We’re Playing A Dangerous Game with Algorithms

We’re Playing A Dangerous Game with Algorithms Erin Loechner By Erin Loechner I was pregnant with my third child, sprawled on the front lawn untangling a steeple rope-ladder for tree climbing. My four-year-old son ran circles around our towering oak, inquiring as to the status of the pending project—Is it ready? How about now? Like a short soon or a long soon?—while my eight-year-old daughter and my husband sat cross-legged, each hunched over a particularly tangled knot in the rope. It was a hot July afternoon, and all that remained of our heaping bowl of frozen blueberries was ant soup and violet tongues. My energy was waning. I questioned more than once whether we should abandon the project, save it for a day that promised more ease, less sweat, and definitely more frozen fruit. But we pressed on. I had a vision, after all. Our home is a small fixer-upper in a quiet neighborhood with an elementary school nestled right in the center. Daily, my family and I watch the pint-size crowd and their parents rush by with Spider-Man backpacks and weighty dreams. What if ropes and rungs could brighten someone’s morning commute? Who might pause? What might he or she discover? What could happen next? Friends and neighbors halting their day to scramble up to the highest heights of our favorite tree, peeking at the world with a renewed perspective. Fresh air, laughing leaves. Built-in adventure, soaring hopes, wide-eyed wonder. Tea parties hosted on every branch. Tangled hair and, of course, scraped knees. Dirt under fingernails. Hundreds of childhoods claimed and reclaimed. Lives lived, if only for the afternoon. Our community tree-climbing apparatus has swayed in the welcoming wind for three years now. We’ve hoisted up babies in diapers, spun giddy toddlers, timed competitive third-graders racing an impromptu obstacle course. Our steeple climber has heard shrieks of every variety—glee, exhilaration, then disappointment when a mother announces it’s time to head home for lunch. The vision came true. Until it didn’t. Earlier this summer, I noticed our once beloved rope climber had been left vacant, untouched, barely noticed. In just three short Julys, the landscape of our neighborhood (and truly, our world) had changed. Today, I watch teens scoot by on their skateboards, scrolling through feeds or firing off text messages, glancing up every now and then to avoid a sidewalk crack. Parents power walk by wearing wireless earbuds, swiping through emails and podcasts as they push double strollers and juggle lattes. The elementary crowd steers bikes or scooters with one hand, balancing devices in the other as they film stunts for YouTube before rocketing off to some destination. A few weeks ago, I peered through the window with delight to see a neighborhood child approach the climber with purpose. I witnessed her grasp the ropes, expecting her to heave higher to the next beam, to climb upward and upward until she reached the tip-top of the ladder swing, the canopy of leaves just brushing her eyelashes. But she didn’t. She, instead, plunked herself onto the second-to-bottom rung, her feet dangling only a few inches from the weedy grass below. She fished for something in her back pocket, and I realized she’d brought her iPhone along. For the next twenty minutes, I watched her pose, snapping selfie after selfie, finding every single one of them lacking. Over and over, she tried another angle while the tree branches danced high above and chirping creatures scampered from view. This time with pursed lips? Gazing away from the camera, pensive? Touching her hair, bored? Hanging upside down, giggling? Again and again and again. An entire world above her, abounding in beauty, all beyond her reach. She was eight years old.The Work of an Algorithm This is the world our children live in, where playground swings become selfie props. It is not an accident. It is the work of an algorithm. It is the work of a machine and a mission, a grand strategy dreamed up by people in boardrooms who make a living by stealing a life. Every time you unlock your smartphone, your next few minutes, next few decisions, next few conversations are filtered, shaped, and informed by an algorithm. Your coworker catches you up on his Yellowstone binge last weekend, and by the time lunch break hits, your default browser is displaying ads for national park totes and a cheap flight to Wyoming. Heading to a baby shower, you pick up newborn diapers at the grocery store and Target starts sending you coupons for Tucks and Frida Baby—“Congrats! Here’s your postpartum survival guide!” Your niece asks Siri the dates of Arcade Fire’s next concerts and your Amazon cart recommends the latest summer festival looks. Your son’s soccer teammate texts pizza orders on a group thread and his next YouTube recommendation is everything he never knew about #Pizzagate. Faithfully, we feast on an Apple a day. But the diagnosis is clear: a steady diet of algorithms, smart