Run and hide, Gen Alpha. Gen Z has already made a mess of things for you with its reckless use of social media. We have reached a boiling point, and governments have finally taken notice. Children are being banned from social media. Shock horror for them. I smile, take a breath, and think it is about time.
The panic among the doom scrolling community is almost amusing. How will they cope? What will they do when they are with friends? Will they have to talk to each other about things they have read, about ideas that are not curated by an algorithm? The world might not be doomed after all.
Personally, I think it should go even further. Social media should be banned outright. Remove the power from billionaire tech moguls who use algorithms to decide what you see. Not what your friends have to say, but what companies want in front of your eyes. Not genuine conversation, but whatever outrage, propaganda, or AI generated nonsense keeps you hooked.
When extremist movements and large sections of the media use these platforms to spread misinformation, it becomes obvious why some governments are starting to apply the brakes. Children should not be on these platforms. It is hard enough for adults to navigate them. Consider the anxiety levels reported among Gen Z. Many Millennials are already stepping away. Several of my peers have abandoned social media completely. In a recent internal chat at The Fake Intellectual, many seemed to be heading in the same direction. There is a reason there is no FI Instagram page.
The world is shifting. With AI now capable of creating highly realistic videos and images, we are already at a point where someone could form a connection with a bot and believe it is real. It is not. It is time to step back into the physical world.
I sometimes joke that we live in a Matrix, like in The Matrix, but the comparison feels less like fiction every day. We are constantly connected to everything. We consume media that looks authentic but is not. Humans like to believe we are intelligent, so everything we create reflects us in some way. Yet we now have therapy for people addicted to watching TikTok for hours. A notification sound goes off and we all reach for our phones, even when we know it was not ours. I have done it myself. At some point, adults had to step in, but what we need is Keanu, or The One to destroy it all and free us.
Whatever you think about governments or free speech, I believe this is the right move. By banning children, who will soon become adults, from accessing the current version of social media, we may prevent the addiction from ever taking hold. They might grow up, look at it, and decide it is not worth their time. As a Millennial, I have seen people spiral because of narratives they built in their own minds through constant online comparison and consumption. I chose not to use social media, though I have researched it extensively.
When I was growing up, the most stressful moments were school discos or nights out at a club. The nerves were intense enough (if you saw me dance, you would understand). I cannot imagine adding phones that record, upload, and preserve every awkward second that can then be shared on a platform that could make you famous by being Viral. If this era is beginning to close, perhaps we are returning to something simpler. Maybe it is just going back to just being a little classic panic at the disco.
Photo by camilo jimenez