There’s a particular species of policy announcement that functions less as solution and more as an indirect-but-inadvertent confession. The UK’s proposed ban on social media access for under-16s belongs to this category – not because protecting children from psychological exploitation is wrong, but because the measure’s spectacular inadequacy reveals something far darker about our collective situation.

We’re not implementing insufficient protection because we haven’t grasped the scale of harm. We’re implementing insufficient protection because we’ve lost the capacity for an adequate response. The regulatory theatre itself proves the dependency it claims to address.

It’s rather like watching someone with late-stage addiction announce they’re cutting back to weekends only whilst their hands shake reaching for the bottle to celebrate this triumph of self-control.

The Regulatory Confession

Every policy reveals assumptions about what’s possible, what’s necessary, and what’s absolutely off the table. The age ban confesses several things simultaneously, though only one gets stated explicitly.

What we admit openly:

Children lack psychological defences to resist platform manipulation. Their impulse control isn’t fully developed. They’re vulnerable to exploitation designed by teams of behavioural psychologists specifically trained to defeat human resistance. Therefore: restrict access for the vulnerable population.

Reasonable. Protective. Entirely inadequate.

What we admit implicitly:

The platforms themselves are too valuable/profitable/embedded to consider shuttering. Adult populations either possess adequate defences (demonstrably false) or their vulnerability doesn’t warrant protection (closer to actual position). The business model of attention extraction can continue operating at scale provided we check IDs at the entrance.

What we confess accidentally:

We lack collective capacity to choose systemic solutions even when the harm is obvious, the mechanisms are understood, and the inadequacy of half-measures is predictable. Not because we’re stupid. Because we’re dependent.

The age ban isn’t evidence of protective governance beginning to address social media harm. It’s evidence of civilisational addiction constraining regulatory response to measures that won’t threaten the supply of cocaine water we’ve all been drinking for twenty years.

(I’m going to lean heavily on the cocaine water metaphor throughout this piece because it captures something viscerally true that sanitised language obscures: we’re dealing with engineered dependency operating at population scale, and our inability to name it honestly contributes to our inability to address it systemically.)

The Adequate Response We Can’t Choose

Let’s establish what an adequate response would look like, not as fantasy but as a logical conclusion from accepted premises.

If we accept that:

∙ Social media platforms are built on business models requiring psychological harm to generate sustained engagement
∙ The harm isn’t incidental but foundational (attention extraction demands defeating user resistance)
∙ Children lack defences against industrial-scale manipulation
∙ Adults exhibit identical vulnerability despite physical maturity
∙ Twenty years of operation has produced catastrophic individual and systemic consequences
∙ The platforms are specifically engineered to prevent voluntary cessation

Then the adequate response is obvious: shutter the platforms entirely.

Not as punishment. Not as Luddite rejection of technology. Rather as recognition that we’ve conducted a civilisational-scale experiment in psychological exploitation that has produced precisely the catastrophic results the original warnings predicted, and continuing the experiment serves no legitimate purpose beyond shareholder value.

We don’t allow casinos to operate in primary schools even with age verification. We don’t permit tobacco companies to design cigarettes specifically optimised for youth addiction then rely on ID checks at point of sale. We recognise that some business models are incompatible with human wellbeing regardless of age restrictions.

Social media platforms operating on attention extraction represent that category. The business model requires harm. Age verification doesn’t change the fundamental equation.

So why can’t we choose the adequate response?

Because we’re fucking addicted.

Not metaphorically. Not as some sort of rhetorical flourish. Instead, this is an accurate description of our collective neurological situation after twenty years of systematic dependency creation.

The Addiction That Constrains Response

Here’s where the analysis gets uncomfortable, because it requires examining not just the platforms but our own relationship to them – and more specifically, our inability to imagine existence without them.

Try this thought experiment: Imagine the government announced tomorrow that all social media platforms would cease UK operations in six months. Given the debacle of what’s going on within the US, this could happen if felt they were no longer a trusted ally.

Imagine it. A complete shutdown. No Facebook, no Instagram, no TikTok, no Twitter/X, no LinkedIn. Gone.

