The speech, delivered “on the frontier of the new Millennium”, is one of the purest expressions of the Blairite creed you could hope to find. Politics was no longer about class struggle, Blair explained — the exploiters vs the exploited. It was a battle between the forces of progress and the forces of reaction — a question of orientation. Are you for the future or the past? As for the substance of this future, Blair is weirdly uninterested. He’s just all for it. And so, like the Communist Manifesto — with its eerie talk of spells and spectres and sorcerers — the speech has its own touch of mysticism. “These forces of change driving the future don’t stop at national boundaries,” he continued. “[They] don’t respect tradition. They wait for no one and no nation. They are universal.”

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Blair’s delight in our silicon future might be dismissed as ancient history, were it not for his renewed influence on British governance thanks to the Tony Blair Global Institute for Change (TBI), the multinational thinktank fronted by Blair and underwritten by the Oracle billionaire, Larry Ellison to the tune of over $200 million. The TBI’s position on tech is basically that it’s amazing. “Accelerating AI adoption is… not only a matter of boosting economic growth but also of improving social outcomes,” reads one report about how we need to “reboot copyright” and to ensure that the fruits of Britain’s creative sector can be fed into Silicon Valley’s shiny new machines.

Keir Starmer has reportedly outsourced much of his policy detail to the TBI’s gleaming legions of researchers and has delivered numerous iterations of Blair’s old speech: “There is no route to growth without embracing the transformative potential of AI,” he was promising back in January. We’ll doubtless hear more of the same during the Government’s forthcoming “London Tech Week” — perhaps even a little more detail on the $330 million that Peter Thiel has signed in order to gain access to seven year’s worth of NHS data. Remember: according to Blair’s oracular vision, the likes of Thiel and Ellison are emissaries of the future, so we just have to do what these guys say, right?

So when we learn that the TBI-stamped technology minister Peter Kyle has met lobbyists from Apple, Google, Amazon and Meta, on 28 separate occasions; or that the Government is minded not to ban smartphones in schools due to a “lack of evidence”; or that campaigners are “dismayed by the lack of ambition” in the new Online Safety Act; I think we are supposed to put away any cynical thoughts. The Government is on the side of progress after all.

The trouble is, the Blairites only seem to be able to see progress in terms of whatever the tech firms tell them is progress. This might have been a mildly credible position in 1999. It’s nothing short of idiotic in the enshittified techscape of 2025. Replace “universal” with “totalizing” in Blair’s little paean and you have a fairly accurate picture of where digital technology under the current oligopoly has actually led us. A handful of firms, none of them British, actively harming children in pursuit of profit.

We can argue whether successive British Governments’ failure to regulate tech in any meaningful way has benefited the nation in the grand scheme of things — but the evidence of its dire effects on children in particular is hard to ignore. According to ONS data, between 2010 and 2014, suicide rates among British 10 to 14-year-old girls and boys increased by 167% and 92% respectively. Self-harm rates among girls rose by 78%. Anxiety diagnoses for 18 to 25-year-olds jumped by 92%. Similar patterns have emerged in just about every developed country since around 2010. Rates of adolescent depression and anxiety nearly doubled in the US between 2010 and 2019. Emergency room visits for self-harm among 10-14-year-old girls rose by 188%. This was before Covid struck and added accelerant.

Correlation is not causation, but as Jonathan Haidt demonstrated in his book, The Anxious Generation, there is no other social change as sudden, universal, or as intimately connected to the lives of teenagers as the introduction of smartphones. In 2010 smartphones barely existed; by 2024, 96% of British teenagers had one according to Ofcom. The teenage mental health crisis exploded around 2010.

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It wasn’t Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok or Reddit that invented self-harm, revenge porn, anorexia, gender dysmorphia, misogyny, extremism, incel culture, or any of the myriad ways that teen misery can mutate online. But teenage life still largely takes place amid a hostile online ecosystem in which social media companies mine their attention for profit. Whatever you’re worried about in the depths of your teenager’s soul, whatever particular sadness they harbor, it’s fairly likely the algorithm has spotted it first and tried to exploit it.

