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Good morning,
🎶 Friday Listening: Pink Floyd – Another Brick in the Wall (Live ’94)
When I was in middle school, back during the Clinton administration, we had a class called, simply, “Technology.” Mr. R, our Shop teacher whose main job was mostly to keep a bunch of 12-year-olds from cutting off their fingers in the school’s buzzsaw, moonlit as the Technology teacher. He would wheel in a bunch of these ancient IBM computers that we would use to play rudimentary games and doodle in MS Paint. We learned how to boot them up and the basics of Windows 95 for word processing, and then how to save our work and turn them off when we completed our tasks. We loved this class for obvious reasons: it was fun and easy, helped by the fact that Mr. R was a Vietnam vet, probably with undiagnosed PTSD, who would regale us with stories from his time in the bush fighting “Charlie.” In retrospect, this sort of experience was probably a seminal part of my generation’s educational upbringing. Personal computers were still new, there wasn’t really an internet yet, and we were taught to use these big, intimidating machines as the tools they were.
Computers of course aren’t tools anymore — for any of us, much less today’s middle schoolers. They’re where real life plays out. In my day, if you were getting bullied in the halls you always knew that eventually the bully would graduate, flunk out or find someone new to pick on, and until then at least the abuse wouldn’t follow you home from school. That line between school and home life, between the real world and the simulacrum of reality that exists online, has been erased. I am not an educator, but I do know a few, and they talk about how their students are completely incapable of differentiating between the real and digital worlds. The phone bans that are gaining steam in schools across the country are a great thing. But it’s not enough. We need to completely rethink how we are teaching our children about this new world that they will inherit.
I’m suggesting a national curriculum that fuses elements of media literacy with an approach that gives our kids the tools they need to take back some measure of personal agency from the algorithms. Call it Digital Civics. Lectures, discussions and classroom exercises that can teach our most impressionable minds how and when they’re being lied to or manipulated by the news media, or the social media influencers and podcasters they now trust. How to spot a political agenda dressed up as factual information, or how Big Tech makes money from playing with their emotions. How to tell when one of their friends might be going down a dangerous rabbit hole online, and how to help them get out of it. How many future school shooters and maladjusted assassins could we stop by giving these children the tools they need for the modern world now, when their minds are still being molded?
Whenever I eventually get laid off again, I think this is what I want to devote myself to. If there’s anyone out there involved in this type of project at a local level, I would love to connect.
Comprehensive and compulsory digital civics is one of two things I think would go a long way, at the societal level, in curing some of these ills we’ve been discussing. The other is national service.
The concept of a national service program in peacetime is not new. Sweden has one, Austria and Switzerland too. When Americans think of national service, we think about the draft. But what I am floating has nothing to do with the military (at least it doesn’t have to). One of the things we desperately need to do in this country is get back into this shared project of nation building. At the same time, we’re seeing young people increasingly removing themselves from their actual lives to retreat into these online worlds. We gotta get them out. A way to do that is a compulsory gap year — during or right after high school — in which every single person in America of a certain age is put to work for a common purpose. It doesn’t even matter what it is. Paint houses, pick up trash, pave our crappy roads, mentor other youths, clean up graffiti, plant flowers, join the National Guard or the Foreign Service. Those exhibiting proficiency in specific areas of importance, like cybersecurity or AI, can put those skills to use in gov’t apprenticeships they can leverage into careers.
The point is to create a project that can foster greater national unity and social integration specifically targeted to this period when, research shows, kids are becoming adrift and lonely and more prone to radicalization or just dropping out of society altogether. It would also give young people their first touchpoint with the federal government, teaching them that the US can be a force for good. I sincerely believe a national project like this, if executed correctly, could help solve everything from the political radicalization problem to opioid addiction to the fertility crisis.
OK, those are my back of the envelope ideas for putting this country back on track after these last couple weeks. Easy stuff, lol. Finally, I’d like to ask everyone to do something this weekend: chill out. We need a National Day of Calming Down around here. Go outside, take in the sunset. Argue with your spouse. Do literally anything other than stay glued to the news. It’s making everyone nuts.
Late-Night Hosts React To Jimmy Kimmel Suspension
A series of late-night hosts have reacted to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel following backlash over comments he made about the assassination of the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.
Speaking on The Tonight Show on Thursday, Jimmy Fallon said: “The big story is that Jimmy Kimmel was suspended by ABC after pressure from the FCC [Federal Communications Commission], leaving everyone thinking, ‘WTF?'”
Stephen Colbert said on his show that he stands with Kimmel and his staff.
“With an autocrat, you cannot give an inch… if ABC thinks this is going to satisfy the regime, they are woefully naive, and clearly, they’ve never read the children’s book ‘If You Give a Mouse a Kimmel.’ Read more.
Also happening:
New polling: A majority of Republicans now believe that the U.S. is heading in the wrong direction after a surge in negative sentiment in the aftermath of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, a new poll shows. Fifty-one percent of Republicans said the country is on the wrong track when surveyed by AP-NORC in September, right after Kirk’s death, up from 29 percent in June. Read more.
NYC: City Comptroller Brad Lander and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams were among several Democratic New York elected officials detained by DHS agents on Thursday during a protest at federal immigration courts in Lower Manhattan. New York State Assemblywoman Jessica González-Rojas said she was also among those officials held after they unfurled a banner and staged a sit-in outside holding cells for immigrants inside 26 Federal Plaza. Read more.