Raised by a Machine

[tau888]

I feel as if I was raised by 3 parents: my mom, my dad, and a cold metal slab. That cold metal slab was a first-gen iPad.

I'll admit it: I was one of the first iPad kids. Kind of embarrassing, but it's not like it's my fault. I was 4. You would assume this would have gone awfully but it somehow wasn't that bad. I wasn't extremely spoiled or totally ruined/corrupted by the iPad, and I thankfully did not stumble across anything awful or shocking on the internet, which I had total unrestricted access to.

It is definitely quite an awful idea to give a 4 year old total freedom to browse the internet, but I guess this was just an exceptional case where I turned out fine and untraumatized. I exclusively stuck to YouTube. I remember watching old Spongebob YTPs from the late 2000s, those old Minecraft animations, and other content like that. Okay, the YTPs for sure had some nasty language and references in there, but I was so naive and young to the point that I didn't really even understand what it was. I think I just liked the pretty lights and funny sounds and effects, and had no idea what was actually happening.

I used to play tons of iPad games and made lots of art. I still have that iPad along with everything on it, and I have all of the thousands of videos and images backed up on my PC. Looking back at those things I made is a happy and nostalgic experience. I really had a lot of fun on that iPad, and made good memories on it. I think I stopped using it around 7 or 8 years old, however I continued to use technology all the time.

I loved YouTube, and still love YouTube today. I feel like I have basically used it for all of my existence. And it has really shaped me. It shaped me so fundamentally in fact, that my religious and political beliefs originated from YouTube. I can literally point to the particular video that changed my faith forever, I still have it saved. Political, not so much, because I now am very open-minded and ambiguous when it comes to politics, and I have no concrete political beliefs. Though I do specifically remember some videos that formed my earliest opinions.

Looking back at this, this kind of scares me. The thought that this massive, cold algorithm has decided my identity for me, starting right at my earliest developmental years is something I don't really know how to feel about. I feel that it has benefited me a lot though, giving me knowledge from infotainment channels. Vsauce is the best example of this (that channel is awesome!). It has given me so many worldviews and interesting ideas that I would otherwise have never seen without it.

There were quite a few negative side effects though. I lived this very closed-in, introverted lifestyle and just watched videos for long periods of time. This significantly stunted me socially, causing me to struggle to connect with my classmates in elementary school. Think about this: most of what I knew and saw, my world, was basically YouTube, and whatever else was on the iPad and computer. And obviously everybody else were actually living their lives and connecting with others. The things I was interested in were so abstract and disconnected from reality that I struggled to relate to other kids my age. Nobody else at that age in that time knew what a YTP was, or used computers, or watched YouTube all the time.

And so, because of this, I had never made a single friend ever in my life until 7th grade. K-6 was just complete isolation. So like, 7 years of sitting around school and not having anybody to talk to.

Obviously this had some psychological impacts. Up until somewhat recently I was socially inept. Could barely hold conversations. Fortunately I have really been working on this, and I can now converse just fine. I have always felt "different". It's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is, but it's there. I have some traits that would suggest autism, but not really enough to definitively say so. I feel like it is a gift, though. I feel unique in a good way.

I have mostly recovered from this development stunting of my social skills though, so that's good. I have quite a few friends now, and I am much more confident than I was before.

I'm tired of thinking of myself as shy, introverted, or awkward. I do not want to be those things anymore. And I have really improved and I feel way more confident and sociable now. My mental health has somehow always been really good. I am very mentally stable and happy, and I have an optimistic outlook on life. Many other people my age seem to be getting more and more depressed or unstable, and this really saddens me.

Sorry for ranting so much. Just feels nice to vomit all of these thoughts out onto a page.

[Memory]

yea same.

i had an iPad 4th gen (not the Mini or Air, the old fat 4th gen) since i was 5, and i def have some shit from the internet. but honestly i don't remember ever being traumatised or anything before i was on social media; Reddit ruined me and Discord only slammed that in harder when i was a teen.

but my childhood - yea many of the things i've seen probably are best not to give a ~6 year old access too, and my parents aren't really tech literate; they're over protective yet they don't know what to do, so i basically had full unrestricted internet access :P
i stopped using that tablet when i was ~11 especially since iOS 10 was chugging it and most things were unsupported for it already. i did get a 7th gen as an upgrade but i never really used it, until it smashed! now i have an Air M1 and i only use it for VTubing and drawing in Procreate now, that's literally all i have on it :P

most of the Vocaloid stuff then was probably best not for kids, especially since it was pre-2017 Vocaloid and there was a heck of a lot of weird stuff. some of the tracks i remember vividly are WAY darker than i ever even thought they'd be, and little me was so naive too.
and plus i mostly just watched a heap of Minecraft, especially remember DanTDM and probably Stampy, if i remember correctly? there might've been some others, but yea. i think i did watch some Flipnote compilations too.

