The Panopticon of Care: Why ‘Safety’ Is the New Trojan Horse for Control

The UK’s push to ban social media for under-16s feels like a relief to exhausted parents, but it’s a trap. By outsourcing parenting to the state, we invite a surveillance infrastructure that won’t just watch our kids—it will watch us all. A diagnosis of why we prefer comfortable lies to difficult truths.

Symptoms: The Exhaustion of the Modern Guardian

I feel the exhaustion in every conversation I have with parents. It is a heavy, dull ache—the sense that we are losing a war against a force we cannot see but can vividly feel. The smartphones in our children’s pockets feel less like tools and more like portals to a chaos we are ill-equipped to manage. So, when the UK government floats the idea of banning social media for everyone under 16, the immediate reaction is a sigh of relief. Finally, someone is doing something. Finally, the burden is being lifted.

But we need to look closer at this symptom. Why are we so eager to hand the keys of our household authority to the state? We are witnessing a collective desire to be absolved of the burden of freedom. We are so terrified of the mental health crisis gripping our youth—and rightly so—that we are willing to invite the wolf of state censorship into the house, provided he promises to eat the digital demons first. But relief purchased at the price of autonomy is not relief; it is sedation.

Diagnosis: The Managerial Solution to a Spiritual Problem

The diagnosis is harsh: we are trying to solve a spiritual and cultural problem with a managerial switch. We have allowed our communities to wither, our ‘third places’ to close, and our family dinners to be interrupted by notifications. Now, facing the void we helped create, we ask the bureaucracy to fill it. We are making the mistake identified by the philosopher Ivan Illich decades ago:

The institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery.

– Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

We are suffering from ‘psychological impotence.’ We believe we cannot raise our children without a law prohibiting them from seeing the world. This ban is not a sign of a strong state protecting the weak; it is a sign of a weak society begging for a strong state. It diagnoses the child as ‘vulnerable’ and the state as ‘competent,’ two premises that are historically shaky at best.

Prognosis: The Age of the Verified Citizen

If we swallow this pill, what happens next? The prognosis involves a side effect few are discussing: the end of online anonymity for everyone, not just children. You cannot effectively ban a 15-year-old without proving you are a 45-year-old. This requires a digital infrastructure of verification—a ‘hard ID’ for the internet. The ‘protection of the child’ is the perfect moral cover for the implementation of a surveillance architecture that security agencies have wanted for years.

We are walking into the trap Michel Foucault warned us about, where discipline is not exercised by force, but by constant visibility.

Visibility is a trap... He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself.

– Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

By accepting this ban, we accept a prognosis where every login is a checkpoint. We trade the wild, dangerous, free internet for a sanitized, monitored, and age-graded playpen. The result will not be safe children, but conditioned subjects.

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Prescription: The Courage of Refusal

So, what is the prescription? It is not to let the tech companies run wild. It is to recognize that the solution cannot be outsourced. The prescription is a radical return to the physical world. It means taking the phone away, not because the Prime Minister said so, but because you said so. It means enduring the tantrums and the ‘fear of missing out’ to build resilience in your children.

We must refuse the easy comfort of the ban. We must build communities where children can play without being tracked, and where they learn to navigate risks rather than being legally blinded to them. The state can build a cage and call it a nursery, but it cannot give your child a childhood. Only you can do that. The cure is not in the law books; it is in the courage to be the friction in the system.