On Teenage Luddites | Hacker News Reader

On Teenage Luddites

calnewport.com

44 pointsbifftastic16 comments

NYT article referred to in the article is being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34004822

People might scoff at the petty vandalism, but how many of you over the age of 35 had a scrupulously clean adolescence?

For the under-30 crowd, everything in their post-puberty lives has been carefully recorded in a semi-public ledger, and they know it.

We should expect people to declare their independence as they enter young adulthood, and it's hard to do that without any space to safely screw up. The Facebook generation was aggressively conditioned to conform with their peers through an industrialized record-share-shame pipeline, so it's good to see gen Z pushing in the opposite direction.

> People might scoff at the petty vandalism, but how many of you over the age of 35 had a scrupulously clean adolescence?

Both my parents were cops in a small rural town, and my father was physically abusive. Damn straight I was squeaky clean.

With modern technology, now every phone is both a cop and an abuse vector. Who needs dads when you've got social media?

I had a scrupulously clean adolescence. I'm not entirely sure why to this day, other than the fact I was completely certain my parents would catch me and ... ground me I guess? They certainly didn't engage in any corporal punishment.

I'm not scoffing at the petty vandalism, I thought it was humorous to link grafittiing the subway to Luddism.

I had a wonderfully filthy adolescence, and like the subject in the article my parents often didn't know where I was at night. Unlike the subject in the article, it didn't seem to bother them. When I abandoned the C64 to spray paint "Circle Jerks" on the walls, it wasn't a rejection of technology. Spray paint is awesome. If I wanted to create a can of spray paint, I wouldn't even know where to start.

If the Teen Luddites had opened for the Circle Jerks, I'm guessing that would have been one ferocious pit.

Great to see young people put down their phones, step away from their screens, go outside and partake in simple natural joys like...checks notes...painting graffiti on subway cars.

As far as misbehaviour goes, this is one of the least consequential examples, and good thrill value to boot!

I love my neighborhood tags! Yeah some of it's kind of a lazy scrawl and that's annoying, but the really audacious, big production stuff is (a) aesthetically pleasing to me and (b) adds an interesting element to my urban ecology. Fascinating to see which tags get repeated in different parts of the city, and whenever I find a new one by a name I know it makes me feel connected to the place I live in an exciting way.

You have a wonderfully positive attitude. I like it. I'm appropriating this viewpoint.

A Luddite was "a member of any of the bands of English workers who destroyed machinery, especially in cotton and woollen mills, that they believed was threatening their jobs (1811–16)." They weren't anti-technology. They were anti-"having their jobs replaced by machines".

> broadly : one who is opposed to especially technological change

1: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Luddite

Hopefully abandoning the smartphone might result in these kids picking up Das Kapital at the Brooklyn library.

Sure, because the communists are well known for their rejection of tracking technology…

Or Progress and Poverty.

By the way, you can view and download almost all of Marx’s works for free in the Marxists Archive! (marxists.org) Probably the advent of the Internet and smartphones have increased access to these works.

Or Capital in the 21st Century

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