Social media platforms were inflicted on youth by adults who control their design

Evidence

As a middle-aged man, I think of such technology as belonging to the kids, but it doesn’t. Smartphones, YouTube, TikTok and the like were brought to market by adults and then inflicted on a generation that has had little choice in the matter. … The boy who threw the punch, then, is exercising a form of minor, violent resistance, resistance to a culture formed to ensure communication and sociality are always commodified. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 110

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School analysis of technology as an instrument of social control; also echoes stance of youth as passive recipients of an adult-designed commercial order.
• DEFINE: Establishes the claim that contextualizes how influencer culture is a top-down industrial imposition, not a bottom-up native creatorship, centrally relevant to the Corpocene thesis.