Hugh Grant showed up at a London school about a year ago doing what every father should do: making noise in public. He called the tech industry a drug cartel. He said that schools, instead of calling the police, invite the cartel in for tea. That strikes me as a pretty accurate description of what’s going on.
But Hugh Grant’s kids go to private schools in London. The debate he and others have brought to the public always comes with a specific address and zip code, different from ours. I feel, however, that here at our local zip code the story isn’t all that different.
In Portuguese public schools, the conversation is similar. The law says phones don’t go into classrooms, but during breaks it’s the law of the jungle. And since a school can have students from seventh through twelfth grade, nobody dares ban the older kids from accessing smartphones, tablets, smartwatches and all the rest of the gadgetry. What would these kids do without their tech paraphernalia? How would they find their way home? Some Portuguese private schools solved the problem in a simple manner: devices go in a box at the entrance and are handed back at the end of the day. It works well. It gives kids back their intellectual freedom, autonomy in their interactions, initiative in their playtime. Americans are good at naming things: they call this a “Bell to Bell Ban.” I won’t try to explain it because any reasonable person can grasp the principle, middle, and end of the measure without further explanation. Those with money buy their kids an environment the state can’t guarantee for anyone. The inequality here isn’t just in access to technology. It’s also in access to protection from it.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation in 2024, documenting the correlation between the spread of smartphones between 2010 and 2015 and the simultaneous rise in anxiety and depression among teenagers across multiple countries. Haidt argues that no other theory explains why the numbers spiked in so many countries, at the same time, in the same way. His critics point out that the studies establish relationships but don’t prove causes. They’re right to be rigorous. But Haidt himself responds that if the hypothesis turns out to be wrong and we still reduce phone use in a generation, the cost doesn’t seem all that great. It’s an argument that has the merit of at least being honest. And there’s a reason we say that too much of anything is never a good thing.
All it takes is watching a kid after two hours of instant rewards in any game to get the gut feeling that something is very wrong. What you see when the screen goes off is not a disappointed child. It’s something much closer to withdrawal. Walk into a casino and try dragging an old lady away from a slot machine after a full day of playing. Bitting and scratching would only be the beginning of that operation.
But this isn’t the same old casino anymore. It’s worth understanding what changed, because the change explains everything. The games of the last century kept you sitting at home, in one place, in front of a PC. Today you play on the bus, in the school yard, in the bathroom. Portability eliminated the last obstacle between a child and addiction. Then there’s another difference, this one even more decisive. The old games had endings. You played a campaign, there was an objective, a conclusion, a moment when the game was over. Today’s games are mostly multiplayer in a permanent online environment — MMORPGs — worlds that never close, never end, always waiting, in constant renewal with new upgrades released almost daily: evolutionary world-building with endless patches and seasons, ad nauseam. The goal stopped being to reach the end. It became accumulation: the reward, the skin, the prize credits to keep playing. It’s a system designed to prevent exit. The child doesn’t play to win. The child plays to not lose access to the next reward. It’s a subtle distinction, and it’s the most insidious one the industry has ever invented.
For children, what was lost wasn’t just the time spent on screen. Gone are the forts, the hide and seek, the ball, the paintings, the questions, the conversations and everything that came after. When deprived of the device, kids run home from school straight to the fix. They punch tablets. They bite screens hard enough to shatter them. On a family outing, twenty minutes in, the question is already “can we go home?” Because there’s something there they need to get back to. At an episode I witnessed just a few days ago, I watched a father carry two tablets and a smartphone for a single user: a five or six year old boy who was sitting impatiently by a pool while his older sister competed in a swimming race. It’s a small example of the total loss of control so many of us end up subjected to. You’ll tell me: that’s an extreme case, it’s not the norm. But I’m fairly sure you know similar cases, with very familiar contours.
After the near-unrestricted and unthinking access to the device comes the “content.” The word has an old history, from Latin, once full of meaning, and arrived in the twenty-first century hollowed out to the bone. It became a label stuck on anything that takes up space on a server. Is it worth qualifying? Some of that content lives in its own environments, which in the most fertile imagination resemble a laboratory. Not the antiseptic lab of science fiction. I’m picturing a backyard lab, dim light, the smell of cheap chemicals, where the substance gets cut with whatever’s on hand to stretch it further and reach more people. The criterion isn’t quality. It’s dosage. The goal isn’t satisfaction. It’s addiction.
The difference from a drug cartel is that these laboratories have a design department, a marketing plan, and legitimate coexistence in the real world.
