There is certainly a divide when it comes to technology.
On one side you have people who are strongly averse to most of it. These people believe that technological development is ultimately bad for society and needs to be tamed. They believe in the ability of the state to protect people from the excesses of the today’s tech leviathans.
On the other side you have those who believe technological development is the answer to all or most of society’s problems. Just keep building and eventually the ends will justify the means.
And then there is something in the middle. Tech is great in many ways, but also has its downsides, and we should therefore focus on minimising the bad and maximising the good.
In the UK, this min-max middle is being squeezed out by policies that are aggressively anti-tech in a way that betrays the classic idea (or lazy stereotype) that the British people are somehow calm, restrained and reasonable.
In June, the UK government announced that it would be banning under 16s from accessing social media platforms. This would, according to the outgoing Keir Starmer, “give kids their childhood back” and “set a new normal for future generations.”
Obviously these are pretty loaded statements, but they are consistent with some of the other anti-tech content I have seen floating around. It’s not hard to find commentary these days about how screen time is frying your mind, shortening your attention span or causing brain rot, among other things.
And as part of that rhetoric, social media is so often cast as the digital fast food, something inherently dangerous that should be consumed with extreme caution if at all. Because if you do use it, you apparently risk sacrificing your childhood and inadvertently discarding a promising future by getting pulled into the dreaded black holes of internet brain rot and slop.
But as is often the case, the reality is more complicated.