It certainly spotted Molly Russell. In 2023, Senior Coroner Andrew Walker determined that the 14-year-old British school girl had died from an act of self-harm after Instagram’s algorithms pushed her image after image inducing her to kill herself. It was the first court case that directly named one of the tech firms as a cause of harm. Her father, Ian Russell, has been clear: “It’s time to protect innocent young people, instead of allowing platforms to monetize their misery.”

Meta responded with platitudes (including some from Nick Clegg, no less), meaningless verifications and assurances that the content was indeed “safe” (in fact, Instagram continued to push inducements to self-harm even after her death). But it wasn’t a design flaw; it was the business model. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg came close to admitting as much in the recent Meta antitrust trial in the US. He testified that only about 20% of content consumed on Facebook and 10% on Instagram actually comes from a user’s friends and family. “The vast majority of the experience is more around exploring your interests, entertainment…” Whatever keeps you glued to the screen, in other words, which just happens to be the most inane, harmful, enraging, depressing, divisive content. Content which, as a recent British Standards Institution survey found, resulted in 72% of 16-21 year olds feeling worse after spending time online. Fully 46% of them wish the internet had never been invented.

The backlash against smartphones — essentially a backlash against the totalizing tech monopolies — is finally strong enough that Labour cannot afford to ignore it. There are Smartphone Free Childhood chapters in just about every community. Parents talk of little else. Even Tony Blair has now been heard saying that tech is “messing with kids minds” — though he’s not sure what to do about it.

The Government’s own position is similarly confused. Starmer would like it to be known that he has watched Adolescence with his teenage son. Gillian Keegan has limply promised to “crack down” on smartphone use in schools. Political will seems absent. As one charity worker, whose work centers on vulnerable boys online, put it to me recently: “I keep telling the Home Office, ‘Why are we not doing more to tackle these big tech companies?’ And they basically said: ‘There’s no political appetite. Big Tech is too powerful to take on’.” As politicians are lobbied here, Zuckerberg has already managed to torpedo protections for young people in America — and we can only speculate what cases his representatives made to Kyle across nine separate meetings. I wonder if Molly Russell’s name came up.

Actual policy is limp. The new Online Safety Bill continues to welcome measures such as age verification (we’ll see how the kids get round that one) and potential fines on social media companies (with no risk of prosecution), but it has clearly been watered down, with no onus to remove “harmful but legal” content. There is nothing remotely as ambitious as Australia’s ban on smartphones for under-16s.

It is an exercise in Blairite governance: if you can’t beat them, invite them to write your policy. Hence the current position regarding a total ban on smartphones in schools comes down to “more research”. Tobacco firms once wanted more research. Betting firms want more research. The fast food lobby hungers for more research. We have the research. The research shows us that smartphones in schools have been a disaster.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Republicans have joined the battle. The broligarcy are openly attacking nations like Canada, Australia and the EU for their attempts to rein in their tech monopolies. JD Vance has reserved particular fury for the UK with the implication that we should fall into line with our Imperial masters on issues such as “free speech” or risk losing favor. The cost of Silicon Valley’s favor is clear: access to data, to infrastructure and to the inner lives of British teenagers.

We have started into this moral vortex before, the strange combination of naivety, cynicism and evangelical uplift that characterized much of the Blair project. Perhaps it is the fate of apparently liberal, progressive governments to be easy on capital and vicious to the vulnerable — an inverted version of the Nixon Paradox. Yet to argue for more leniency for these companies is not to argue for change, but a still more enshittified version of the present. And this is what makes Starmer’s subservience to the exploiters so depressing. As the public begins to get the measure of these companies, the Government and its Blairite allies are opening the door wider.

Since we now do so much online, governments obviously feel that the law should apply to the online world as it does to the offline world. In general, it already does. The Malicious Communications Act of 1988, for example, covered both online and offline communications. Existing laws can also be used to prosecute crimes that institutions and companies might commit in the virtual realm — including fraud, libel, or failing to uphold their own professional standards.

