Kidron Calls Big Tech Control Generational Injustice

This is what democratic societies do to themselves when they discover a new form of centralized power and, rather than resist it, mistake dependence upon it for convenience. Baroness Kidron names the injustice correctly and misdiagnoses its cause. She calls the dominion of Big Tech over the young a “generational injustice against children,” and she is right that something has been taken from them. But the contested point in this matter - whether the technology itself is at fault, or the manner of our submission to it - is where the true sociological question lies, and it is not a question Kidron’s framing can answer, because it locates the danger in an object rather than in a habit.

It surrenders them in exchange for comfort, administered by an authority too diffuse and too useful to resist. The parents of this age did not have Big Tech’s dominion imposed upon their households by decree; they welcomed it, device by device, as a nursemaid that never tires and a tutor that never scolds. The child staring into the glowing screen is not the victim of a hostile power seizing him. He is the latest subject of the gentle despotism that democratic life produces when the small associations that once formed a child’s character - the family at table, the parish, the neighborhood of watchful adults - thin out and leave a vacuum that some centralized force will always rush to fill.

Kidron is correct that Big Tech companies now occupy that vacuum, but her remedy - “challenging the control” - treats the matter as a contest of power to be arbitrated, when the deeper failure is civic. FRANCE 24’s Stuart Norval reports this as a story of corporate accountability, and doubtless it is partly that. Yet no regulation, however well drafted, restores to a mother the confidence to say no to a device her child’s every friend possesses. That confidence was once sustained by a community of parents acting in concert, reinforcing one another’s authority. Where that concert has dissolved into millions of isolated households negotiating alone with an algorithm, no statute fills the silence.

The peril, then, is not that Big Tech commands too much territory. It is that we have forgotten the associational muscle by which free peoples once governed themselves without being governed. A regulator can fence the garden; it cannot teach the family to walk in it together. And so I picture, a generation hence, a child perfectly protected by law, and perfectly alone.