Notice your immediate reaction.

Not your considered philosophical position after some careful analysis. Your immediate reaction. The one that arose before any sort of intellectual justification.

For most people – including those who intellectually recognise the platforms’ harm – that immediate reaction includes some variation of panic, loss, resistance. How would I stay in touch with people? How would I know what’s happening? How would I maintain professional connections? How would I fill the time on the train? What would I do when I’m bored?

That’s the language of dependency talking.

Not “I find these platforms useful and would prefer to keep them.” That’s preference. This is “I can’t imagine functioning without them” despite the fact that you – yes, you reading this – somehow managed to function perfectly well for most of your life before they existed.

Many of the platforms aren’t even twenty years old. If you’re over 40, you spent more of your life without them than with them. Despite this, the immediate reaction to their removal is a feeling of existential threat rather than one of mild inconvenience.

That neurological response – the panic at imagined loss – constrains what regulatory responses feel possible. We can’t choose to shutter the platforms because we’ve lost the capacity to conceive of existence without them. Not at a policy level but at somatic level.

The age ban represents the maximum intervention our collective dependency permits. Anything more aggressive triggers the same resistance as suggesting to the profound alcoholic that perhaps complete cessation might be healthier than switching to 4% ABV beer on weekdays.

The Regulatory Capture By Dependency

Traditional regulatory capture involves industry influence over regulators through lobbying, revolving doors between industry and government, the funding of sympathetic research, and other mechanisms of institutional corruption.

All of that is happening with social media platforms. Obviously. The usual suspects doing the usual dance.
However, there’s a second, more insidious form of capture operating here: the regulators themselves are dependent.

The MPs drafting age restriction legislation are scrolling Twitter during parliamentary debates. The civil servants implementing policy are checking Instagram between meetings. The ministers announcing protective measures are maintaining LinkedIn profiles for professional positioning.

They’re not corrupt in any traditional sense – such as those who are taking bribes to protect industry interests. They’re dependent in the neurological sense – their own relationship to the platforms constrains what interventions feel possible.
You can’t design adequate response to addiction when you’re currently using. The alcoholic makes excellent arguments for why complete cessation is unnecessary, extreme, or otherwise disproportionate to the actual problem. They’re not lying – they genuinely believe the rationalisations their dependency generates.

Social media generates the same mechanism operating at a policy level.

The regulatory response to social media platforms is constrained not primarily by lobbying (though that’s happening) but by the regulators’ own inability to conceive of systemic solutions that would threaten their own access to the cocaine water. So instead, we’ll just ban the kids.

This isn’t intended as conspiracy. It’s the predictable outcome of twenty years of systematic dependency creation encountering attempt at self-regulation. The addict announces they’re cutting back. The specifics of how they’re cutting back reveal they have no intention of actually stopping.

You can check IDs at the entrance to the casino, but the house keeps operating.

The Civilisational Bind

Individual addiction is a story of tragedy. Civilisational addiction has existential consequences.

When an individual becomes dependent on substances or behaviours, intervention is theoretically possible – family, friends, medical professionals, legal system, employers can potentially combine to create conditions forcing confrontation with dependency.

When entire civilisations become dependent, who exactly is positioned to intervene?

The mechanisms that might force confrontation with collective dependency are themselves composed of dependent individuals. Governments full of scrolling MPs. Regulatory bodies staffed by Instagram-checking civil servants. Media organisations whose business models now depend on social platform distribution. Educational institutions using the platforms for “engagement.” Healthcare systems offering mental health support via Facebook groups.

We live in an addicted world – one where, with no hint of fucking irony, there are people suggesting a LLM is an effective therapist, and an algorithm as a suitable replacement to friendship.

The entire institutional apparatus that might address the problem is thoroughly infiltrated – not by malicious actors but by the dependency itself.

It’s rather like discovering the immune system has been compromised by the very pathogen it’s supposed to fight. Who mounts the immune response when the immune response is infected?