But the translation between the actual and the virtual isn’t seamless. Technology means we do things differently. Instead of a pub conversation which is heard in context, in person, and only by those present, social media conversations can be spread to an audience of millions and survive for decades. School bullies can message their victims day and night. News and opinions can be found with the twitch of a thumb, with no editorial board responsible for tone, taste or checking of sources.

So the Online Safety Bill,  promises to establish “a new regulatory regime to address illegal and harmful content online”. It would do this by imposing legal duties on providers of specific internet services: search engines, platforms for pornographic content, and “user-to-user services”.

Video Sharing Platforms (VSPs) established in the UK are already subject to Ofcom regulation, which requires them to protect the public from illegal content, and under 18s from “videos and adverts containing material that might impair their physical, mental or moral development”. This means TikTok, Vimeo and OnlyFans are all covered. The new legislation would expand both the type of user-to-user platform, and the scope of content, that might be deemed harmful. It especially targets the kind of user-generated content that has not already fallen under the regulatory net. However, rather than the Government trying to explicitly regulate what is said, shown and shared online, it plans to delegate that task to the platform providers, overseen by Ofcom through agreed codes of conduct.

From the start, the language of the Bill has been that of harm, safety and danger. Service providers must carry out risk assessments, and then have a “duty of care” to take reasonable steps against these risks. This approach was first proposed by Professor Lorna Woods and William Perrin in 2018, drawing on health and safety regulation and the “precautionary principle”, which emerged from German environmentalism in the Eighties, and essentially preaches: first ask about the risks of harm, rather than unforeseen opportunities. Woods and Perrin laid the blame for the internet’s worst features at the door of companies who designed systems to engage ever-larger audiences and make ever-larger profits. They regarded regulation as an opportunity to force those companies to pursue a “harm reduction cycle” — and a more ethical approach to the wider impacts of their products and services.

Woods and Perrin’s proposals, on which the government’s White Paper drew heavily, discussed a wide range of harms, from physical abuse of children to damaging democracy itself. The problem is that, as Lawyer Graham Smith has put it, “speech is not a tripping hazard”. The effects of online content are subjective and social, stemming from an interaction between the post, the person who reads it, and what that person goes on to say or do — to the extent that the law has to take into account the intention of the speaker, writer or poster. The Duty of Care is therefore a completely inappropriate model for improving the impact of technology on our social interactions: somebody responsible for a building has a duty of care to maintain it, to avoid causing injury to visitors, but not to control what those visitors say to one another while in the building. “Duties of care owed by physical occupiers relate to what is done, not said, on their premises,” as Smith puts it.

The kinds of harm described in the draft legislation include very nebulous and subjective harms: psychological distress, or offence caused to a group that is (perceived to be) the target of a joke, for example. This means that putting the onus on technology companies to predict the risk of harm, especially from user-generated material that may not be illegal, is bound to have negative effects. Context, nuance and irony are stripped away on social media. Under the threat of large fines, companies will be incentivised to adopt the precautionary principle and get rid of anything potentially troublesome.

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Many social media platforms already remove, hide or downplay content that contravenes their own rules or tastes, shaping the kinds of conversations that are possible in their online “public square”. The Government’s proposed codes of conduct now demand that these platforms reduce the risk of poorly-defined harms to unspecified people. The “duty to have particular regard to the importance of protecting users’ right to freedom of expression within the law” will be far too vague to enforce.

Some of the problems the Bill has faced are very practical ones. It is much easier to say that children should be protected from seeing inappropriate material online than it is to design and implement a reliable system to keep them from it. Bullying takes many forms that can be hard for other people to recognise, let alone automated systems. But the Bill’s fundamental flaw is the philosophical approach that sees online human interactions primarily in terms of danger and harm: something to be solved through risk assessments and the precautionary principle.

Unfortunately, though this Bill is specifically about the digital world, it reflects some wider trends. We’re too inclined these days to see human interaction as inherently risky — something that needs to be regulated, lest it cause harm. Asking service providers to supervise human exchanges on their platforms, as if they’re dinner ladies in a school playground, is simply a formalisation of our general unease with the unforeseeable nature of human communication.