Roblox is one of these laboratories. A case study that should be on every European news channel. In 2019, Roblox reported 675 cases of child exploitation. By 2024, that number had risen to 24,522. This is not a problem of a few bad actors. At least 30 people have been arrested in the United States since 2018 for the kidnapping or sexual abuse of children lured through the platform. Los Angeles County sued the company in February of this year. The attorneys general of Texas, Louisiana, and Iowa did the same. The charge is always the same: the company knew the platform was a hunting ground for predators and chose profit. Roblox presents itself as a safe and creative space for children. Half of all American children use it. Forty percent of users are under thirteen.
The solution Roblox has put forward to protect children from predators is called Persona. It’s a biometric verification software partially funded by Founders Fund, the firm of Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir. When a child goes through age verification on Roblox, the software runs 269 distinct checks: facial recognition against watchlists, financial activity screening, cross-referencing with government databases. The biometric data is retained for up to three years. I draw my own conclusions. The reader will draw theirs. But there seems to be a strong indication that the thief holds the key to the cell and to the courthouse door.
Meta and Google are no different. In March of this year, a California jury found Meta and Google responsible for the depression and anxiety of a young woman who started using the platforms at age six, ordering the companies to pay six million dollars. It was the first time a jury treated a social media application as a defective product, designed to exploit developing brains. The prosecution cited internal documents showing how the companies deliberately incorporated behavioral and neurobiological techniques — the same ones used by slot machines and the tobacco industry — to maximize user engagement and increase advertising revenue. Except here the targets are children. More than forty state attorneys general have active cases against Meta. These are internal documents, court testimony, statements under oath. There is evidence, there are depositions, there is data. We are no longer in the territory of conspiracy theory. There is documented “negligence” with names attached. The difference between this and a drug cartel is that Big Tech has a colorful logo and four and a half stars in the App Store.
And while all this happens, European governments fall into complete mimicry of the American model, where freedom of expression is a constitutional value that protects everything except children. Big Tech operates in a regulatory vacuum no other industry would be allowed. There are rules for the food we eat, the drinks we drink, the cigarettes we smoke, the medicines we buy — but for what is served daily to the brains of millions of children, there are no rules. There is arrogance. There are complaints that go nowhere. Just try to fix something on Facebook or Instagram and spend hours finding no solution. There is an arrogance only possible in an industry full of young millionaires with no life experience whatsoever, who handed day-to-day management over to the algorithm, with no idea what they’re doing in other people’s homes, but with enough profit to keep not caring.
And at the end of the day the blame falls on parents who do nothing, who don’t ban, who don’t monitor, who don’t spend their days screaming at their kids to pull them away from something harmful. Or on schools that don’t correct and don’t enforce stricter rules. As if it were reasonable to ask every parent to individually audit each platform, each game, each dependency mechanism deliberately built by highly trained professional teams to make sure children can’t get out.
The generation that grew up like this, in the observation of many parents and educators, reaches adulthood with obvious difficulties in initiative, decision-making, and sustained attention. Boredom has become the new black plague. Neuroscience may one day confirm the exact mechanism. For now, just look around.
What is being asked for is not a blanket ban on technology, nor a state legislating what people can or cannot think and consume. It is something harder and more urgent: a model of active awareness and common sense that runs through the entire chain, from creator to end consumer, establishing best practices before the excesses we have already witnessed become irreversible.
These are growing pains. As such, they have a correction. What we cannot accept is letting arms and legs grow crooked for life and condemning one or two generations because we didn’t address the problem when we first identified it. Audits of these dependency systems, deliberately built to drug the most vulnerable, are urgent. Accountability is urgent. Regulation with teeth — but also with intelligence — is urgent. Mechanisms of prevention and reparation funded by those who profit from the harm are urgent. This is not a new idea, nor is it controversial. The tobacco industry was condemned on exactly this principle. So were opioids. The model exists. The precedent exists. What is missing is the political will to apply it to a monster that grew too large, too fast.
Hugh Grant, has a parent, is absolutely right. He just picked the wrong audience. Politicians won’t solve this. Politicians do what gets them votes. Banning things generally doesn’t get votes. There are children whose brains are rotting because someone is making money from it. Convictions already exist. Internal documents with the names of those responsible already exist. Shouting in public isn’t enough anymore. The problem has grown beyond the reach of any famous father at a private school in London. That five year old boy by the pool, impatient, with two tablets and a smartphone waiting for him — he doesn’t know any of this. Does his father?
André Domingues
