A self-described technologist describes on the Haven blog how he gives his kids the parts of technology he loved growing up, while keeping the surveillance-economy parts out of the house. His fixes mostly involve going back a couple of decades.
He bought a mini CD boom box and borrows CDs and DVDs from the public library. He wired up a landline through a cheap VoIP adapter, whitelisted family and friends, and set it to block calls from dinnertime to morning — his kids now call their grandparents on their own to arrange playdates. And he set up a used tower PC by the kitchen behind a Pi-Hole, whitelisting only the domains the kids can reach: Wikipedia, but not Google, Minecraft, but no public servers.
The appeal of physical media, he writes, is that the kids can be more independent "because there is no adversary inside the device they are using."
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