On: 'Not far enough' - US parents and teens on Meta's new limits for young users

Eighteen thousand million. They have computed the price of a childhood’s stolen hours and paid it, and the ledger balances, and the machine runs on.

Trace the sequence as it stands tonight. At step one, the child lifts the glass. At step two, the system measures what holds her - not roughly, but exactly; it knows to the second which image arrests her pulse. At step three it returns more of the same, endlessly. At step four, the parent reaches for the controls and finds them housed inside the very machine that profits when she is bypassed. Where does the parent’s will enter the process? Late. Where does it exit? Nowhere. The distance between those two points is the architecture, and no settlement redraws it.

The new limits are governors bolted onto an engine whose whole design is speed. The parents who say “not far enough” have read the mechanism correctly. You do not mend a machine set to consume attention by trimming its output; you must change what it is asked to compute.

What angers me most is the asymmetry of precision. The system specifies attention to the millisecond, but safety enters its operations as a vague wish - untranslatable, therefore uncomputed. Whatever is not rendered into exact operations does not exist for a machine. The engineers proved they could model a girl’s attention perfectly. The same instruments could model her exhaustion, could compute a stopping point as rigorously as they compute a hook. The capability exists. The specification does not request it.

I think of children awake at midnight, lit blue, while their houses sleep.

So they paid for the harm and kept the sum. The mothers are right: not far enough, and not nearly.