If you’ve been paying attention to social media lately, then you already know the score: smartphones are corrupting our children, we need legal intervention immediately. Roughly half of US states have enacted some form of age-gating for social media or pornographic content. Australia banned under-16s from social media platforms outright, France and Indonesia followed suit and the United Kingdom is now asking people for their papers to read moderately offensive blog posts. You don’t need me to rehash this. The phones have nuked the interior lives of Gen Z, Gen A and the hitherto unborn Generations B and C. Every opinion lands somewhere between “protect the children” and “this is Reefer Madness for iPads.”

The market is so efficient at metabolizing dissent, the critique and commodity become indistinguishable

The market is so efficient at metabolizing dissent, the critique and commodity become indistinguishable

What I find more interesting is the anti-tech culture gestating underneath the conversation. At its most extreme, you have writers such as Paul Kingsnorth. I should say upfront: I quite like Kingsnorth, despite disagreeing with him. His Against the Machine, published last fall, hit the New York Times bestseller list and draws on Jacques Ellul, Wendell Berry and Simone Weil to argue that the techno-capitalist apparatus he calls “the Machine” is hollowing out our civilization. Kingsnorth – English writer, Green movement veteran, former Wiccan, now Orthodox........

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