LF13 - Family Futures
Family-scale Networks & Network-scale Families
Hi, Tom here. Thanks for joining - this is the first installment of Little Futures: Season 3. Season 2 was five years ago. This week: family futures.
“Children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves.” - Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn
I’m guessing, like me, many readers of Little Futures grew up during the era of personal computers, with memories of dialup, disks and DOS. My dad had some of the first personal computers in the UK, using them to run his business out of our family home.
But the era of the personal computer is mis-named because they weren’t really personal computers - they were family computers. Big chunky things. Yelling up and down the stairs to see if anyone was on the phone before going online. You could feel where the internet came from - the pings and bloops of the dialup sound traveling across the phone lines - the same phone lines you could see criss crossing above you as you walk down the street on the way to school.
My childhood computing experience was physical - I used to carry floppy disks into school and trade them with friends back and forth like pokemon cards.
Fast forward 30-ish years and it’s all disappeared from view - I can’t count how many internet-connected devices we have in the home. And yet there’s no family computer. The physicality of the computing experience, the geography of the network, has been subsumed into an ambiance.
So buying a record player and watching my kids, with their insatiable curiosity become interested in what’s playing, to choose their own records. Delightful.
Bookcases are visible media too. Growing up we had an entire set of Encyclopedia Britannica on the bookshelf. An entire wikipedia there to be browsed, referenced. Many family debates were settled by pulling an encyclopedia off the shelf.
We’ve had a Google Home device in the living room for a few years but it doesn’t do much except play music and tell us the weather (and even those it does pretty poorly). More recently however, I’ve been pulling chatGPT out at dinner time and putting it in voice mode with the kids and we’re in hysterics getting it to tell us jokes, teach us about greek mythology using paw patrol characters or teach us about how the body works (oh the irony).
Family-Scale Networks
A record player is a boundary object. It has a stable mechanical function in our living room - but it also makes legible the entire world of music. Technology that bridges our understanding of what’s possible between the physical and digital worlds.
I’ve been thinking about family-scale technology. What devices, networks and systems to let into our family dynamic. How does technology enter our home? What is the geography for understanding how and where technology lives.
Yes, there’s a direct conversation about if/when to let Roxy get a phone (she’s 9, not yet). But I’m more interested in the boundary objects. Experiences, devices and objects that signal the boundary of the physical and digital. That bridge understanding of what’s possible, that opens up technology as a creative world waiting to be explored.
My daughter Roxy and I wrote a blog post together years ago. Maybe it’s time for Indy’s first blog post. A digital rite of passage in our household?
In an era of vibe-coding, the concept of home-cooked software has never been more within reach as Robin Sloan writes (pre-vibe coding and AI!):
For a long time, I have struggled to articulate what kind of programmer I am. I’ve been writing code for most of my life; I can make many interesting and useful things happen on computers. At the same time, I would not last a day as a professional software engineer. Leave me in charge of a critical database and you will return to a smoldering crater.
Building this app, I figured it out:
I am the programming equivalent of a home cook.
Network-scale Families
Meanwhile, I live in Brooklyn while my mum and brother’s family are in the UK. A lot of our family experiences are mediated through group whatsapp threads. What are these spaces? Is the family whatsapp thread more like the family dinner table, sharing stories of our days or more like the fridge covered in notes. todos and reminders?
What kinds of space does your family inhabit online? What kind of shared computing environments do you engage with?
The Slackification of the American household points to one future - where we run our family networks through corporate B2B saas tools:
In other words, confronted with relentless busyness, some modern households are starting to run more like offices.
Julie Berkun Fajgenbaum, a mom of three children ages 8 to 12, uses Google Calendar to manage her children’s time and Jira to keep track of home projects. Ryan Florence, a dad in Seattle, set up a family Slack account for his immediate and extended family to communicate more easily. And Melanie Platte, a mom in Utah, says Trello has transformed her family life. After using it at work, she implemented it at home in 2016. “We do family meetings every Sunday where we review goals for the week, our to-do list, and activities coming up,”
But there surely is another way, one hinted at by Robin Sloan where our digital spaces are home-cooked, with rough edges and designed for the patina of our individual family dynamics. Maybe with more deliberate geography and seams?
Inviting chatGPT to the dinner table
Sometime soon I predict chatGPT will roll out family accounts and it’ll be the biggest family-scale computing change since the personal computer.