[DiffydaDude]

I remember in the earliest years of my life, most of what I was taught wasn't through a tablet, but through books, the TV, and video games. If you wanted to watch a video, you had to connect your console to the Internet or use the family iPad, which we all shared. Or you could use a school laptop when you were at school. So most of my early life was influenced pretty naturally. There was still Internet, but it was pretty much positive.
I eventually did get my own tablet on Christmas 2015, and while I was still young, I mostly used it to explore what I learned about elsewhere. It just sort of adapted to my regular activities. I still read books, I still played my 3DS, but now I had this cool tablet I used to make art, watch videos on my own time (where I watched Jacksepticeye and MLP videos and other cool things), and browse the Internet. That's not to say that it wasn't bad in some ways, like when I watched DHMIS and that Film Theory video about how the Wall-E Milkshakes are made of human flesh and got traumatized, or when I went through my conspiracy phase and started worrying about MLP being satanic, but I got over those eventually. I also distinctly remember when I started to see the Youtube change into something full of drama and idiots. It started with the Adpocalypse, and soon it was more profitable to make fun of other people's stuff more than make your own. So I started becoming an anti-cringe person who hated furries and little animator girls because apparently they were who ruined the internet. That was pretty wrong huh, they were actually the loadbearing part.
Now the part where the way I used tech started changing was in 2020. Because I couldn't go to school and read books there or had restraint for using my phone, I started using phones a lot more. It wasn't until 2021 that it really got bad. Because I got into a really bad depression, I started getting really addicted to Discord. I lost my skills and habits for reading, I would go out of class to look at Discord, I'd stay up at night to look at Discord, and Discord would wake me up in the middle of the night. It basically ruined all my proper habits for using a phone, and I still haven't built them back up. I think I might try to forego a phone soon but I don't know how successful that'll be if I do it. It'd be awesome to just go back to having a DS and using a flipphone, but people would probably be like "BRO IS LIKE MY GRANDMA    ".
Thats another thing I forgot to mention. The part where you said how the internet totally changed the way you behaved makes me think about how literally most kids in school all talk the same way and speak in TikTok or Youtube lingo. I sit next to these 2 kids in my art class and they're always like "Bro is literally ________" "_________ is crazy" "Im so cooked" and it pisses me off so bad because hearing people talk like in the internet is obnoxious but they wont get that because it's normal to them now. I really wish they banned people saying they're cooked. It pisses me off, especially when they say it just because they're too incompetent to write a full sentence or dare solve an algebra equation. It's like now I'm the loner for not doing that crap. Why is it normal for people to be so dogshit?

[tau888]

Thats another thing I forgot to mention. The part where you said how the internet totally changed the way you behaved makes me think about how literally most kids in school all talk the same way and speak in TikTok or Youtube lingo. I sit next to these 2 kids in my art class and they're always like "Bro is literally ________" "_________ is crazy" "Im so cooked" and it pisses me off so bad because hearing people talk like in the internet is obnoxious but they wont get that because it's normal to them now. I really wish they banned people saying they're cooked. It pisses me off, especially when they say it just because they're too incompetent to write a full sentence or dare solve an algebra equation. It's like now I'm the loner for not doing that crap. Why is it normal for people to be so dogshit?

I feel you on this one. It feels like society is normalizing anti-intellectualism through things like this. The peer pressure of social media is insane. People look at me funny when I tell them I don't have TikTok, or really any social media for that matter. It really is frustrating because it's this cruel cycle where you are pressured to get it because literally everybody else has it, and it's the only way to stay connected with your friends, so it creates a snowball effect. TikTok has literally given the population such an embarrassingly short attention span that I would honestly consider it as acquired ADHD at this point.

YouTube comments are the best example of the "Bro ____ 💀" comments and other variants of dogshit. Literally no comments have anything of value anymore, and they are literally just pointing out the punchline and adding an emoji. And it gets thousands of likes.

"I died when (punchline)"

 "Bro said (punchline) 💀"

 "(Punchline)"

"(Punchline) 🤣🤣🤣😭😭😭💀"

Literal drones.

[Memory]

I feel you on this one. It feels like society is normalizing anti-intellectualism through things like this. The peer pressure of social media is insane. People look at me funny when I tell them I don't have TikTok, or really any social media for that matter. It really is frustrating because it's this cruel cycle where you are pressured to get it because literally everybody else has it, and it's the only way to stay connected with your friends, so it creates a snowball effect. TikTok has literally given the population such an embarrassingly short attention span that I would honestly consider it as acquired ADHD at this point.

YouTube comments are the best example of the "Bro ____ 💀" comments and other variants of dogshit. Literally no comments have anything of value anymore, and they are literally just pointing out the punchline and adding an emoji. And it gets thousands of likes.

