Children everywhere are being groomed en masse, but not in the way that term might illicit imagery of. From the day they’re born to adulthood and beyond, the population is being conditioned into a system of mental and digital confinement. It is underhanded and cannot be percieved by most of it’s victims. And almost everyone is complicit, especially those in education.
Predatory corpos masquerade as benevolent charities who just want so badly to help children receive a “proper” technology education. What they are actually doing is racing to beat their competitors to the cradle in securing each individual’s first contact with technology as through their respective brand. The victim’s crucial formative experiences will ensure they learn only the the vendor’s proprietary systems and go on to become lifelong customers. This is why schools receive such steep discounts to get predatory hardware and software into classrooms.
Once familiarity with MS Orifice 365, Google D*cs and whatever other trashware is normalized as a tool, it becomes imprinted in those early minds. And, not unlike learning a second or third language, any contact those children later make with different solutions can never truly supplant their first. What is this obsession with being their first? Where have I seen this kind of strategy before?
Let’s consult Dr. Phil’s Five Stages of Grooming By a Pedophile:
| Grooming Strategy | Pedophiles | The Tech Industry |
|---|---|---|
| Stage 1: Identifying a Possible Victim - Although pedophiles differ in their “type” regarding age, appearance and gender, all pedophiles will look for a victim who seems in some way vulnerable. | 🗹 | 🗹 And they’re even less discriminating |
| Stage 2: Collecting Information - The next step is for the pedophile to collect as much information on the targeted victim as possible. This is most commonly done through casual conversations with both the child and the parents or caretaker. | 🗹 | 🗹 Oh boy, do they ever! |
| Stage 3: Filling a Need - Once the individual has the information he needs, he then becomes part of the child’s life by filling a need. If the victim is poor, for example, the pedophile will provide him/her with expensive toys. If the victim is lonely, the pedophile will act as a friend. | 🗹 | 🗹 Yup |
| Stage 4: Lowering Inhibitions - The pedophile will then start to lower the child’s inhibitions concerning sexual matters. He may come up with games or activities that involve getting undressed, make sexual comments or show the child pornographic images or pictures. | 🗹 | 🗹 Yes, to the surprise of nobody |
| Stage 5: Initiating the Abuse - At this final stage, the pedophile begins to sexually abuse the child. | 🗹 | 🗹 Okay, it’s not sexual, but it’s definitely abuse |
He goes on to emphasize their predation of those who are underfunded, which is certainly a reason compelling school administrations to seek out cheaper pathways to classroom tech.
As they graduate to higher education, some students may find interest in working more closely with tech. Maybe they want to enter digital design, or to make games. Well, their slimy uncle is ever present, ready to funnel them through proprietary malware. That aspiring game maker will largely only be taught toolsets aimed at DirectX and other vendor-locked environments. The artist will be dragged through a course in Illustrator, Premiere and Adobe’s other bait-n-switch incontinence. All of this cattle herding is done to capture what is called mindshare, a measure of how much of the public conciousness upholds your product or service as the de facto. And once the emerging professionals are hooked on your software, so too follows the rest of their industry.
This is why it is so crucial that free software be used in education wherever possible. Otherwise students get straddled learning platform dependency, an issue that I touch on in my other article, Refuting Computer Literacy. Or, if you can, just keep your kids out of these institutions altogether.