Until the end of elementary school I was an unmoored, uncaring kid with no connection to the planet, the future, or the world. Yeah I'd play outside, but I felt no real identity, & longed to understand how I might begin to grow or to have purpose to engage myself in.

I had a public school teacher who went way above & beyond, introduced us to technology & computing (bringing his own PC's into the class room, which we only used very occasionally) & ham radio (although the planned club never really materialized). This gave me a much stronger relationship to the world I'd face, & began a genuine interest in the world in me.

Kids are blank slates- tabula rasa- & they need models of engagement & things to grow interested in over time. Simply expecting play & fun time, without specific encouragement to go deeper, without examples of others about them who are interested & are going deep into things- is an extreme danger. It's been so hard seeing so many so adrift, wishing so badly these people had had more exposure to different things in the world where they might moor themselves.

Technology is fantastically difficult to root into in todays world, is oppressively technocratically nightmarishly resilient to exploration & playing with at any genuinely technical level. But it's still more accessible, a bigger open field, with so vastly much wider open potential (in part because this rotten technocratically driven core is so low-nutrient & exploitative & unwilling to do anything but suck down our life energies, not contributing value) than so so so much else in the world that I yearn so much to see some of the near breakthroughs that could happen anytime. I have deep reverence for biology, medicine, chemistry, material science, design, ux, for so music & culture & art, but wow, so many of these require so much more dedication & luck to break through in, to run the gauntlet of. Computers still seem so rife with potential as a place I'd want people to seek engagement, in spite of their sad hulky rebuffing outer shell of "user interface" that lies & betrays, that is Plato's Cave's Marionette scene, endlessly lying to us.

Kids have so much cognitive surplus. They have so much potential. Pretending that you know better, denying them mediums of thought they might explore & forcing them into simplicity, prolonging their childhood forcibly, is not something I am sympathetic to. Clay Shirky had a 2008 conference talk that electrified the world, on cognitive surplus, contrasting Watching Gilligan's Island versus Editing Wikipedia[1]. These words weren't used but it was a contrast of inert, useless, goes-no-where activity versus the chance to engage in something, in starting the ability to find your own meaning. This process should not be force-started upon kids, and there is a lot of inert, dead end uses of technology they'll hook themselves on & click endlessly. But to deny the whole project, to opt them out of exploring the deeper angles of the world- that's a bad mistake I'd wish on no one. Tech, in spite of all the bad I've said, still has the lions share of open & explorable angles. There's a huge question about how we open the real explorable, interesting angles, versus letting ourselves be sucked in to inert activities, but imo the risk of denial is worse than the risk of what is possible.

[1] https://www.edge.org/conversation/clay_shirky-gin-television...