Megan Amram on the UK teen phone ban viewed from Portland, the politics of attention, and who actually profits from the rage.
From Portland, Oregon, the spiritual home of the very tech industry that built the infinite scroll, I have been watching Britain debate banning teenagers from social media with the specific discomfort of someone living next door to the arsonist while the neighbours argue about smoke detectors.
The Arsonist’s Neighbour
The news, as I followed it from the belly of the beast, is Starmer’s plan to ban under-16s from social media, which has apparently bred a generation of rebels who have discovered sarcasm. And living where I live, surrounded by the people who designed these machines to be exactly as addictive as they are, I want to scream a single point that gets lost in the British debate: the platforms are not neutral utilities that some teenagers unfortunately overuse. They are engineered, deliberately, by brilliant people paid enormous sums, to capture and hold attention against the user’s own interest. The teenager is not weak. The machine is strong, on purpose, by design.
This matters because the entire framing of the ban treats it as a problem of teenage behaviour rather than corporate design, which is like blaming a fish for the hook. The left position, my position, is that you do not solve a structural problem by disciplining the individuals caught in it. You regulate the structure. You hold the designers accountable. You make the hook illegal, not the fish.
Who Profits From The Rage
And here is the connection that keeps me up at night in my Portland apartment, listening to the rain that is just London rain in a flannel shirt. The same machines that hook the teenagers also manufacture the division. I read that Britain is more divided than during Brexit, with experts recommending everyone argue more calmly online, and I want to point at the platforms and say: the calm is not available, because the rage is the product. They do not make money from your agreement. They make money from your fury, your engagement, your inability to look away from the fight. The division is not a bug in the system. The division is the system, working perfectly, as designed.
The researchers documenting this, the people at organisations like the Mozilla Foundation, have shown again and again how engagement-optimised systems systematically amplify the most divisive content because divisive content holds attention longest. You cannot argue calmly online because the online was built, by my Portland neighbours, to make calm unprofitable.
The Materialist Reads The Machine
So when Britain debates whether to ban teenagers, I find myself impatient with both sides, because both sides are arguing about the fish while the hook manufacturer counts its money two time zones away from me, possibly in the building I can see from my window. Ban the teenagers, do not ban the teenagers, it barely matters while the underlying machine remains engineered to extract attention and manufacture rage at industrial scale. That is the thing to regulate. That is the thing to break. Everything else is arguing about smoke detectors next door to the arsonist.
The View From The Belly
I love living here, in the strange beautiful contradiction of Portland, close enough to the machine to see how it is built, far enough from home to see Britain clearly. And what I see is two countries, both hooked, both arguing about the symptoms, both reluctant to name the design. The teenager is not the problem. The division is not natural. The rage is a product, manufactured by people I could probably wave to from my fire escape, sold back to us as engagement, and the only real solution, the materialist solution, is to stop blaming the hooked and start regulating the people who forged the hook.
The Hook And The Fish
Living where I live, I cannot unsee the engineering. Every infinite scroll, every autoplay, every notification was designed by someone, in a meeting, with a goal, and the goal was never your wellbeing. To debate teenage willpower while ignoring the deliberate design is to blame the fish for the hook, and I find it maddening that the conversation so rarely names the people holding the rod.
And the same machinery that hooks the young manufactures the division, which is why I read the reports of a fracturing Britain as a design outcome rather than a cultural accident. The researchers at watchdogs like the human rights organisations documenting algorithmic harm have shown how engagement optimisation systematically rewards outrage. You cannot argue calmly online because calm does not pay. The rage is the revenue. Name the design, regulate the designer, and stop pretending the hooked fish is the problem.
I finished my coffee in the rain and toasted my fire-escape neighbours, the brilliant well-paid architects of the hook, with the grim affection one reserves for an adversary one understands completely, certain that the only honest fix is to regulate the rod and free the fish, and equally certain that two countries will spend another year blaming the fish instead.
I walked out into the Portland drizzle, that London rain in a flannel shirt, certain that naming the design rather than blaming the hooked is the only honest politics left, and equally certain that the people who built the hook will keep selling us the rage and calling it connection for as long as we let the conversation stay fixed on the fish.
For more, try McSweeney’s.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
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