"I died when (punchline)"

 "Bro said (punchline) 💀"

 "(Punchline)"

"(Punchline) 🤣🤣🤣😭😭😭💀"

Literal drones.

yea basically. i myself already had diagnosed ADHD and ASD but really this is something else.

really, it's kinda stupid knowing people seem to mock anyone who actually knows something, or uses something different from the mainstream? it's this viscious cycle that makes people come out almost rabid.
people get immediately pissed off if you have much of an opinion, mock you if you're somewhat smart, etc. it's exhausting as hell.

that's kinda why i've already left most things but even then in the real world there's still people like that. i wouldn't go as far to dwell on this kinda stuff, but it's sometimes good to get it out.
especially some certain kinds of people i know in the real world, they still dance around 'cringe culture' like it's still well and truly alive, when the reality is it's kinda stupid to hate something.

i don't think the internet's all bad though - many things that only exist now and usually within emerging teenagers online wouldn't even be a thing until potentially centuries into the future, if we didn't have the internet at all. really it's a blessing and a curse.
however tech and inventions take us is just how society ends up, the future isn't up for one or two people really. even though it feels like a corporate dystopia right now, it's not all there is, yk?

[AY38910]

What if I told you in my case the machine was a computer twice as old as me

OK I'll add more stuff.

My first experience with a machine was when I was 6, an ancient Spectrum my dad still kept around for absolutely no reason that I found inside an old cardboard box. It was where I played my first games and wrote my first programs. I got Internet access when I was 8, by whicn I mean "I started going to the library for something other than reading kids' books". Still, the library PC was so restricted you could barely visit anything other than a few sites like Wikipedia, Google, Wayback...when I was 10 I was given a tablet. I mostly lurked on Facebook (there were a few artists I liked that uploaded there), watched YouTube videos about topics I liked, played flash games on Newgrounds and chatted on a now defunct IRC server. Still used the Spectrum for quite some stuff though, mostly "Why bother searching a BASIC interpreter when I already have one?"
I also made a blog on LiveJournal, I forgot its name, but I deleted it 2 years later. It was really cringe, either way. Like, this is a snippet of it I still keep for some reason:

and like thats how yuri hacked the school

(He literally just found an unblocked games website)

I later found a cheap laptop at a garage sale, so I bought it. I started tinkering with it. The thing barely ran Windows 7, but I still used it. Installing Linux made it much faster, even though it was not even a "minimal" distro (it was plain old Debian with default settings). The laptop broke in 2020 when I accidentally spilled soda all over it 

And here I am now...heh...
That old brick-shaped system, it introduced me to my biggest passion, and a huge part of my life. It was what got me into computer science (and its history).

In a way, it was like a 3rd parent, that taught me to appreciate what most people see as just a thing to run Candy Crush, Chrome, Paint and Windows Media Player on.

As for socializing, even when I was 7 I could barely relate to others. They just seemed too slow, too shallow, and overall too tiring to talk to. It later turned out that I not only had ADHD but was also autistic AND had an IQ higher than average (which basically explained why I found other kids to be kinda dumb, lol). That plus being already shy for very different reasons. Basically, I had very little friends, and 90% were like much older than me XD

If anyone is wondering, my IQ is around 128. Average is 100.

Maybe the fact mine is a power of 2 was an early hint at what I would end up as?

[candycanearter07]

The earliest I remember being "online" was actually the Nintendo DS and Flipnote. It was wild to me that I could see stuff that other people around the world made. I don't think I ever published anything, but I still have the sd card filled with saved notes... somewhere.

Similar to other people in this thread, I really didn't have that many friends until like highschool (because it was such a small highschool i was forced to learn other peoples names and stuff). I was also a weird kid in that I had a kindle fire instead of an ipad...

I didn't actually get my first phone until middle school, at least.

[⋆Spicy_vinta⋆]

surprisingly despite being born at a time when the internet was as accessible as it could ever be, I never really had a chance to actually "use the internet" on any device other than my families Xbox 360 and the occasional you tube video my dad would show me. The first ever internet capable device i was given was a really cheap amazon tablet. Luckily my parents did not give me and my brothers unrestricted internet access, neither did they tell us how to make emails so we could access stuff like you tube or google so i just used it to play old mobile games like jet pack joyride.


The next important part of my interactions with the internet at a young age was when i got my first phone near the end of 6th grade and made my first google account at the library. That's also when my relationship with tech started to get a little unhealthy as COVID was just around the corner (i finished 6th grade in 2019) also making an Instagram,tiktok,and account that because i didn't really have anything else to do.

A year and a half later we started physical attending school and in 8th grade one of my friends created a sever that most of our friend group ended up joining an using to keep in touch with each other outside of school. i don't really want to go into specifics but all i really can say is that the server was beyond toxic or at least became that way after a while. the regret from being apart of that made me want to stop using social media all together for a while if not forever and probably contributed to my longing for a web that incentivized community which is how i ended up here. Despite the negatives I still don't regret being online as certain spaces and creatives have gave me very meaningful insight about life and even myself (which funnily enough is how i figured out i was bi).