YouTube Kids is massively popular and also the actual worst content the world has to offer. The most successful content, racking up hundreds of millions of views, is extremely vapid and just consists of sounds and colours punctuated by disguised adverts for expensive toys. No narrative, no speech, nothing educational. Kids are so malleable and early development is so important, yet a sizeable chunk are watching people in knock-off Spider-Man costumes unwrap toys and chase around knock-off Elsas all day. I won’t even get into the unsettling uncanny valley side of things and the creepy procedurally generated animation on there.
I’m genuinely concerned about kids being brought up on what is essentially mental junk food through their most formative years. I’m not saying they all need to be listening to violin concertos all day, but I feel that when I was a kid straight up garbage like this didn’t even exist and every kids show had at least something you could learn from it, like Sesame Street, or was decently produced entertainment, like Pokemon. This has a quarter of a billion views and it’s just... nothing.
What alarms me is the video games, and it makes me feel like a hypocrite because as a child I was exposed to the Columbine shootings.
I remember how badly the politicians wanted to blame Duke Nukem and Doom for the shooting. In those games you play some character who is being portrayed as a "good" guy stopping evil, whether it was the demons of hell or the corrupted state police.
Now every shooting video game targets the fellow man, Fortnite and every battle royal game is fighting your fellow man for these scarce resources in hopes of coming out on top. On top of that these war games are revising history to further obfuscate the youth.
I really like when Matt Christman challenges the idea that the youth is the future. I saw what millennials my age have done the moment the capitalists provide them with bread and circuses. The kids are not alright.
I listened to an older ep just the other day where he goes off on how he finds the zoomers terrifying because they're all "dead-eyed psycopaths" lmao