One of the reasons so many interpersonal interactions moved online, even before the pandemic, was that virtual communication is seen as less risky. Dating via an app is more controllable than walking up to strangers in bars, trying to think of a good opening line despite the possibility of face-to-face rejection (or getting into a conversation you’re not enjoying, and from which you can’t politely extricate yourself).

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Our idea of harm has inflated — a fact reflected by the growing tendency to regard unwelcome disagreement as intrinsically damaging. And if disagreement is seen (and felt) as an attack on identity, those who feel attacked will call for the removal of content they don’t like. Enforcing an online regime driven by the precaution against the risk of harm is therefore either impossible — or the path to destroying any pluralist public sphere.

The idea that the internet can be re-engineered around a driving principle of reducing risk is, in my view, completely unrealistic. But it appeals to policymakers and others who view the offline world as beyond control. Even before the pandemic, the precautionary principle was taking over our politics.

Online life is already less risky than offline. The real world has no off button. Face to face conversations can’t be abandoned without notice or with a BRB emoji. Physical danger of harm, accidental or deliberate, is confined to the offline world, though the online world can facilitate it.

But, like the real world, the virtual one cannot be made completely safe. A risk-free, supervised, inoffensive online world is a fantasy. This confused Bill is a distraction that should be ditched, in favour of law-making that focuses on specific activities — ones that can be defined, detected, and prevented or punished. There is plenty wrong with the form that online society currently takes, but most of it is the kind of social problem that Parliament cannot fix.

Is the anonymous internet really just a breeding-ground for nutters, extremists and people whose hobby is harassing MPs? That’s the fear behind a recent petition, signed by nearly 700,000 people, calling for the Online Safety Bill currently making its way through Parliament to require anyone creating a social media account to provide verifiable ID.

The petition will be debated later this month. Defenders of anonymity will doubtless point to its importance as a free-speech outlet for whistleblowers, or for those who don’t have much public clout and wish to speak their minds in the “cancel culture” age without repercussion. But how much longer will it last? For free speech no longer commands wide institutional or even public support.

That doesn’t mean I’m against online anonymity. Far from it: last week I cracked and created an anonymous “alt”, out of nostalgia for that feeling of wandering the internet’s weird byways without a comet-tail of public selfhood trailing after me. But our growing unease over the accelerating weirdness and perverse incentives of our digitised public conversation needs to move on from a simple focus on “free speech”.

It’s not a coincidence that for some time now, public support for online censorship has grown steadily more overt on both sides of the Atlantic. And how could it be otherwise, when the entire medium of digital debate encourages ideas to adopt the most extreme and lurid form possible in order to cut through?

Digital culture embraces an increasingly voyeuristic online dynamic, a “pornography of the self” — a perverse set of incentives, that encourages already fragile personalities to offer themselves up as an ongoing psychiatric spectacle, in exchange for money and attention. The results may not be sexual, but have a tendency to grow steadily more grotesque. This can converge with actual pornography, and culminate in outright atrocity, as when seven people were arrested this week following discovery of a bizarre cult that live-streamed human castration for paying viewers.

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The ratchet toward this kind of monstrous spectacle is captured by a TV trope named after Simpsons character Ned Flanders. In the early series, Flanders is an amiable and slightly cringe Christian neighbour. But over the programme’s history, Flanders’s character becomes ever more exaggeratedly focused on his faith. The trajectory is so pronounced it’s given rise to a TV trope: “Flanderisation”: whereby a comic character becomes ever more grotesquely defined by a single trait.

Over the last couple of years, pandemic restrictions have virtualised ever more of our personal, social, romantic and professional lives. And with it, something like “flanderisation” has spread. It’s not as though “real life” has disappeared, exactly; but the relation between “real” — that is, non-digital — life and the public discourse has grown steadily more lurid and strange.

It’s not as though Technicolour tabloid headlines are a new phenomenon: the immortal Sun splash FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER ran in 1986. And the term “attention economy” was coined even earlier, by Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon, in a 1971 article. Here, Simon explored how to build organisations in a world saturated by information, arguing that attention is a key bottleneck in human culture. That is, the more abundant information is, the scarcer attention becomes as a resource.

