was and wished to share that knowledge on top of the compulsory curriculum, it would most probably have been the wrong moment to do so.
The algorithms, on the contrary, don’t follow a standard curriculum. They just suggest things when they sense the moment is right. Over the years he has spent using App Store’s educational apps, YouTube, brilliant.org, plane old Google and other platforms, algorithms have gotten to know him better and reflect his interests with greater precision. At the same time, algorithms have access to all the things he doesn’t know even exist, that we as his parents don’t know even exist. Like mind-blowing geometric construction or graph engines, 3D rendering and computer engineering tutorials done just right, clicking well with his learning style, and yes, all those wonderful mentors and likeminded curious people he has connected with around the world. He doesn’t like the word “mentor” though, their interaction is always fun and informal. We didn’t expect he would be interested in copyright law. Or color theory. He is free to discover what makes him tick, to get to know himself and what sort of skills he can master in the real world that is very different today from what it used to be when institutionalized schooling was modeled after the factories of the early 1900s. That’s why he doesn’t take part in that obsolete construct.
It’s beautiful to observe both of our children being very open about their online interactions and very mature in double checking their sources. They are adamant in following the codes of conduct and don’t count likes or compare themselves to others, a school-induced habit I myself still struggle with.
Children Are People
The Social Dilemma ends in urging for more legislation to regulate data sharing and “protect the children” in order to make tech “more humane”. I have seen many online educators shy away from under-13-year-olds in fear of trespassing the existing draconian regulations that fall under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This kind of “protection” is not concerned with children’s development but with escaping responsibility, as it violates children’s basic human rights. We have already institutionalized so much of their daily lives and invented separate “children’s rights” to cover up the fact that children don’t have basic human rights. What if we turn the internet into one more institutionalized, highly regulated superstructure (like what we see emerge in China today)? Won’t that be the end of all things humane?
Maybe a better idea would be to finally face that elephant in the room and what it does to our children and our society, the algorithms simply mirroring and mimicking what they observe?
Don’t make this issue seem more complicated than it is, Nikhil Goyal writes in Schools on Trial: “In reality, it boils down to understanding that children deserve to be treated like human beings, like any other member of society. That they should not be inappropriately controlled, managed, and measured but given freedom and treated with dignity and respect. That isn’t too much to ask. We have become obsessed with making tweaks and small dents to the system when what we genuinely need is a total overhaul, a transformation, a goddamn revolution. It’s time to break free from the shackles of our oppressive school system”.
Maybe it’s time that we finally recognize that children are people. Algorithms will copy that.