This creates what I’ll call the Civilisational Addiction Bind:

∙ The harm is obvious and systemic
∙ Adequate response requires systemic intervention
∙ Systemic intervention requires collective capacity for voluntary cessation
∙ Voluntary cessation becomes impossible after sufficient dependency creation
∙ Therefore: inadequate responses that preserve access whilst performing concern

The age ban is Exhibit A. We’ll implement symbolic protection for children whilst carefully preserving the infrastructure that created the problem, because adequate response – shuttering the platforms – triggers existential panic in the dependent population proposing the regulation. The kids are safe whilst the adults play with matches and wonder why everyone keeps getting more and more burned.

What Recovery Would Require

Let’s be unflinchingly honest about what an adequate response – civilisational recovery from social platform dependency – would actually require.

It wouldn’t just policy change. Nor merely regulatory reform. Instead, it would need to be something approaching collective withdrawal from engineered dependency operating at neurological level across entire populations.

At the individual level:

∙ Sustained periods without access to algorithmic feeds
∙ Relearning capacity for boredom, sustained attention, genuine human connection
∙ Confronting whatever emotional/social needs the platforms were medicating
∙ Rebuilding psychological architecture systematically eroded over twenty years
∙ Accepting that some neural pathway damage may be permanent

At an institutional level:

∙ Restructuring every system now dependent on platform infrastructure
∙ Finding alternative mechanisms for communication, coordination, information distribution
∙ Accepting significant short-term disruption to operations built around platform integration
∙ Developing new approaches to problems we’ve forgotten how to solve without algorithmic mediation

At civilisational level:

∙ Collective tolerance for extended discomfort during withdrawal period
∙ Sustained political will despite inevitable backlash from dependent populations
∙ Acceptance that recovery timelines are measured in years or decades, not quarters
∙ Recognition that some capabilities lost may not return in currently living generations

Look at that list. Really examine it.

Now consider: Do we have collective capacity for voluntary embrace of that process?

Or are we like the late-stage alcoholic who recognises the bottle is killing them but can’t imagine Friday evening without it, Monday morning after it, the family gathering surviving exposure to it, the work stress managed absent its chemical assistance?

The adequate response requires collective capacity we’ve systematically destroyed through the very process we’d need that capacity to address.

We can’t choose to shut down the platforms because we’ve lost the neurological and institutional capacity to function without them. The dependency has become load-bearing infrastructure. Removing it triggers collapse fears – justified or not – that make removal psychologically impossible.

So we’ll implement age bans. Start to check IDs. Announce we’re protecting the vulnerable whilst carefully preserving access for everyone else. Declare victory over harms we’re actively perpetuating.

Success! Alas, no – it’s more of the same with a thin veneer of consideration for younger people whilst the rest of the adult population says it’s fine for us.

The Tobacco Parallel That Terrifies

You know and I know that we’ve been here before. Different substance, but remarkably similar patterns.

The tobacco industry created:

∙ Obvious harm visible for decades
∙ Industry suppression of evidence
∙ Regulatory capture preventing adequate response
∙ Incremental half-measures arriving far too late
∙ Warning labels, advertising restrictions, designated areas
∙ Continued operation of systems known to be catastrophically harmful

By comparison, social media platforms:

∙ Obvious harm visible for decades
∙ Industry suppression/dismissal of evidence
∙ Regulatory capture (now including dependency capture)
∙ Incremental half-measures arriving far too late
∙ Age restrictions, content warnings, “digital wellbeing” theatre
∙ Continued operation of systems known to be catastrophically harmful

The parallel is exact. We’re following the same timeline, implementing the same inadequate measures, protecting the same profits, accepting the same casualties.

With one crucial difference that makes the social media version potentially more catastrophic:

Tobacco primarily killed individuals. They were horrible, preventable, unacceptable deaths – but ultimately individual tragedies aggregated. Society continued functioning. Institutions remained intact. Collective capacity for response persisted.

Social media platforms erode collective psychological capacity itself. Not just harming individuals but degrading the civilisational infrastructure – sustained attention, impulse control, genuine connection, shared reality, democratic discourse, institutional trust – necessary for collective response to collective crisis.

We’re losing the neurological and social capacity to address problems at the same time we’re accumulating problems requiring that capacity to address.

