If you want to see how far the managerial class will go to protect its bottom line, look no further than Canberra this week. Down in Australia, the nation’s High Court is hearing arguments over a sweeping federal law that bars children under the age of sixteen from social media platforms. Standing before the bench are high-priced advocates for Reddit and the usual chorus of self-anointed civil liberties groups, solemnly arguing that severing a fourteen-year-old from an algorithmic feed is a grave violation of the child’s implied constitutional freedom of political communication. You have to hand it to corporate legal counsel: it takes genuine audacity to look a panel of judges in the eye and pretend an infinite scroll of choreographed dance videos, manufactured outrage, and digital poison is the modern equivalent of the town square.
Out here in the American heartland, where common sense is still traded across diner counters instead of dissolved in boardroom seminars, the Australian case looks less like a high-minded constitutional dispute and more like a desperate rearguard action by corporate giants who treat childhood as unmined real estate. Nobody sitting at a booth over morning coffee believes an eighth-grader possesses a fundamental right to have their attention span strip-mined by predatory algorithms. Yet the legal arguments unfolding halfway across the globe rely on the strange, modern delusion that children are simply miniature adults with sovereign consumer rights, rather than young souls who require shelter, guidance, and boundaries while their characters are formed.
This is where the old wisdom of Edmund Burke still offers a steady hand in the storm. Burke famously observed that society is a partnership across generations, and that men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. A free society cannot survive on raw impulse alone; it requires ordered liberty, cultivated through self-discipline and anchored in real institutions. True freedom is not the license to consume whatever a Silicon Valley programmer pipes through a glowing glass screen at two o'clock in the morning. To suggest that depriving a thirteen-year-old of a digital addiction is an act of state tyranny completely misapprehends what human freedom actually entails.
The hypocrisy of the tech lobby makes the medicine go down even rougher. For years, the engineers, executives, and coastal venture capitalists who designed these digital labyrinths have quietly sent their own progeny to elite private academies that ban smartphones and emphasize wooden blocks, chalkboards, and outdoor play. They know precisely what they built, and they know the wreckage it leaves behind. Yet when a sovereign government steps in to protect ordinary families from the very hazards the Silicon Valley aristocracy shields its own heirs against, the corporate machine suddenly discovers an unyielding devotion to youth empowerment and the Bill of Rights. It is a cynical performance, and ordinary people see right through it.
Talk to any mother or father in Ohio, Indiana, or Iowa, and they will tell you the same story. They are waging an exhausting, daily trench war inside their own living rooms against billion-dollar platforms designed by the sharpest behavioral psychologists in the world. The natural buffers of childhood—the sandlot games, the family dinner table, the quiet contemplation of an afternoon chore—have been dismantled and replaced by a dopamine casino. We are witnessing an unprecedented collapse in adolescent mental health, a surge in anxiety, and a generational alienation that no local community can easily mend. When Burke spoke of the little platoons of society—the family, the neighborhood, the parish—he recognized them as the true seedbeds of character. Social media does not strengthen those platoons; it systematically atomizes them.
Now, any conservative worth his salt harbor a healthy, instinctive skepticism toward state intervention. There is a legitimate discussion to be had about enforcement mechanisms, digital surveillance, and the danger of governments overstepping into family life. The primary duty of raising children belongs to parents, not bureaucrats in the capital, and a top-down mandate is always a clumsy tool. But acknowledging the sanctity of the family does not mean we must surrender the household gates to predatory corporate cartels. When an industrial lobby floods the public square with an addictive product that actively subverts parental authority, pretending the law has no protective role is not conservatism; it is a brand of abstract libertarianism that ignores human nature.
What happens in the Australian High Court will ripple far beyond the Southern Hemisphere. Lawmakers in Washington and state capitals across America are watching closely to see whether a democratic society still possesses the nerve to set boundaries for Big Tech. The tech companies will continue to wrap their balance sheets in the noble language of free expression, hoping to bamboozle courts and intimidate legislatures. But childhood is brief, fragile, and irreplaceable. Protecting it from corporate exploitation is not an assault on liberty; it is the very first duty of a self-governing people who give a damn about their future.