GitHub

28. May 2026

I'm technologist. I enjoy the things that computers and digital devices can afford – they often seem magical and amazing! As a technologist, I have a special look at what companies do with this technology, and it is very unpleasant to me. For these patterns there are keywords: AdTech, Surveillance Capitalism, Rage Bait, Engagement-Optimized Feeds, Harvesting Eyeballs. I'm also a parent. As parents, I am afraid to release my children in a digital world that is so aggressively dominated by these companies and patterns. But at the same time, technology was an enriching part of my childhood and remains an enriching part of my life, and I would like to share it with them. In this post, I don't want to spend much time discussing how bad technology patterns are bad, but instead I would like to share some of the possibilities I have held on the enriching parts of the technology to share them with my children. With many of these decisions, it turns out (surprise!) that my favorite solutions are to look back a few decades in time. I'm starting to fall in love with CDs again. When I was young, there was music on CDs. This was a time before MP3s and before Spotify. That was the time I went to the summer camp and picked up half a dozen CDs I wanted to take on the trip. This was the time of the wired earphones in which you sat at school and played a song with someone by giving him one of the two earphones and listening side by side. This was a time of [children's instructions] on CDs that contained offensive language. At that time there were still tiny LCD screens on portable CD players that only displayed the title number, so I sometimes knew my favorite song on a CD on the basis of the number instead of the name. I bought a mini CD boombox for home. My eldest loves to take it into different rooms, connect it and insert a CD. I bought her the CD “K-Pop Demon Hunters” for her birthday. The local public library has CDs! CDs are great. Speaking of public library, there are also DVDs and BluRays. I remember the whole ritual when I went to blockbuster video with my father to choose a movie for the family movie night. Normally, he let my sister and me pick up some statistics we wanted to see. So I met the Three Stooges, even though it was before my time. The magic of holding something you can take home and put in the player next to the TV, and the movie is here! As a parent, one of the great benefits of physical media is that I know exactly what my children can experience. If they're not ready to do something, it won't come to us. The children can be much more independent when watching and listening, as there is no opponent in the device they use. Children love this independence. I connected a wired, physical phone next to the kitchen in our house. I use a cheap VoIP provider with an analogue phone adapter, but there is a company called Tin Can that really makes it easy (no belonging). Since everyone has moved to smartphones, the telephone network has remained down-compatible so that grandparents, neighbors, aunts and uncles are now all accessible to the children. Even better: These digitally managed phones have excellent configuration options. I put all the friends and family members who can call us on the whitelist, and the phone automatically blocks calls from dinner until morning. My children spontaneously call their grandparents and ask if they can come by to play and have noticed my phone number because they like to call me when I'm in the kitchen. When I was a child, the phone was my bridge to friends and to arrange my own game dates. It was “Do you want to come home?” instead of “Papa! Can you agree with this and that one game meeting?” There is still a certain network effect until other families connect their own home phones, but I am really excited about it. Children really love this independence. I remember seeing friends and going home to friends and one of our favorite jobs was playing computer games. This was the era of Commander Keen and Prince of Persia. We alternately sat side by side on the family computer and discussed the strategy. I definitely have games that I want to share with my children, but I don't trust the internet either. I bought a used tower PC at Ebay and placed it next to the kitchen. Each child has its own login and its own games or activities that it would like to explore. I also set up a Pi-Hole for our home network and configured the family computer to use the Pi-Hole for DNS. Just like on the phone, I put every domain you can visit on the whitelist. For example, they get access to Wikipedia, but not to Google. You get access to Minecraft, but we don't play on public servers. No Youtube or Spotify, but I have compiled some websites that are about how to remove a magic cube or how to bind its shoes. I showed my older daughter that she can copy and listen to a CD on the computer. At the moment, she is only pleased that she has another place where she can hear her favorite song from K-Pop Demon Hunters, but perhaps this is the beginning of building up her own music collection, as I have done over the decades. Children love to use a computer alone! I used to call myself a technologist. I am aware that many of the tools I have described above are not accessible to less technically experienced parents, but the core philosophy is definitely still accessible. The dystopic parts of modern technology have prevailed because they are very practical – but this convenience has its price. Especially when it comes to children, it can really be worthwhile not to pay these costs and sometimes even to seek inspiration in the past.