Feeding the Beast You're Furious At

For the first time in human history, not in a generation, not in a decade, but right now, in real time, adults are not arriving ahead of children. They are arriving alongside them. Shaped by the same systems. Pulled by the same currents in architecture that was never designed to slow us down, never built to make us think, only to make us respond.

The algorithms did not come for the young first. They came for all of us.

What they have levelled is not just our attention. What they levelled was the very ground that wisdom is supposed to stand on. The hard-won understanding that a parent, a teacher, a community elder was meant to carry ahead. That understanding does not seem to be surviving the feeds.

This past week, I watched instead of commenting, in two cases I remembered what my grandmother always used to say "silence is the loudest scream" not because I had nothing to say, but because I wanted to run my own quiet experiment. I wanted to see what happened when someone who knows this system simply… refused to feed it.

I watched how people wrote. How they commented. How they performed their outrage in clean paragraphs and sharp takes, feeding a machine that was built to be fed exactly that. More heat, more division, more outrage, more clicks dressed up as conviction. And I thought…they don't see it. They are doing the very thing they are furious about kids being exposed to, and they cannot see it, because the system was designed so that you cannot see it from inside it.

Social media does not fear your anger. Social media runs on your anger. Every furious post, every pile-on, every thread that begins with "this is not okay" and ends with three hundred replies going nowhere. This is not advocacy, education, or resistance. It is just more revenue for big tech.

And so I found myself in a peculiar and quietly devastating place. I was watching the people who are supposed to guide the next generation through the fog, standing in the very same fog, squinting at the same uncertain light that came this week in the form of court cases, hoping someone somewhere knows the way out. That is not a failure of parenting, teaching, advocacy or regulation. This is what it looks like when an entire civilisation gets disrupted faster than it can adapt. And still — STILL — we pretend this is a problem we can shout our way out of.

Listen to the language. Fix it. Ban it. Age-gate it. Stop them now. Not good enough. What about our children? Sack them. Sue them. Ban them. Resign now. Do something. Do more. Do it now. Why hasn't anyone done anything? I can't believe no one is doing anything.

It sounds like strength. It feels like control. But what it actually exposes is something far more uncomfortable. A population so thoroughly trained by these systems that it now genuinely believes visibility equals impact. That outrage equals leverage. That posting equals progress. That if you share it hard enough, caption it right, and tag the right twenty people at the bottom of a LinkedIn post, something will change.

Newsflash! Not one regulator and their team in Canberra, Brussels, or Washington is going to look up from their desk and think: oh god, we'd better move faster. They are not.

The outrage isn't just ineffective, it's being shared on the very platforms that caused the problem in the first place. The adult social media bizarre love triangle triangle of Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. The same architecture. The same engagement loops. Similar algorithms deciding who sees it, when they see it, and whether it travels at all based not on its truth or its urgency, but on how much heat and outrage it generates.

You are not disrupting the machine. You are powering it.

People have been trained by these very platforms to believe that the loudest response is the most powerful one. To perform urgency in public rather than build it quietly in the places that actually matter. Trained by the same systems they are now screaming through.

Here is what a platform optimised for engagement has done to our collective ability to respond to a crisis. It has made us extraordinarily good at expressing that something is wrong, and almost completely incapable of doing the slow, unsexy, undocumented work of actually fixing it. There are no likes for that work. No shares. No reach. And so the machine rolls on, funded in part by the very outrage it inspired, while somewhere a quarterly earnings report looks absolutely fine.

So what does move the needle?

What moves the needle is boring. Unglamorous. Chronically underreported and almost impossible to make go viral. It is the parent who sits down with their kid, not to confiscate the phone, but to get genuinely curious about what's happening inside it. It is the teacher who redesigns not the homework, but the thinking and who starts asking students not what they found, but how they found it, and who told them it was true. It is the community that decides, together, quietly, without a hashtag, that they are going to do something differently starting Tuesday. It is the regulator who gets one well-researched brief from one calm, credible voice and does more with that than with ten thousand comments on a petition that auto-populated with a single click. It is the advocate who stops performing for the algorithm and starts building the relationships that legislation is actually made of. Slow relationships. Undramatic ones. The kind that don't make good content and have far more impact than bouncing off the walls of whatever echo chamber the algorithm has built around them.

The children we are trying to protect are watching how we navigate this. They are watching whether we practise what we preach. Whether we can hold complexity without collapsing into a comment and if the adults in their lives are capable of something the algorithm cannot monetise. Patience. Restraint. The long game.

This is what I keep coming back to. The thing that stays with me at the end of every conversation, every keynote in Europe or Australia, every late night spent reading the research so you don't have to and in every email of distress from a school that knows, with a certainty born of hard experience, that they will need support, and that when that moment comes, my team will be there. The children are not waiting for us to have all the answers. They never were. What they are waiting for — what they have always waited for — for the adults in their lives to be honest about the questions like I don't fully understand this either, but I am paying attention. I am not looking away. I am here, and I am thinking, and I am not going to outsource my concern to a comment thread and hope for the best.

That is what guidance actually looks like in a world that is moving faster than wisdom can travel. Not certainty or control. Not a parent who has read every warning, installed every filter and monitoring app, and still has no idea what their child is actually experiencing behind the screen. But a person. A present, curious, humble, sometimes frightened person. One who chooses, day after day, to stay in the conversation even when it's uncomfortable.

Actually, especially when it's uncomfortable.

Because the most dangerous thing we can do right now is nothing, and the second most dangerous thing we can do is mistake adding to the outrage train for it.