On: Meta’s settlement will compel others to bend the knee and set up teen guardrails

The figure is eighteen thousand millions. I read it twice: it is not a penalty but a ransom, and ransom is paid for what was taken. What was taken was the attention of children.

The company professed friendship. It practised retention. Its own papers, laid open in court, show it knew the child at midnight was not connecting but craving, and that the craving was the product. For years the platform taught children nothing, and the children learned everything: to check, to compare, to perform. When profession and practice part company so far, no sermon about intentions avails. One must audit the formation behind the conduct. What were the engineers trained to prize? A single number, watched hourly. Form clever minds to maximise one figure and they sacrifice everything else to it, and call it diligence.

So I do not mourn that the giant bends; I note how it bends. Compelled first by lawsuit, then by fear, its rivals must adopt the same guardrails - and here is the quiet mercy of compulsion: the knee remembers its posture. Outward observance, repeated daily, trains the inward disposition. The merchant who keeps honest books for fear of the assessor is, after twenty years, an honest man. Let the industry comply from terror. The habit does the rest.

But a fence is the beginning of instruction, not its substitute. The guardrail keeps the child from the cliff; it does not teach the child why the fence stands. That teaching is slower work, done in homes and schoolrooms, one child at a time, and no settlement can accomplish it. The suit took years; the unmaking of these habits takes longer.

Patience, then. The first stone is laid, mortared at vast expense - yet the cheapest foundation on offer. There are more stones to set.