# notes --- - [[{3.3a} the algorithm is changing childhood]] - [[{3.3a1} the internet is for children because they give the most currency in the attention economy]] - [[{3.1d} the algorithm has replaced culture-building]] - lack of adulthood markers plus an algorithmic mono-culture focused on children has left first-gen social media users untethered - we’re untethered culturally b/c everything is online and not for us… we don’t have the same ties to culture as ppl older than us (maybe this is specific to younger millennials)… we’re also experiencing lack of continuity of identity…. lack of childhood / adulthood markers are lack of continuity… # highlights --- >One thesis of the Read Max newsletter is that a *huge* portion-- much more than you might imagine--of content produced on the internet’s big social platforms is consumed by 12-year-olds. I like to cling to this thesis when I encounter something particularly strange and alarming on YouTube or TikTok: If I can remind myself that a video was likely made to appeal to people much younger than me, with less-developed skills for identifying obvious personality disorders, it helps me move past the content and sleep soundly at night. >**Because the audience online so wildly over-samples 12-year-olds relative to the population, and because all social platforms work like highly competitive marketplaces, you are constantly being disciplined into creating content that is essentially, though not explicitly, *for* 12-year-olds.** >there isn’t really a special “young adult”>[2](https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-for-12-year-olds#footnote-2-133198777)>section of, say, YouTube, so *every* video, even those that might otherwise be enjoyed by adults, is under constant pressure to be more adolescent than it would be in most other venues because the audience is more adolescent >there’s no adult institutional mediation between 12-year-olds and their content creators besides whoever is tweaking the recommendation algorithms. >There are no hallmarks of young-adult entertainment; YouTube videos have no winking adult jokes inserted for a presumable audience of half-attentive parents, no moral lessons woven in to signal wholesomeness--just pure, unhinged, what-will-12-year-olds-click-on[-within-the-context-of-the-present-algorithmic-settlement] content. >A possibly related phenomenon is the fact that “Young Adult” fiction and its incessant controversies seem these days to be exclusively the purview of actual adults.