Tobacco took fifty years from obvious harm to meaningful regulation. We eventually got there because collective capacity for response survived the interim casualties.
Social media is eroding that collective capacity now and rifting the world into myriad micro-societies. Each year of continued operation makes adequate response less likely by degrading the psychological and institutional architecture necessary to choose it.

We might not have fifty years to arrive at an adequate response. We might not even have twenty. We might already be past the point where collective capacity for voluntary cessation exists.

The age ban, implemented two decades into obvious harm, suggests we’re already well down that trajectory.

The Answer We Can’t Speak

There’s a question we’re collectively avoiding, because asking it honestly would require confronting answers we lack capacity to implement.

Not “should we ban children from social media?”

Instead: “Should these platforms exist at all?”

The honest answer – based on twenty years of evidence, understanding of business models requiring harm, recognition of systematic psychological exploitation, assessment of individual and civilisational consequences – is clearly no.

They shouldn’t exist. Not in their current form. Not operating on attention extraction. Not optimised for engagement over wellbeing. Not designed to defeat human psychological defences. Not structured to prevent voluntary cessation.

The business model is incompatible with human flourishing. Full stop.

But we can’t choose that answer. Not because we don’t understand the harm. Because we’re dependent on the harm-creation mechanism.

The platforms have successfully created the neurological and institutional conditions that prevent their own removal. That’s not an accident – it’s the explicit goal of engagement optimisation. Make yourself indispensable by making users dependent. Success measured by inability to imagine existence without you.

They’ve succeeded spectacularly.

So we implement age bans. Announce protective measures. Carefully avoid the actual question because we know – at somatic level, before intellectual justification – that we lack capacity to choose the adequate answer.

The regulatory response itself confesses the dependency. We can only implement measures that preserve the infrastructure we’re dependent on. Anything more aggressive triggers withdrawal panic that makes it psychologically impossible.

The Generations That Won’t Recover

Here’s perhaps the darkest implication: even if we implemented adequate response tomorrow – complete platform shutdown, and civilisational withdrawal from engineered dependency – significant portions of currently living populations might never recover full psychological capacity.

The neural pathways carved by twenty years of algorithmic manipulation don’t just disappear after a week off. The psychological architecture that never developed in those raised entirely within platform environments becomes hard to subvert. The institutional knowledge of how to function without digital mediation that we’ve systematically lost in service of some vague promise of social engagement.

Some of that damage may be permanent.

Not because humans are fundamentally broken but because neuroplasticity has limits, developmental windows eventually close, and twenty years of systematic erosion doesn’t reverse through six months of abstinence.

The children we’re now proposing to protect with age bans were born into world where platform dependency was already civilisational norm. They never experienced pre-smartphone existence. Their entire psychological development occurred within environment optimised for attention extraction.

Even if we stopped creating new casualties tomorrow, we’re looking at multiple generations carrying the neurological consequences of civilisational-scale experiment in psychological exploitation.

The adequate response – shuttering platforms – would prevent additional harm but wouldn’t reverse existing damage. We’d be stopping the poisoning whilst acknowledging that some effects are permanent.

That’s the hardest truth to accept. Particularly when accepting it would require implementing response we’ve already established we lack capacity to choose.

So we don’t accept it. We implement age bans. Pretend that protecting future children compensates for abandoning current casualties. Announce measures that won’t meaningfully address the problem whilst carefully preserving our own access to the mechanisms creating it.
The civilisational equivalent of the parent announcing they’re quitting drinking whilst pouring their morning whisky, rationalising that at least they’re setting a good example for the kids by not letting them drink too.

The Confession In The Silence

What’s most revealing isn’t what the age ban does but what it deliberately avoids.

No discussion of shuttering platforms entirely.

No consideration of business model regulation that would eliminate attention extraction economics.

No proposals for systemic intervention that might actually address root causes.

Just age verification. ID checks. Symbolic protection for one vulnerable population whilst leaving the exploitation infrastructure intact for everyone else.

That silence – the complete absence of adequate response from policy discussion – confesses our dependency more honestly than any admission we’d make explicitly.
We can’t discuss shuttering platforms because the suggestion triggers immediate panic. Not careful policy analysis of costs and benefits. Immediate, somatic, pre-rational resistance.

