Holy shit and I thought millennials and Gen X had it bad with how corporate our toys were.
I hate to be that person that’s like “omg what kids like these days is poisoning them!” Especially because I come from the Mortal Kombat generation, but between Mr Beast, social media and shit like Roblox turning every hobby into a hussle I have to wonder what effect this will have on them.
Capitalism preying on kids was bad enough when I was a kid in the 90s and 00s (and from what I’ve seen from 80s cartoons, the generation before mine was pretty bad too), but it’s a whole other level now.
Collapse is hitting hard and is only going to get worse though, so it is possible they’ll go left.
Most school districts, in my experience, have no teeth when it comes to phone policies, if they have one at all. A lot of kids will do pretty much anything their favorite “influencers” tell them to do, including acts of bullying, vandalism, and outright giving them money whether or not there’s some vague promise of a return on it.
Even when the politics aren’t obvious (to them, anyway), it’s all conditioning, and dare I say grooming, to get them used to a dopamine-saturated noisy zero attention span sort of constant state of unease and aggression. It’s scary… I saw some modern variant of “the hitting game” erupt like a rash once where dozens of kids started doing it because their favorite trust fund sociopath on TikTok said so one day. I had to try to explain the outbreak of
to the elderly school nurse because she was until that point blissfully unaware of what parasocial bonding was.