Tech executives shield their own children from the designs they profit from

Evidence

Second, consider that while seemingly every kid in a restaurant is now watching bizarre, algorithmically determined children’s content on YouTube, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both severely limited their children’s use of technology at home. As Paul Lewis reported for The Guardian, Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the “like” button, had a parental-control feature set up on his phone by an assistant, to keep him from downloading apps. Loren Brichter, the engineer who invented the “pull-to-refresh” feature of Twitter feeds, regards his invention with penitence: “Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things. When I was working on them, it was not something I was mature enough to think about.” In the meantime, he has “put his design work on the back burner while he focuses on building a house in New Jersey.” Without personal assistants to commandeer our phones, the rest of us keep on pulling to refresh, while overworked single parents juggling work and sanity find it necessary to stick iPads in front of their kids’ faces. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 664

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s framing of Odell in the ‘gatekeepers of attention’ tradition alongside Curtis White and others.