That’s truly the words of dependency talking.

The profound alcoholic doesn’t carefully analyse whether complete cessation might be an optimal long-term strategy. They immediately reject the suggestion as extreme, unnecessary, disproportionate. The dependency generates rationalisations that protect access to the substance.

This is the same mechanism operating at civilisational level.

Policy discussion carefully constrained to measures that won’t threaten platform operations. Not through conscious conspiracy but through unconscious dependency. The bounds of “reasonable policy debate” are set by collective inability to imagine existence without the things destroying us.

The age ban represents the maximum intervention our dependency permits. Everything more aggressive is automatically categorised as unrealistic, extreme, impossible to implement – not based on careful analysis but based on somatic resistance to imagined loss.
We’ve become the thing we’d need to not be in order to address the problem adequately.

Whether It’s Already Too Late

So here’s the question that matters: Is civilisational recovery from platform dependency still possible?
Or have we passed some neurological and institutional point of no return where collective capacity for adequate response no longer exists?

I genuinely don’t know.

The optimistic case: Humans are remarkably resilient. Neuroplasticity continues throughout life. Social systems can reorganise rapidly when circumstances demand. We’ve recovered from collective dependencies before – smoking rates have declined significantly following adequate regulation. Civilisational recovery is difficult but possible.

The pessimistic case: The tobacco parallel breaks down because tobacco didn’t erode collective capacity for response. Social media platforms have created dependency whilst simultaneously degrading the psychological and institutional infrastructure necessary to address dependency. Each year of continued operation makes adequate response less likely. We may have already passed the point where voluntary cessation is collectively possible.

The honest case: We won’t know until we try. Of course, we won’t try until we’re forced to by consequences so catastrophic they override the dependency-generated resistance to adequate response.

Which means we’re likely headed for version of civilisational withdrawal that’s involuntary rather than chosen. Not policy-driven shutdown but collapse-driven cessation when the platforms’ continued operation becomes materially impossible to sustain.

That’s a considerably less pleasant scenario than a voluntary, managed transition to platform-free existence. However, it may be the only pathway available when the population has lost capacity for voluntary cessation.

The age ban suggests we’re not even close to voluntary response. We’re still in the “4% beer on weekdays” phase of addressing civilisational alcoholism. The catastrophic consequences that might force involuntary withdrawal haven’t yet arrived – or haven’t yet been recognised as such by populations whose capacity for recognising catastrophe has been systematically eroded.

The Regulatory Theatre Continues

Meanwhile, the age ban will be implemented. Headlines will be written. Politicians will claim credit for protecting children. Industry will comply with minimal measures whilst continuing operations unchanged. Everyone will declare victory.

Children aged 15 years and 364 days will be protected from psychological exploitation through rigorous ID verification.

Adults aged 16 years and 1 day will continue unrestricted access to identical exploitation infrastructure, their lack of psychological defences carefully ignored because acknowledging adult vulnerability would require admitting the platforms themselves are the problem.

And what of us? We’ll all continue scrolling, checking, engaging, medicating whatever needs the platforms serve, convincing ourselves that protecting children whilst preserving adult access represents meaningful progress rather than confession of our own dependency.

The cocaine water keeps flowing.

The isolation cages remain operational.

The rats – young and old, in school uniforms and grey suits – continue drinking.

And the fact that we can only implement symbolic protection whilst carefully preserving the exploitation infrastructure proves exactly what we’re unable to admit: we’re not protecting anyone.

We’re protecting our access to the thing destroying us.

The age ban is confession masquerading as solution.

And somewhere, future historians are watching this regulatory theatre, wondering why we thought checking IDs whilst operating civilisational-scale psychological exploitation constituted meaningful reform rather than admission that we’d already lost collective capacity for adequate response.

The answer is simple: Because we’re addicted.

Not metaphorically.

As neurological reality constraining what regulatory responses feel possible.

The inadequacy of our protection reveals the depth of our dependency.

As well as the fact that we can’t choose better measures proves we’re exactly as lost as the measures themselves confess.