The Obsolete Men

Every New Year, my family has a tradition of watching SyFy channel's Twilight Zone marathon. While some episodes are certainly better than others, it's a pretty decent show. Perhaps one of my favorite episodes is entitled "the Obsolete Man." In this episode, a librarian is found obsolete by a dystopian society and scheduled for termination. By the end of the episode, the leader of this society is embarrassed nationally by said librarian and himself found obsolete. While I am not a Christian like the protagonist, I do find the ultimate message: "the state is not God," very appealing. However, what I enjoy more is the conclusion that it is men such as allow for oppression who are obsolete.

Without going so far as to claim that people can be "obsolete" (though in some cases this was probably true; I'd say we didn't really need Hitler, for instance), there are people whose thought patterns are. I had one example of this phenomenon brought to my attention by a family member recently. Apparently there had been a lot of attention given a while back to a mother who gave her son an iPhone 5 but only if he followed a series of strict and silly rules. This was apparently enough to reward the mother involved with national fame and the admiration of an entire generation of grumbling old people.

http://news.yahoo.com/moms-18-point-iphone-rules-son-143831843--abc-news-parenting.html

Admittedly some of the rules laid out in the "contract" (which you can't actually make with a minor legally) are fair. No porn seems reasonable, though highly unrealistic. No sexting also kind of makes sense given the child's status as a minor. However, most of these prohibitions are the actions of a creepy helicopter mom who belongs to a generation whose members are sometimes left without a working understanding of computing.

Now don't get me wrong. I will be the first to admit that giving a thirteen-year-old an iPhone 5 is a terrible idea - it should be an Android phone, so that he can learn about computers from an early age and be given every opportunity to cultivate a necessary skill. Children should not be discouraged from using technology to its full potential. (That's why when I have kids, they will get their first computer at an early age - in pieces, which I will then teach them to assemble.) Telling a child not to use Google to look things up is like telling them not to open a dictionary to learn new words. There is a wealth of online knowledge waiting for anyone who wishes to learn. Google offers a vast database of the combined knowledge of every Internet user on the planet. It's where I learned to build a computer and use Linux, both of which, not incidentally, were major factors in getting me the job I have now. I would also be far less effective as a historian without Google and a variety of online resources, which have helped me to vastly increase my knowledge of American slavery, which helped be get into a great Masters program. You can learn pretty much anything by using the Internet. In this day and age, not allowing your child to access Google ensures that learning will be a much slower, much less effective process as you are blocking their access to a variety of useful resources. Disallowing Google because you can find some pretty gross stuff on it if you want is like not sending your kid to college because he might drink: you have to trust the kid to make the right decisions. You take the risk because the benefit of getting an education outweighs the danger, and if your child partys all day, it's not the college's fault, just like it's not Google's fault if you use it to look up nasty porn.

The same could be said about restricting a child's interaction with those he only knows in real life. I'm not saying you don't have to be careful online, but there are whole online communities based around every conceivable subject. You can learn more from a forum than you can from talking to people in your neighborhood, and you can learn it a lot faster. The Internet is a meeting point for everyone in the world. It is a massive consensus-building tool. Sure, a run on Omegle will result in over 9,000 perverts, but they're perverts from all over the world. If you go to the right places, you can have discussions with people all over the world who aren't just interested in your tits. You might even gain a broader perspective. In suburban America, it's a lot easier to be exposed to different viewpoints if you're online. Sure, if you go to the wrong place you might be exposed to something else, but that's no reason to discourage healthy online discussion with people worldwide.

For some reason, however, stunting a child's mental growth is praiseworthy for some people. While I could easily go into why the list here is a stunning example of terrible parenting, I'd like to focus on part of the reason it has become so popular. The problem is simply that there exist people who fear or dismiss technology, despite benefiting directly from it and having no knowledge of what it actually constitutes. Computer systems and related technology are tools, like all technology. They have become so prolific because they allow the user to do whatever he wants faster and more efficiently. Ironically, this has been one of the main complaints about computing; however, one cannot fault a group of circuits for the nature and actions of an individual. If you raised your kid to be the type of person to hook up with random people, then yes, they might have sex online. Computers don't change the behavior; they only facilitate it. This holds true of any behavior. If you raised your child to be the type of person to have a burning desire to learn, a computer will help him to do this more efficiently as well. The responsibility the mother in question is evading is essentially that of raising her child. It's easier to prohibit access to things you don't want your kid to get than it is to raise them correctly. The problem is, this mother's child won't be thirteen forever, and helicopter moms are begging for their kids to go nuts when they're out from under the watchful eye of the parent. Teaching this kid a little responsibility now by trusting him and letting him make his own mistakes while he's young might save him the trouble of making those mistakes in the future when he is given free reign to do so and, it might be added, held legally responsible for his actions.

People like this mother and those who agree with her twisted view of one the world's greatest inventions are going to have a hard time adapting to the future. If she can't handle Google, I can't imagine how she'd deal with augmented reality, computer sentience, and singularity - and those things are coming, maybe not in her lifetime or mine admittedly, but they are coming. But it's not just future technologies that she fails to understand. Probably every single positive material aspect of  your life right now was aided in some way by a computer. Computing, by its nature, has led to massive breakthroughs in literally every aspect of daily life, if not directly, then indirectly. For a mother to scorn technology as a harmful necessity as she sits in her suburban home, whose comforts are a direct result of computing, drives to her job in her car which, in all probability has a computer, and benefits from computer systems at work, is deeply silly and hypocritical.

Technology is a tool. It will do what you tell it to do. If you fuck up, it will not protect you. Stifling the benefits of technology out of fear of the drawbacks or as a substitute for responsibility demonstrates not only bad parenting but a lazy attitude towards parenting and an unrealistic attitude towards the modern world. This mother should be castigated, not praised. She should be encouraging her son to cultivate the skills necessary to living in the 21st century, not stunting his knowledge of a useful skill set. She should be encouraging him to explore the world that opens up with Internet access, not telling him it's a fear inducing, sex-crazed pit. Parts of it are, but so are parts of the world and you let your kid out there. Sure, the Internet is more accessible, but that also lets you access the great parts of the Internet: the parts that let you learn, collaborate, and experience a variety of viewpoints and perspectives. That's why, no matter how hard the ignorant fight technological progress, it is here to stay. Those who refuse to adapt will find their lives increasingly difficult and will be far outpaced by those who do. They will remain in a world of slow communications, less social interaction, and less information - a world which is, by 2013, long obsolete.