NB: When writing a history, the hours spent in research tend to outweigh those spent shaping the narrative itself. Along the way, you collect all kinds of material — primary sources, theoretical reflections, marginalia — that never make it into the final cut. These “Chapter Notes” are for readers who want to know more about the people and events behind the story, and who don’t mind wandering down a few adjacent corridors.
(Free subscribers get a glimpse; paid subscribers ($5/year) get full access.)
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Notes for Chapter 7 include the press release from Google which announced Inner Currents (among others), as well as excerpts from a magazine article and podcast transcript.
But first, here are some excerpts from the viral op-ed I mentioned near the end of the chapter.
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Excerpts from “It’s Child Abuse to Raise an Unintegrated Mind” — Dr Margo Levene; Guest Opinion, The New York Times, November 12, 2034:
“When I first encountered early Cog-Net integration proposals in 2030, I was skeptical. I believed in childhood freedom, analog experience, tactile learning. I believed in ‘letting kids be kids.’
“But freedom, in the absence of capacity, is not protection: it is abandonment…
“We now have four years of clear data. Children integrated into regulated cognitive networks, even at ages as young as three, consistently show superior pattern fluency, adaptive reasoning, emotional regulation, and collective orientation. These aren’t marginal gains. They are structural advantages. And the gap is widening.
“The future is mesh-structured. It will not wait for your child to catch up …
“I no longer view Cog-Net abstention as a lifestyle choice. It is a developmental handicap imposed by anxious parents who misunderstand the world they are sending their children into. To delay integration is to deprive your child of the most essential early tool of the 21st century: cognitive alignment.
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“We do not need a federal mandate. But we do need to call this what it is: a profound form of neglect. When you raise a child outside of shared cognition, you are not preserving their innocence. You are ensuring their irrelevance.”
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Excerpts from a Press Release, “Genius Groups Initiative Expands to Curated Community Clusters” — Alphabet Inc; March 12, 2030: