A Line in the Sand
Scott Gardner ·
The tide was unavailable for comment.
The Government has announced that children will no longer be permitted on social media, with the exception of the parts of social media that are also social media but have been issued a different name.
YouTube is to be banned. YouTube Kids is to remain, on the grounds that it contains the word "Kids," which is understood to be load-bearing.
Messaging apps are exempt. Children may not post, but they may direct message, the distinction being that one of these is public and the other is the place where everything actually happens.
This is being described as the strongest action of its kind anywhere in the world, which is true, in the same way that the strongest possible action against the sea is to draw a firm line in the sand and then stand slightly behind it.
The mechanism is straightforward.
To prevent the small number of people who are fifteen from accessing a website, the website must now establish the age of every person who has ever lived. This is achieved by photographing them.
The photograph is assessed by a system with a stated accuracy of plus or minus two years. At the boundary of sixteen, plus or minus two years is the difference between a child and a man with a mortgage, which is to say it is the entire question, now answered by a camera that has never been to school.
Maureen, who has read the legislation, points out that the system does not have to be correct. It has to take reasonable steps.
This is the part everyone walks past, so we will stop here.
A platform is compliant not when it keeps children out, but when it can demonstrate that it tried. A platform that takes every reasonable step and fails completely is in full and total compliance. A platform that takes no steps and succeeds entirely is breaking the law. We have built a regime in which the measured outcome is effort, and effort, unlike children, is infinitely available.
Niko is thirty-eight. The scanner thinks Niko is fourteen.
Niko has therefore been removed from the internet for his own protection. He has appealed. The appeal requires him to upload a document proving his age, which he is happy to do, into the same building that has now been constructed to hold the documents of every adult in the country in one place, behind one login, watched over by the same companies the policy exists to punish.
We have decided to protect children from data harvesting by harvesting the data of everyone, including the children, first.
Maureen calls this load-bearing irony. Niko calls it Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the children — the actual ones, the ones the whole apparatus is for — have become Latvian.
This took thirty seconds and cost nothing. A nation's teenagers have been granted instant Baltic citizenship by a small green button, and now appear, to the website, to be browsing peacefully from Riga, where the line in the sand does not apply and never will, because Riga is not in the sand.
The only children who remain successfully banned are the ones who were not especially interested in the first place. These children have been protected. The Department is counting them.
There is, finally, the matter of the birthday.
A child is to be kept from the entire functioning communications layer of their own generation until 23:59 on the eve of their sixteenth year, at which point, at one minute past midnight, they are to be handed all of it. The full firehose. Sixteen years of careful darkness, and then the lights, all of them, at once.
We have replaced learning to swim with being kept from the water and then thrown in the sea on a specific Tuesday. The sea, you will recall, is where we started.
The Institute of Things That Are Probably Fine has reviewed the policy and finds it probably fine. Its assessment notes that the ban will "change the conversation," which is correct: the conversation has moved to a messaging app, where it is now private, encrypted, exempt, and entirely unobserved, exactly as everyone wanted, by no one.
The Institute has further recommended an overnight curfew and a break in infinite scrolling — two features which, if applied to adults, would be described as the problem.
None of this is an argument that the harm isn't real. The harm is extremely real. That is precisely why it deserves something better than a speed bump wearing a hi-vis jacket and being announced as a wall.
A ban that cannot be enforced is not a ban. It is a vibe, with fines attached, pointed at the wrong people, measured by the wrong number, evaded by the only people it names, and paid for by everyone it doesn't.
But it will be declared a success. It will be declared a success because everyone involved tried very, very hard, and around here, that is the standard.
Sturgeon's Revelation, this week's edition: Ninety percent of every solution is the bit where we agree to stop measuring whether it worked.
Niko has since moved to Riga. Maureen is verifying his documents. The tide is in.
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