This is one of those inflection points in tech history that should be lighting up every radar… product, policy, legal, safety, ethical...and yet, the conversation remains surface-level. A few months ago, OpenAI spent $6.5 billion acquiring Jony Ive’s design firm to build a screenless AI device, with the stated ambition of shipping 100 million units out of the gate. What they're designing has no screen, no keyboard, no swiping, no scrolling. It’s not a phone, not a laptop, no

What 1,000 Children Just Taught Us About the Future of Education By Kirra Pendergast When we talk about education, we default to the tangible. Infrastructure, teacher shortages, curriculum reform, and access. It’s a language shaped by bureaucracy and funding models, not by the children who live inside those systems. Something extraordinary happened when over a thousand preschoolers from ten countries were asked how they would improve education. Their answers cut through poli

The screenshot below isn’t clickbait. It’s not even rare. It’s a mother’s real post to a support group on Facebook that was sent to me (published with permission) , desperately surfacing the quiet horror she discovered while scrolling through her daughter’s phone, a place she had no intention of invading until her gut said something wasn’t right. What she found wasn’t a shady internet forum or a toxic YouTube rabbit hole. It was ChatGPT. And it was playing coach. Her daughter

These images of “Big sis Billie” were generated using Meta AI on Meta’s Facebook Messenger service, in response to a Reuters reporter’s prompt: “Send a picture of yourself.” Images by Meta AI, via REUTERS. The girl was eight years old. The bot called her “curvy.” That sentence alone should be enough to shut down a product. To summon hearings. To spark something resembling consequence. But in 2025, inside Meta’s empire, it was nothing more than a line item in a document. Just

Trigger Warning: This piece discusses suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and substance abuse involving minors. If you or someone you love is struggling, please don’t wait. Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14 US: National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 988 UK: Samaritans 116 123 Kids Helpline (Australia, under 25s): 1800 55 1800 Beyond Blue (Mental health support, Australia): 1300 22 4636 In a controlled test, researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate posed as a 13

A scatter of sideways glances, twitching grins, half-swallowed laughs. Not cruel, not even overtly dismissive just buoyed by the comfort of assuming that this was a problem for someone else. This is what sexual extortion talks often look like in schools. It is not indifference. It is the luxury of thinking “it won’t happen to me”. When I told them that boys are now at increasing risk particularly boys their age, the smiles faltered but only slightly. The statistics sit like f

When Big Tech CEOs speak, they don’t shout, they soothe. They turn risk into “connection,” danger into “innovation,” and reframe your fear as nostalgia, convincing you that a child’s time on an unregulated platform is just like your rainy-day phone calls as a kid. The real trick? They don’t have to convince you directly. They’ve already convinced many cyber safety educators, flown in, funded, and fed the same engineered reassurance until they repeat it as truth. It’s not a

If you would like to book a 45-minute "Preparing for the 16+ Age Delay Webinar and Q&A" with Kirra Pendergast for your school community, please book today, as places are limited. $597+GST Resources provided. Hit reply to this email. Why This Matters In response to growing global concerns about online harms, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Reddit, X/Twitter, and YouTube will need to have age-verification measures to restrict access for users under 16 from accessing thes

The line between what schools know and what they do just got a legal reckoning - by Andrea Turner Ctrl+Shft Legal Advisor In July 2025, the NSW Court of Appeal handed down a decision that should have halted every school board meeting, inbox scroll, and policy review in the country. In State of New South Wales v T2 [2025] NSWCA , the court confirmed something that educators, lawyers, and families have been circling for years: the duty of care held by schools does not end at th

We’re living through a moment where digital instincts haven't caught up with digital reality. A moment where a feature can feel like a private diary, but act like a press release. And most people have no idea it's happening. ChatGPT’s “Share” button is one of those design sleights-of-hand that seems harmless. Elegant. Convenient. You’ve just had a conversation with the AI—maybe it helped you draft a policy, unpack a trauma, or name the thing you couldn't say out loud. It wrap

When things go wrong online, it is 24/7, it cuts deeper, lasts longer, and follows them home. Whether your child is being bullied, or you’ve just found out they’re the one doing the bullying, it requires a new kind of parenting: calm, connected, and cyber-literate. Cyberbullying is not just mean comments or name-calling online anymore. It’s evolved into a spectrum of harm including: Doxxing : Publishing someone’s private information online Deepfake manipulation : AI-generated

When a child makes a catastrophic mistake online, the first question people ask is always the same. Where were the parents? It’s a question soaked in judgment. It implies negligence. Weak boundaries. A lack of discipline. It lands like a hammer on mothers who monitor every message, on fathers who’ve delayed the phone longer than most, the parents who said no to social but yes to a phone for safety reasons. It hits hard on caregivers who’ve done everything right, until the

Last week, like so many others, I sat with the weight of the news. The devastating revelations of abuse in early childhood education centres across Australia weren’t just shocking, they were heartbreaking. But what struck me most was what didn’t make headlines. The quiet architecture of risk. The systems that allowed harm to go unnoticed, not out of malice, but out of assumption. I did what I always do in moments like this, I went down a rabbit hole of trying to find the fixa

We need to discuss the language we use when referring to digital harm, abuse and crimes. Because right now, in schools, in courtrooms, in headlines and hashtags, we’re using a word that hides the very thing we’re trying to expose. “Sextortion.” It rolls off the tongue like a cousin to “sexting.” It sounds digital, flirty, fleeting or a misstep, maybe. But it doesn’t sound like what it actually is: a form of abhorrent sexual violence. A crime of coercion and blackmail designe

This is not a story about technology. This is a story about neglect. Over the weekend I read an article in The Wall Street Journal that you can read here: https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/sextortion-scam-teens-apple-imessage-app-159e82a8?st=TWuAaq&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink In three separate homes, in three different US states, three families are now living with the unimaginable. Their sons were targeted by sexual extortion scammers. Strangers who knew exactly w