Give a two-year-old a tablet and you know what usually happens. A cartoon starts, then autoplay picks the next one, louder and faster, and twenty minutes later she’s somewhere you never chose. My daughter has a different first choice now. She opens her own player, taps My Records, and watches herself — as a baby, at her first birthday, on an ordinary Tuesday last month. She’ll do this for an hour. She skips the cartoons to get to it. ...
My mother is eighty-seven. She lives in the countryside, by the Boseong River. She has never made an account for anything, never typed a password she chose herself, and she would not know what “the cloud” means. But tonight she is holding a Galaxy tablet, and on it she is watching her granddaughter — my daughter — as a newborn. Then at six months. Then last week. She taps a folder marked 2026, then July, and there is a video my wife shot this afternoon. ...
Every parent knows this feeling. You hand your child a tablet to show them one video you picked. One tap later, the app has carried them off somewhere else — loud videos, ads, and “recommended” clips chosen by an algorithm that doesn’t know or care about your child. I didn’t want that for my daughter. I also didn’t want to pay a monthly fee, make another account, or hand my child’s attention to another company. ...