devices, and tech addiction is changing us to the core. And when we grant our kids an appetizing bite of shiny newness? The consequences are dire. Developmental delays. Confusion. Loneliness. Stress. Anxiety. Manipulation. Inactivity. Depression. And much worse. According to Tim Kendall, former president of Pinterest and director of monetization at Facebook, “It’s plain as day to me—these services are killing people. And causing people to kill themselves.” He’s right. The dangers of our modern-day digital lives have been well documented, and I’ll point to many studies and statistics throughout this book. But the question remains: if smartphones—and their dangerous algorithms—are so terrible for us, why do we engage? Why do we choose to hand today’s top addiction to our kids? And why are we, as full-grown adults, sitting on the bathroom floor watching (filming?) TikTok content while our toddlers play alone one room over? The answer isn’t what you think. Of all the expert strategies we an wield against our tech addictions—Leave your phone in a drawer! Turn off all notifications! Try a digital detox!—we’re addressing only half of the issue. We’re silencing our devices. But what silences the desire to turn them on in the first place?A New Path to Consider My aim in The Opt-Out Family is to offer a new path to consider as you think about your family’s approach to digital living. As you’ll soon find out, this revolutionary journey doesn’t call for parental-control apps, arbitrary time limits, or complicated reward charts. This road travels into far deeper territory, and the map comes from the most unlikely of sources: the algorithm itself. What if we stole the secrets of the boardroom and the tech wizards and the platform experts? What if we gathered the internet’s greatest tips and tricks to guarantee delight online and used them to grow delight offline? What if we unpacked every sneaky strategy technology uses to get us to opt all the way in and we flipped the script? Could we rebuild our lost lives? Would we gain back our time and our attention and our energy? Could we learn to be more engaging than the algorithm? It’s a lofty goal to boldly raise an opt-out kid, to design a family culture that is truly yours—entirely yours!—that ensures you’ll know the people under your roof better than an Instagram ad does, to create a life that is so good and so abundant and so full that you won’t find yourself sneaking away from it to check your feeds. But I believe it’s possible to live a life that’s both full of love and empty of likes. I know it’s possible, because I did it. And you can, too. ________ The Opt-Out FamilyAdapted from The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't, by Erin Loechner. Click here to learn more about his book. Discover a new and hopeful path forward as you consider your family's approach to social media, screen time, and technology. We've all heard the mind-boggling statistics about technology and social media use. The numbers don't lie; our obsession with smartphones and social media is slowly eroding the very essence of our homes and families. We see it. We feel it. We know it. So what do we do about it? Spoiler alert: Forget parental control apps, time limits, or reward charts. This revolutionary path takes us into the heart of the beast itself: the social media algorithm. Former social media influencer and trailblazer Erin Loechner has seen the perks and pitfalls of social media usage, and she knows how to hack the strategies of tech wizards and platform experts so you can borrow their billion-dollar playbook to engage your family in meaningful ways away from screens. The Opt-Out Family is packed with eye-opening research and startling insights, as well as practical encouragement and creative ideas to transform your family's relationship with today's ever-evolving technology. As a result, you will:  Experience more quality time with your children that doesn't revolve around screens Create healthy habits as a family that will set your children up for success in the future Discover what your kids actually need from you, and learn how to delight and engage them better than a device can And, ultimately, establish true and lasting influence within your own four walls—and far beyond The Opt-Out Family unlocks a world where genuine connections flourish and technology takes a backseat. It's time to reclaim your home and build a tech-free family culture that's stronger than your Wi-Fi signal. Erin Loechner, founder of global tech-free movement The Opt-Out Family, is a former social media influencer who walked away from a million fans to live a low-tech lifestyle—and is now teaching others how to do the same. Her cutting-edge work has been praised in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Huffington Post, as well as on the Today Show. When she’s not scrawling on her trusty steno pad, Erin, her husband, and their three kids spend their days chasing alpenglow, reading Kipling, and biking to town for more tortillas.