Thoughts on living and parenting in the digital age.

There are some lines I have drawn in the sand when it comes to tech companies: I don’t have any sort of account with Alpha (Google), nor do I have an account with Meta (Facebook, Instagram, etc.). I find their stated goals for the relationship between technology and humanity repulsive, and their exploitation of adolescents—harnessing the power of addiction and pre-teen/teenage hormones to increase their user base—abhorrent. I find nothing redeemable about either tech company.

I don’t love everything that Apple does, but I do continue to use their products. I committed a few years back to only buying used Apple equipment which, given the generally high quality of their hardware, has served me well. Apple’s vision of the relationship between technology and humanity, while not as blatant as that of Alpha and Meta, is still well short of what I would call a healthy vision.

You may spot some cognitive dissidence in how I view Alpha, Meta, and Apple, but I have made peace with it myself.

But here is a question that I am finding myself pondering lately: where do streaming platforms fall in this discussion?

AT&T provides all of my devices with internet capability. It that sense, they are simply an internet utility. They are my gateway to “the internet” and all that it entails. I don’t find myself holding them responsible for what they give me direct access to.

But I do quite a few things—from using whitelist filters on my phone for internet access to router-end filtering in our home—to restrict what my family and I have access to on the internet. But I don’t expect AT&T to do that filtering for me. That works out well because there are tools available that allow me to do the filtering myself.

Where then, do streaming services fall? I currently view Netflix and Apple Music, for example, almost as a utility. It is through Netflix that I have access to their library of offerings. But here is where that breaks down:

If I don’t want myself or my family to partake of certain offerings, there are some ways I can “filter” this out—age restrictions or explicit tags—but not nearly as robustly as I can with a whitelist or router-end filtering.

For example, there are things I filter out of my own internet access, not because they are “inappropriate” but rather because they are time-stealing brain-rotting garbage. I can’t quite do that with Netflix, or Apple Music. I can only filter out things deemed “age-inappropriate” or “explicit.”

The irony is that I would rather have my family hear a “bad” word in a song than passively embrace the many—often conflicting—shallow unexamined philosophies du jour of the pop music or film world.

With the tools I am currently aware of, I now have two options: drop these subscriptions entirely, or keep them entirely, knowing that they are gateways to things I think are less healthy.

Or a third way, which is the hardest. I can put real boundaries around when and where these streaming services can be used. (We do this, to a good extent now.) I could so regularly discuss brain-rot, time-wasting, logical fallacies, and mantras that sound nice but don’t hold up to an ounce of philosophical integrity with my family that they begin to recognize and dislike them as much as I do. (We do this, some, now.)

I am becoming more convinced that my work is to double down on this third path; to treat it the same way I treat an important project in my day job(s).