GoKawiilMay 28, 2026
I am a technologist. I enjoy the things that computers and digital devices can do–they often seem magical and amazing! As a technologist, I have a particular vantage point to see and be very uncomfortable with what companies are doing with that technology. There are catchphrases for these patterns: AdTech, Surveillance Capitalism, Rage Bait, Engagement-Optimized Feeds, Harvesting Eyeballs.
I am also a parent. As a parent, I am scared about the prospect of letting my kids loose in a digital world so aggressively dominated by these companies and patterns. But at the same time, technology was an enriching part of my childhood and continues to be an enriching part of my life and I want to share that with them. In this post, I don’t want to spend much time discussing the ways that bad tech patterns are bad, instead I want to share some of the ways I have held on to the enriching parts of technology to share them with my kids. For many of these choices, it turns out that (surprise!) my favorite solutions involve looking back in time a couple decades.
Physical media
I’m starting to fall in love with CDs again. When I was young, music came on CDs. This was a time before MP3s and before Spotify. This was a time when going to summer camp, I would pick which half-dozen CDs I wanted to bring with on the trip. This was a time of wired ear-bud headphones, sitting in school sharing a song with someone by giving them one of the two ear buds and listening side-by-side. This was a time of [Parental Advisory] labels on CDs that had objectionable language. This was a time of tiny LCD screens on portable CD players that only displayed the track number, so I sometimes knew my favorite song on a CD by number instead of by name.
I bought a mini CD boom box for the house. My oldest loves bringing it around to different rooms, plugging it in, and putting in a CD. I bought her the K-Pop Demon Hunters CD for her birthday. The local public library has CDs! CDs are awesome.
Speaking of the public library, they also have DVDs and BluRays. I remember the whole ritual of going to Blockbuster Video with my Dad to pick out a movie for family movie night. Usually he would let my sister and me pick out a few extras that we wanted to watch. That’s how I got familiar with the Three Stooges, even though it was before my time. The magic of having something to hold onto that you can bring home and put in the player next to the TV, and there is your movie!
As a parent one of the big wins with physical media is I know exactly what my kids have available to experience. If they aren’t ready for something, it doesn’t come home with us. The kids can be much more independent about watching and listening because there is no adversary inside the device they are using. Kids love that independence.
Landline Telephones
I hooked up a wired, physical telephone next to the kitchen in our house. I’m using a cheap VoIP provider with an analogue telephone adapter, but there’s a company called Tin Can that makes this really easy (no affiliation). The telephone network has retained backward compatibility as everyone moved to smartphones, so grandparents, neighbors, aunts and uncles, are all now accessible to the kids. Even better, these digitally-managed phones have excellent configuration options. I’ve whitelisted all the friends and family who get to call us, and the phone automatically blocks calls from dinner time to morning. My kids will spontaneously call up their grandparents to ask if they can go over to play, and have memorized my phone number because they like to prank call me when I’m also in the kitchen.
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