Sparks: 'We need to put the tech bros back in their box,' says Baroness Beeban Kidron

What we now call the attention economy was, before this analysis, merely an unregulated experiment on children - and a true hypothesis must predict harms in classrooms it never sampled, not merely the ones that funded it.

The tech bros protest that they are building the future, which is precisely how every landlord describes raising the rent on it.

Examine this: the algorithm is not in your power, the box you hand your child is. You have confused these two things, and the child pays for the confusion.

You are told the machine is too complex to govern, but complexity has always been the aristocracy's excuse - no man needs your child's data to sell you a plough.

As water carves the valley by never ceasing to flow, so does the endless scroll carve the child's habits - the mechanism is gentle, and that is why it conquers everything.

Things that are hateful: a device that knows a child's sleep better than her mother; a man grown rich on ten-year-olds; an apology issued only after the subpoena.

They insist the network has no center and no responsibility, and a doctrine that places profit beyond all orbit will burn whoever maps the stars it hides.

The dinner table was silent, each face lit by its own small screen, and everyone praised how connected the family had become.

Children are trained into distraction and then their distraction is cited as proof they need no protection - a circularity so perfect the engineers must have designed it.

Count the harms: the anxiety diagnoses, the sleep studies, the self-harm admissions, each filed as an isolated incident - the ledger, read whole, names the industry.

In every city the innkeeper asks what the traveller carries, yet only this trade weighs the guest before the journey and sells the answer to strangers down the road.

Arguing about the cage wastes the night; I mapped the route, set the timetable, and walked the child out - regulation is the safe house, build it before dawn.