Adults profitably engineered platforms that addict children, then moralize about it

Evidence

Our reams of fretting essays about how much the kids love phones tend to ignore who gave them phones in the first place. We are like parents who left the liquor cabinet unlocked and are shocked to come home and smell the children’s breath—except we’re making money, so maybe we are more like those 18th-century Britons who shipped opium to China. We aren’t forcing Zoomers to spend their childhoods watching and shooting videos; we’re just giving them the opportunity. Some kids will resist, but most will indulge that opportunity, and those who do will make a little more money for Google, for Apple, for TikTok—all the far-off companies chartered to do business with the digital natives in their new world. It is a world we call barbarous, even as we devote more and more resources to colonizing it. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 111

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the opium-shilling framing; connects to the chapter’s broader point that vague tech moral panic obscures the structural role of chartered corporations like YouTube/Google.
• ADDENDUM: Could slot into the trees/Worldbuilding essay only loosely; more directly useful for the Corpocene teaching goal as evidence that the influencer’s enablers are themselves corporate persons.