Toxic Tech, Toxic Youth

I barely remember the COVID lock-downs — thank Christ. Just a few memories of family Zoom quizzes and a hazy recollection of toilet-roll rationing are all I have to reminisce on. In truth, I was simply too damned busy to notice much else, everybody in healthcare was.

We worked from the moment we woke until the moment we slept, at least six days a week. And I was far from alone in being indescribably angry. Years of under-investment by the British government had left the health service on its knees, and only the fortitude and sacrifice of its staff carried us through. Some of them sacrificed for the last time.

There was a TV production a while back called Help that detailed a care assistant's view of the pandemic and the inadequacy of the system. It’s stars, Stephen Graham and Jodie Comer, were as excellent as always but I had to leave the room while my wife watched — I felt a rage building up that I knew wasn't healthy.

Now, Stephen Graham has done something worse. Adolescence, in which he plays a father going through hell, is a piece of storytelling, acting and directing so phenomenal, it rivals Das Boot as the best thing ever made. But it's hard to watch. All the vulnerability, secrecy and angst of youth is compounded by social media and internet culture until it reaches a multifaceted worst-case conclusion. I'm a father and it terrified me. I remember my own youth, and I feel powerless.

Young people are stupid. Your blood is constantly running hot, your brain is thinking of little but the violence you're too immature to control and the sex you're not getting, and everything is a big deal. Worst of all, you can't distinguish between yourself and your environment. If you're in a posh school with sports facilities, you'll probably play rugby and cricket. If you're in a high-crime area, then you'll probably join in, at least a bit, even if you don't really want to.

I didn't really want to. Luckily, I had the incredible fortune to experience other environments. For one thing, I have a gigantic family that crosses social strata. For another, I grew up on the poor side of the Thames. When you can be in a whole other world just by crossing a bridge and seeing stockbrokers sipping coffee and wine, even a stupid young mind can see better options. Today, kids don't even have to cross a bridge to change their environment, they just look at a screen. And the digital environments they go to are far removed from anything their parents know. That's dangerous, and modern.

The streets I grew up on were my mother's before they were mine, and she knew them. She knew them so well that when I stepped into their shadows, she could master the parental art of give and take. She gave me just the right amount of space to misbehave a little — letting me get away with some things and pulling me up when needed — and she let me come to my own understanding of my place in the world (which is in a quiet village with free-roaming peacocks). She'd have been clueless if I'd had social media.

And I'll be clueless if my children start using it, even though I'm ostensibly one of the few parents with the technical skill to effectively manage their access. I can sanitize their computers and phones, I can disallow certain apps and platforms, I can restrict our home Wi-Fi to only allow certain websites, I can monitor everything and switch it all off remotely if I have to. But I cannot stop my children borrowing a friend's device and having Andrew Tate talk to them through somebody else's screen.

Or Fitness models with impossible-without-drugs bodies telling them they need to train harder and that no results mean personal failure. Or crypto-bros telling them that if they're not rich already, they're not good enough. Or dating “gurus” telling them nonsense about what makes one person attracted to another. And I can't stop other children cyber-bullying them behind their backs and periodically showing them the insults in the school playground. I'm up the same paddle-sparse creek as every other parent, and that scares the life out of me.

There was a moment in Britain when we were having a serious debate about this kind of thing. It followed the tragic death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, the prodigious campaigning energy of her father, and a courageous coroner who explicitly detailed the “negative effects of online content” in his report. The nation was outraged, rightly so, and the government was forced to start a dialogue, at last.

Sadly, the debate has gone from an airing of very good ideas to a court case between the government and Apple over an astoundingly bad one. The government wants to force tech companies to provide backdoors through their encryption algorithms, making it easier for law enforcement to prevent shady things happening in digital secret. But Apple and the entire tech community know backdoors cannot be protected — if you give them to “the good guys” then the bad guys will eventually figure them out too. Decades of hacks and data leaks and mass cyber thefts have proven this point.

Worse, all the ideas around protecting young people from the more poisonous parts of the web — which are overwhelmingly unencrypted and not at all secret (and publicly bloody advertised!) — have been sidelined by this ridiculous state assault on encryption. This wastes a fantastic chance to rein in the more predatory and parasitic behaviours of Big Tech. And the odds of another chance like this happening, with the weight of such broad public anger behind it, are negligible. Stupid, stupid, stupid