Parent Algorithm Detox

The original plan was to go through my newly-retired parents' phones and social feeds and systematically strip out the algorithmic garbage. Cleaner feeds, less rage bait, less scam surface.

Why I killed it. Reading it back, it was a bit of a douche move. Deciding what my parents should see, on their own devices, because I have decided I know better. That is not help, that is a project I was doing at them. The genuinely important half of it, the privacy and scam-surface work, already exists as the Online Presence Scrub, which they opted into on purpose.

What happened instead, which is much better. Both of them picked up AI on their own and ran somewhere I never would have pointed them.

My mom uses it to build pickleball training camp programs. Full session plans, drill progressions, the whole curriculum. She also runs Serve With Joy, a professional wait staff service for events around Raleigh, which means my mother is out here running a small business and a pickleball program while I write blog posts about folder structure.

My dad went further. He generates AI music now, as a full-blown retirement hobby, and he is prolific about it. Listen to it here. Nobody taught him this. He found it and went.

The lesson I did not expect to learn from my parents: the way to get someone into a new tool is not to clean up their old one. It is to hand them something they actually want to make and then get out of the way.

Deprioritized on purpose. Replaced by something better.