Family accounts would provide immediate value - offering a shared calendar, shared memory, personalization at the family level not the individual level. The possibility that Roxy’s first device would not be an iphone but an AI assistant she can talk to. The possibility that our family could actually have an imprint digitally. That we could embed our values and our quirks into the chatGPT model we talk to every day. A true shared computing environment.
I’m excited for this future - I think it invites technology into the home in a way that is shared, collaborative and perhaps even playful. But of course like all new technologies it will come with many problematic second order outcomes… Things we’ll need to work through.
If the family whatsapp thread is the dinner table, I’m excited to invite chatGPT to sit at the table. To tell us stories, to huddle around our campfire with us.
So…
Clearly the answer is the same as it’s ever been - to closely and intentionally consider our choices around technology. Not to use less technology necessarily, not to retreat out of fear, but rather to engage in more interesting, nuanced ways - and to do so in ways that help the whole family navigate the shared geography of invisible network space.
This week’s links, the family:
The Pram in the Hall
Can you hold a creative life while being a good parent? Does parenting fundamentally leave room for creative time and energy? Austin Kleon has a lovely note The Pram in the Hall:
My oldest son turned four this week, so I’ve been taking stock, and thinking about how lucky I was early on in my life to find examples of good writers who also seemed to be good dads.
Pair that with this meditation on A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Mom. Is domestic life the enemy of creative work?:
The question of what effect domestic life might have on creative work, both in the abstract and in my actual life, first dawned on me 14 years ago, when I was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I was 23 at the time, years away from motherhood and thus confident that my desire to have a family and to be a writer would seamlessly coalesce. The first flicker of doubt occurred when my professor invited the entire workshop to a gathering at his home.
We knew that he had a wife who was pregnant and two children under the age of 6. But we knew it in the way we knew he had a mother or that he came from California. Our time with him was devoted to issues of literature, the forms and functions of fiction, writing practice and craft. We saw him as a writer, a reader, a professor and man of letters — all other biographical information was background static — until, that is, the evening we stepped inside his house.
“It smells like milk,” one of my friends whispered.
What do your kids see you doing?
We spend a lot of time as parents thinking about what we’ll teach our kids - but the most powerful lesson kids absorb is watching what you do. How do you want your kids to see you as they grow up? Again, from Austin Kleon, Take Your Kid to Work:
Last night I was picking through my stack and started composer Philip Glass’s memoir, Words Without Music. I wound up reading over 50 pages before I passed out. (That’s a lot: I’m a slow reader, especially at 10PM.)
Glass writes about working in his father’s record store and how formative it was for him. His father began as a car mechanic without any formal education, then moved to fixing car radios, then to selling records with a little bench for repairing radios in the back. He wanted to understand why some records sold and why some didn’t, so he’d take home modern classical music and try to figure out what was wrong with it. Instead of diagnosing it, he fell in love with much of it, and started foisting it on his customers. Glass says his dad would come home late, around 9 o’clock, and then start listening to records from 10 to midnight. Glass would sneak downstairs without his father knowing and listen along.
Related: love what you do in front of your kids.
Creative Computing with Kids
Amongst the debate about screen time we overlook how enjoyable and meaningful shared computing can be. I love this little writeup of a family computer project (that ended in a physical object - boundary objects!). Designing a Family Cookbook:
Last fall my eleven year-old daughter Thúy got the idea to solicit favorite recipes from family members and collect them into a family cookbook that she would gift at Christmas. She’s always been interested in cooking, and has great appreciation for the variety of food that she’s eaten throughout her young life from all over: Vietnam, France, Texas, Illinois and a random selection of cuisine enthusiasms that we’ve picked up as New Yorkers.
Teach People with the Objects They are in Love With
This excellent quote from this excellent article Remembering Seymour Papert:
We love the objects we think with; we think with the objects we love. So teach people with the objects they are in love with. And if you are a teacher, measure your success by whether your students are falling in love with their objects. Because if they are, the way they think about themselves will also be changing.
Play as a Right vs Play as a Tool
A nice little provocation and rebuttal of “educational toys” thinking through how they might be problematic. Play as a Right vs Play as a Tool:
What if educational toys are actually a violation of children's basic rights? As someone who has spent a lot of my career designing toys with educational goals, this would be a pretty big blow to my work. I've always thought that learning is an inherently good thing, so why would educational toys be a bad thing?
Today’s art: illustration from a sharp PC ad from circa 1988. More families and vintage pc ads here: https://merylalper.com/2012/07/24/children-families-and-vintage-computing-ads/Before the big futures, endless little futures.