Josh Hawley Wants Government To Be Your Techno-Mommy
As Josh sees it, you cannot be trusted to be the shepherd of your own time on the Internet and social media.

Corbin Barthold writes at Truth on the Market:

Enter Josh Hawley, freshman GOP senator from Missouri. Hawley claims that Facebook is a "digital drug" that "dulls" attention spans and "frays" relationships. He speculates about whether social media is causing teenage girls to attempt suicide. "What passes for innovation by Big Tech today," he insists, is "ever more sophisticated exploitation of people." He scolds the tech companies for failing to produce products that--in his judgment--"enrich lives" and "strengthen society."

As for the stuff the industry does make, Hawley wants it changed. He has introduced a bill to ban infinite scrolling, music and video autoplay, and the use of "badges and other awards" (gamification) on social media. The bill also requires defaults that limit a user's time on a platform to 30 minutes a day. A user could opt out of this restriction, but only for a month at a stretch.

The available evidence does not bear out the notion that highbrow magazines, let alone Josh Hawley, should redesign tech products and police how people use their time. You'd probably have to pay someone around $500 to stay off Facebook for a year. Getting her to forego using Amazon would cost even more. And Google is worth more still--perhaps thousands of dollars per user per year. These figures are of course quite rough, but that just proves the point: the consumer surplus created by the internet is inestimable.

Is technology making teenagers sad? Probably not. A recent study tracked the social-media use, along with the wellbeing, of around ten-thousand British children for almost a decade. "In more than half of the thousands of statistical models we tested," the study's authors write, "we found nothing more than random statistical noise." Although there were some small links between teenage girls' mood and their social-media use, the connections were "miniscule" and too "trivial" to "inform personal parenting decisions." "It's probably best," the researchers conclude, "to retire the idea that the amount of time teens spend on social media is a meaningful metric influencing their wellbeing."

One could head the other way, in fact, and argue that technology is making children smarter. Surfing the web and playing video games might broaden their attention spans and improve their abstract thinking.

...We now hit the crux of the intellectuals' (and Josh Hawley's) complaint. It's not a gripe about Big Tech so much as a gripe about you. You, the average person, are too dim, weak, and base. You lack the wits to use an iPhone on your own terms. You lack the self-control to post, "like", and share in moderation (or the discipline to make your children follow suit). You lack the virtue to abstain from the pleasures of Prime-membership consumerism.

One AI researcher digs to the root. "It is only the hyper-privileged who are now saying, 'I'm not going to give my kids this,' or 'I'm not on social media,'" she tells Vox. No one wields the "privilege" epithet quite like the modern privileged do. It is one of the remarkable features of our time. Pundits and professors use the word to announce, albeit unintentionally, that only they and their peers have any agency. Those other people, meanwhile, need protection from too much information, too much choice, too much freedom.

There's nothing crazy about wanting the new aristocrats of the mind to shepherd everyone else. Noblesse oblige is a venerable concept. The lords care for the peasants, the king cares for the lords, God cares for the king. But that is not our arrangement. Our forebears embraced the Enlightenment. They began with the assumption that citizens are autonomous. They got suspicious whenever the holders of political power started trying to tell those citizens what they can and cannot do.

Some of us might need to go to a therapist or get a program to get us offline.

We'd like the ability to choose to do that, thanks, and also the ability to spend a fuckton of time online, if that's what we choose.

With freedom, comes responsibility. Also with freedom can come the need to learn that the hard way. And thanks, I'll take my chances.

If you won't or can't, hire somebody to be your mommy instead of imposing government mommy on all of us.

via overlawyered