What About The Children?

The First Generation of Parents Who Knew What We Were Doing—and Did It Anyway

Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

I have harmed my own children through my screen addiction.

I write those words and feel them burn. Not because they’re dramatic but because they’re true. I was a tech executive who spent years thinking about both technology and philosophy. I understood these systems from both sides—how they were built and what they were doing to us.

The technologist in me recognized the deliberate engineering: intermittent variable reward schedules, social validation loops, dark patterns designed to create dependency. The philosopher in me understood what this was doing to human consciousness—fragmenting attention, destroying sustained thought, replacing authentic relationship with parasocial bonding.

I wasn’t building these social media platforms. But I used their products. And I couldn’t stop. Even knowing exactly how they worked. Even understanding the philosophical implications of attention capture. Even seeing what they were doing to society, to democracy, to our capacity for thought itself.

Still I fell. Still I chose the screen over my family. Still I modeled for my children that they were less interesting than whatever might be happening in the infinite elsewhere of the internet.

My children learned what I valued by watching what I looked at. And too often, it wasn’t them.

This Is Not Okay

No, seriously. What about them?

We’re destroying them with social media and now AI chatbots, and we all fucking know it. If you’re a parent who’s watched your kid with a smartphone, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The vacant stare. The panic when the battery dies. The meltdown when you try to set limits. This isn’t kids being kids. This is addiction, and we’re the dealers.

There’s a tech cartel in Silicon Valley that built the seeds of our modern epistemic crisis. But here’s the thing—they didn’t know what they were building either. Not at first. They thought they were connecting people, building communities, making the world more open. They discovered what they’d actually built the same way we did—by watching it consume us. And by then, they were as addicted to the money as we were to their platforms.

Their platforms have been weaponized into systems of mass distraction. They’re not competing for our business—they’re competing for our attention, buying and selling it like a commodity. And now these companies have all taken a knee to Trump to make sure no government regulation ever gets in the way of them perfectly optimizing us into consumerist supplicants.

This isn’t an anti-capitalism screed. I’m a technologist. I think self-driving cars are going to be amazing. But social media as it’s currently designed is fucking insane, and we all know it.

TikTok is controlled by a foreign adversary that’s using it to raise a generation of American kids who can’t focus long enough to read a paragraph. X is controlled by a man who seems to harbor fascist sympathies and is now rolling out sexually suggestive AI “companions” on Grok. Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram has systematically destroyed the mental health of young girls—and yes, he knows now, he has the internal documents, but he can’t stop either. The money is too good, the machine too big, the whole system too dependent on the very mechanisms causing the harm.

And we’re giving our children to these people. Every day. Knowingly. Because we’re addicted too.