Kidron Calls Big Tech Control Generational Injustice

Well, a Baroness stood up and said Big Tech’s grip on the young amounts to a generational injustice, which is a fine turn of phrase, and over on FRANCE 24, Stuart Norval nodded along the way interviewers do when they’ve heard a phrase they know will make good copy. And somewhere in a boardroom, a very calm man in a very good suit said, well now, hold on, it isn’t the technology that’s the problem, it’s how folks choose to use it. Which is a remarkable thing to hear from the fellow who built the thing to make sure you couldn’t put it down.

I have known men who ran crooked card games and every one of them told me the same thing - it ain’t the deck, mister, it’s how a man chooses to play it. Which is true, in the sense that nothing forces your hand, and false in every sense that matters, because the deck was stacked before you sat at the table, and somebody made a considerable fortune stacking it.

Baroness Kidron’s complaint is that children didn’t choose the table, didn’t choose the game, and certainly didn’t stack the deck, and yet they’re the ones paying the marker every night before bed with a screen still glowing under the blanket. That seems to me a plain enough observation, and I don’t know why it takes a Baroness and a French television programme to say it out loud, except that the folks who could say it plainer are mostly on the payroll of the folks being complained about.

Now the clever answer - it’s not the tool, it’s the use - sounds awful reasonable until you notice who benefits from everybody believing it. If the fault is in the use, then the fix is on the user - teach the child better, supervise the child harder, blame the parent for handing over the phone. If the fault is in the tool, the fix is on the maker, and that costs money and lawyers and possibly an Act of Parliament. So it is no mystery which explanation Big Tech finds more persuasive. I expect if you handed a wolf a microphone he’d tell you the sheep just didn’t manage their fear correctly.

The generational part of the injustice is the part I find hardest to shrug off, because a grown man can put the phone down and go feed the horses, but a child has never known a world where the phone wasn’t already deciding what he wanted before he wanted it. That is not a bad habit. That is an architecture, built by people old enough to know exactly what they were building, aimed at people too young to know they were being aimed at.

So I’d say the Baroness has it about right, and the calm man in the good suit has it exactly backward, and the injustice isn’t that the children misuse the technology. It’s that the technology was never built to misuse them back - only it does, every single evening, right on schedule, and calls it engagement.