Simon believed that people could learn to allocate their attention “efficiently”, among “the overabundance of information sources that might consume it”. But if information felt over-abundant to Simon in the Seventies, that flood became a tsunami with the arrival of the internet. And with that escalation, we’ve been forced to abandon the idea that there’s anything very efficient, rational or wise about how we allocate our attention.

In the brutal competition for clicks, attention is allocated not by reason or efficiency but flanderisation. You can reach a relatively small audience of serious-minded fellow-travellers by weighing an issue thoughtfully and talking reasonably. But for widespread engagement, you need red meat. Scandal; fights; larger-than-life characters; absurd propositions, bad-faith arguments defended to the death. The more grotesque, simplified and caricatured, the more likely it is to cut through.

In this landscape, topics that have serious ongoing repercussions but resist flanderisation will sink without trace. For example, the mere words “agricultural subsidies” will be enough to send many fingers clicking instantly away — and yet the nuts and bolts of post-Brexit farming policy impact millions.

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But it’s an issue where the devil is all in the detail. Outside specialist publications, the only way to make people notice would be to flanderise — a difficult task in a complex subject. A spate of farm fire-sales or farmer suicides might attract brief attention. You might get a whole ten minutes of discourse out of a proposal to improve biodiversity by reintroducing wolves in Britain. In the meantime, though, complex issues with major long-term ramifications for the whole country, such as topsoil erosion or upland subsidy regimes, remain of little interest to the general public. Our long-term food security, biodiversity and rural economy are poorer for it.

This fundamental failure of seriousness in public conversation extends even to the question of how we conduct that public conversation. Even as the Online Safety Bill has continued its lurch through Parliament, with the contours of our entire digital discourse at stake, the press focused its investigative energy on whether or not Boris Johnson had a birthday party during lockdown.

The Bill contains provisions to tackle a range of negative aspects of digital discourse, including trafficking, online abuse, and child pornography. But like all regulatory issues with systemic impacts, it’s difficult to persuade people to think about the fine detail — even MPs — and the Bill itself has been under fire from all fronts, including the parliamentary committee set up to scrutinise it.

And when it does manage to consider the issues, they are flanderised. And perhaps the central such over-simplification concerns freedom of speech — for in truth the “free speech” ship sailed a while ago. And if widespread public and institutional support for the idea is waning, this has a simple cause: the digital era has turned what was once a generous ocean of ideas into a grotesque Marvel Studios cartoon sea-battle, between flanderised caricature concepts.

In the resulting bare-knuckle war for attention, it’s not reason that wins. Nor is everyone saying that the best, sanest, or most constructive ideas will prevail. Rather, it’s the most lurid (or aggressively state-sponsored) ideas that make it to the surface, a dynamic which does much to account for absurdist identity politics, hyper-polarised Covid discourse and the roiling underbelly of online extremisms alike. In that noisome soup, anons may be nutters or extremists — but sometimes they’re really just people who prefer to wander the weird byways and be left alone.

Because it’s also not just politics that gets flanderised. Having an online presence, as an individual, creates a similar incentive to flanderise ourselves: that is, to turn your online “self” into a caricature, based on compulsively oversharing whichever features of your personality are the most attention-grabbing. And while this pressure affects everyone, it’s still greater — as I’ve discovered — if you post under a “real” identity.

For young women, that might mean incentives to garner online attention by posting sexualised selfies. For those not blessed with looks or opinions, but willing to invite voyeurism, another option is a warped version of the common human bonding mechanism of sharing personal information: pornography of the self. Those who embrace this online are often women. But the result is less bonding or intimacy than flanderisation: a kind of ritual self-humiliation for clicks.

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If you have the stomach for it, a glance at how “e-girls’ are discussed on the lolcow website gives a sense of how such compulsive over-sharing often results less in friendliness or bonding than in cruelty and objectification.

In turn, this toxic dynamic (rightly) fuels concerns about online abuse — as well as calls for online anonymity to be banned. The petition to include provisions outlawing anons will be debated later this month; will it rehash the same old free speech ground again? If it does, we can expect it to be even more reductive and polarised than last time: because the real danger we face isn’t restrictions on speech.