A leash, a chain and a cage are wonderful things: a person tied to a leash, and best of all, a person locked behind bars is much safer than a free-walking person. This is especially true for children who do not always understand where they are climbing and what may happen. But is this a reason to tie them to a digital leash?
"Big Brother" is coming
Judge for yourself: "for safety" we put a smart watch on the child's hand so that we always know where he is. And when he is somewhere “not there” and is removed from the places marked by his parents as “safe” - the alarm bell rings for his mother or father.
There are already cities where the road to school must now be “school-coordinated” and marked as “safe route”. And if the child has deviated, then see point one. A child can most often enter and leave school only with a card, with registration of the passage time. And everywhere there are cameras, cameras, cameras …
But this is not enough. What trackers and electronic passes! In several Perm schools, as we are promised, they will soon install systems for analyzing emotions: children will be filmed, and a neural network will analyze their behavior and intentions online - by plasticity and facial expressions. Allegedly, this system "will be used to prevent emergencies." I do not know if emergencies will disappear, but the system will constantly take pictures of students, and the neural network will analyze emotions by faces. She will be able to distinguish joy from sadness, fear from delight, aggression and other emotions.
Progress? Something, the neural network sees, I don't want to rejoice. Having accustomed an entire generation to resignedly to obey the digital leash, we will soon see the same methods of controlling behavior in our office: who is not happy enough with the idea of working outside the classroom ?! And then the technology will go everywhere: in transport (we need security!), In public places, in places of recreation …
Do we need it? Is this the future we want? And if not, then why put children in a cage that we ourselves are afraid of and do not accept?
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From what we die
By the way, is the devil of violence as terrible as it is portrayed? In recent years, only 7-8% of the total number of deaths perishes from external causes (as demographers call deaths not related to diseases). And 92-93% - from old age and disease. Our non-medical mortality rate is the lowest in the last almost half a century - and compared to the peak of the 90s, it has generally decreased by half. And this result was achieved in completely different ways, not so straightforward, without tracking and analyzing emotions. Largely thanks to the restoration of order in the country, from the condition of roads and measures to control strong alcohol to improving working conditions. And the result is obvious.
Are we afraid of murder? Reasonable. But at the same time, we already have twice as many people dying from suicide than from criminal attacks. Rosstat regularly publishes mortality rates from external causes. These are very interesting numbers!
Our citizens are mostly killed for the following reasons:
- From damage (PNN) * - 25.8%
- From suicide - 13.8%
- From transport accidents - 12.9%
- From alcohol poisoning - 8.4%
- From murders - 6.3%;
- From accidental drops 5.1%
- From accidental drowning 3.9%;
- From fires - 2.8%
* Data for 2016. According to the documents of the World Health Organization (WHO), EUI ("Injury with undetermined intent") includes those deaths about which "There is insufficient information available to conclude whether the incident is an accident, self-harm or violence."
Safety system: only for children
There is a good chance that having built a sterile safe environment for children in our beautiful digital world, we will receive an increase in the number of suicides among adolescents who have decided to escape from the cage built by adults in such a terrible way. And this is a fairly common way of "solving a problem" in adolescence, statistics and any psychologist will tell you this.
One more important thing is not taken into account: the ability to make the right decisions in a difficult and borderline situation cannot be developed without giving the teenager the right to take risks, isolating him from all "difficult situations". It is known that people who are placed in an environment without microbes for a long time gradually lose their immunity - and then they get terribly ill, dying en masse from the common flu. We also seem to be going to undermine the social immunity of children - with the best of intentions, of course. Fencing them off from everything, placing turnstiles and cameras around them, connecting "neural networks" and hanging beacons on them.
And, of course, we must agree with the thesis (I didn’t come up with it) that you cannot build a security system separately for minors - outside of what happens to adults. For example, no matter how stricter the rules for transporting children on the roads of the country, no matter how much you recruit people with good faces and an impeccable pedigree in the tenth generation as drivers - tomorrow a man will fly out to meet them in a latan KAMAZ - and all efforts have gone to dust.
Any extremes give birth to monsters. It's lovely to be religious and moral - but at the extreme point of this path, the fire of the Inquisition burns. It's great to root for your people - but a burnt swastika sticks out at the extreme point of this route.
This is the same monster that our understandable and correct craving for safety can generate. When, for the sake of safety, we first put our children in a cage, and then we do not notice how we will find ourselves in it ourselves.
Author: YULIA ALEKHINA