This week, Josh MacAlister – a Labour MP who was formerly a teacher – will introduce a private members bill that is full of good intentions. Children are "doom scrolling" for hours a day, and it needs fixing. Pepe Di'lasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said: "Smartphones and the instant access they provide to harmful content is nothing short of a public health emergency for children and young people."
This is all true, of course. Many young people are miserable and made more so by their constant scrolling. You're just a click away from being misled, bullied, traumatised, and whatever damaging behaviour you might like. The internet is terrifying.
But it is not purely terrifying. That is a statement that feels at once controversial and obviously true, which is what tends to happen when our public discourse has run away with itself. Here's another statement that it shouldn't feel quite so outrageous to say: I like my phone, and I like what it has done for me.
As someone at roughly the young end of millennials, the internet was a kind of known but rare thing in my youth; a common experience through computers as a teenager; a totally monopolising, omnipresent force in my 20s. I have never known a world without the internet, though both its content and form has changed so radically over the time I've been using it that it's hard to recognise it as the same thing.
But however it has changed, the internet has always been a fairly free space; if you want to see something, you can find it. Early on, that mostly meant horrible stuff, and I have to be frank seen more people die than anyone ever should. Now that horrible stuff has been joined by more misleading information, empowered by both technical breakthroughs and the increasing geopolitical power of the web. But it remains very easy to see horrible stuff, even if you don't want to.
That of course is where the instinct for crackdowns comes from. People should not see this stuff. But even if the instinct is correct, the solutions are often so heavy-handed and wide-ranging that they are unlikely to make any difference.
Both critics and supporters of crackdowns are fond of pointing to the fact that this sort of thing has happened before. As soon as the novel appeared, there were suggestions it was making people stupid and licentious. (Those people were largely the women who were now able to engage in culture as they couldn't before.) Since then we've had panics about everything from telephones to televisions.
Critics of regulation says that shows that those technologies can be put to good use, though that argument often ignores the regulation that actually ensured they were, such as copyright and regulation of the TV airwaves. Supporters of regulation say that shows that we can successfully regulate those technologies. They are probably both right.
But the really useful historical analog might not really be technology at all but the outside world. A couple of years ago, research from Save The Children showed that only one in four of today's kids play out regularly on the street, compared with their grandparents generation.* But it wasn't technology they cited: the study pointed to traffic, the fears of parents and anxiety about upsetting neighbours by making noise. If the study is to be believed, then we have made the simple act of playing out the subject of its own social clamp down.
The response of course should be a kind of cautious optimism about what awaits us when we play out, or online. There are threats out there, of course, and knowing about them is key to staying safe from them. But there is great joy out there too, and if you don't know that then you could miss that entirely.
The real trouble is that if you make the internet into a place that feels only bad, then only bad people will want to be there. We see the results of that every day, on Twitter, a place that feels bad and gets worse as a result. "The internet is full of bad people," we say, and then act surprised that people go on there and feel like one.
At times, this is generally terrifying. We spend so much time decrying the bad influence of internet users such as Andrew Tate, for instance, that it can be hard to find actually healthy content for young men – and then act surprised that they're going to the place that everyone directs them to. It might well be that there is a dearth of such content – but that's a real problem that needs fixing with investment, creativity and thoughtfulness, not castigating.
What's more, we spend so much time telling off children for using the internet that we fail to look back at ourselves. Adults are at horrible risk of disinformation, especially those old enough to have had the luck or misfortune of not growing up with the internet. Many of the accusations about doomscrolling can really feel like an admission.
I'll say it again: I love my phone, and the internet that lives inside of it. So much of it disgusting and unhealthy. But the internet has great potential, and if we don't think about that sometimes then we risk throwing it away.
* The survey relied on recollections from those older people, which may well skew towards claiming to have been outside more than they were.
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