What do these treehouses have in common?
None of them are built by children.
But let’s change the search to “treehouse made by kids”.
Yeah right. Not even the third one from the left has the adult managed to keep their controlling fingers in check. Far too straight and tidy.
But this isn’t about adults not letting children build treehouses (which may or may not be true) but why it’s so incredibly difficult to find pictures of it. I remember doing a search maybe ten years ago. My memory then was that there were more pictures of children’s treehouses ten years ago.
Consider that I’m sitting in front of my computer making wild guesses. Like many other 50+ white men, I could work up some keyboard rage and blame adjacent modern phenomena like phones, games, movies, or other crap. And sure, it probably has to do with children moving less in forests and fields today. Increasingly rarely running into containers just to find planks to build life-threatening wooden creations in treetops. You know, those that are completely life-threatening but so charged with children’s anticipation and joy of creation.
But I choose to think that it’s part of enshitification – how image searches have become more streamlined. How algorithms push forward image after image of conformist mush. I choose to direct my old man’s rage in that direction because I cannot live with the thought that children no longer build dangerous treehouses.
Note:
I finally found pictures. A flickr-group called Kids huts expidition and one called forgotten treehouses. So perhaps this story ends on a high note.