Lunarpunk vs SolarPunk. Very worth thinking upon.
sister_sam
sister_sam@primal.net
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Voluntaryist, privacy nut, pissed off would be radical optimist. Software architect, developer, "hey you" by trade.
The world of AI, robots, automation is very two-faced. On one hand there is all the excitement about purported hyper-abundance just around the corner and life of plenty for all. OTOH we act as our evolved psychology leads us to that Scarcity is the base reality. So if each individual doesn't scratch just the right itch that won't be replaced overnight then so sad, too bad for them. On the one hand the big beautiful dream and on the other hand complete uncaring can't afford to care because there is not enough, never enough and well it is too bad. This is a very explosive juxtaposition. It is a deep problem how humans overcome their evolved deep expectation of scarcity and do it fast enough. Otherwise we go out of our way to create scarcity even where there is abundance either fully present or easily in reach.
How the "sausage" of "protect the kids" is made the excuse to KYC everyone.
The Gospel of the Anxious Generation
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment “kids and phones” stopped being a parental gripe and started sounding like a public health emergency.
But if you trace the lineage of the panic, you land on a familiar face: Jonathan Haidt, the respectable father figure of the screen-time apocalypse.
Haidt didn’t invent the idea that social media was melting teenage brains. He just made it sound like science. The Anxious Generation took a half-formed cultural suspicion, phones bad, kids sad, and gave it a bar graph and a bibliography.
Before the book, “social media addiction” was the kind of thing you heard on morning shows, in lawsuits filed by opportunistic attorneys, or in the worried sighs of parents trying to confiscate an iPhone.
After the book, it started to sound definitive, like gravity. That transformation mattered.
Haidt’s pitch was simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker: smartphones plus social media rewired childhood and caused a mental health crisis. The argument ran on emotional fuel, addiction, loss of control, kids as collateral damage in a digital arms race.
He described tech platforms as if they were running a lab experiment on adolescence. Even when he stopped short of saying children were chemically dependent, the imagery did the work for him. Kids were described as “hooked,” “trapped,” “compelled.”
The appeal was obvious. It gave parents and policymakers a villain you could hold in your hand. The messy, complicated mix of parenting, culture, and economics collapsed into one easy story: Silicon Valley pushed digital heroin on our children.
Once you buy that framing, the policy prescriptions practically write themselves. If it’s an addiction, you need enforcement, not education. Bans, not guidance. Monitoring, not trust.
The debate gave way to a crusade.
Then the book got its miracle: Bill Gates liked it and openly promoted it.
Unfortunately, when Microsoft founder and digital ID proponent Gates calls a book “important,” it moves consensus as well as copies.

Reclaim The Net
The Gospel of the Anxious Generation
The myth of “social media addiction” has become a convenient moral shield for expanding digital ID systems, turning concern for kids’ safety ...