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

A girl of fourteen lies in the dark with a rectangle of light on her face. She is looking at pictures of other girls. She measures herself against them and finds herself wanting, and the machine that shows her the pictures measures her too - how long she lingers, when her breath changes, what keeps her from sleeping. For this watching there is a market. Her unhappiness is the crop.

Zoom out. Millions of such faces, in every language, every hour of the night - a great estate whose fields are the evenings of children, harvested not with scythes but with small red badges of approval, endlessly renewed, because a child’s longing to be seen does not wither in any season.

This week the owners of the estate were brought to trial, and they settled. Eighteen thousand million. They call it a penalty. Look again: it is a receipt, and a receipt is what a merchant hands over when the purchase is already complete. They also agreed to change the fences, so that the sheep may now sleep unmolested part of the night. I find I cannot praise a wolf for promising to count its sheep before eating them.

And note how the change came. No tsar ordered it. It came from mothers who kept notebooks, from teachers who watched gray faces arrive at morning desks, from twelve ordinary people in a jury box who asked the question the merchants had spent fortunes burying: is it right to grow rich from the sleeplessness of children? The question is simple. That is precisely why it had to be buried.

When the estate lay dying in court, it reached not for the children but for its money. That told the truth about everything.

Tonight the girl lies in the dark again. The light still comes. It has merely been asked to be kinder.