The UK Government's Social Media Ban For Under-16s - What Would Mark Fisher Think?

Image credit: Channel 4 News

 

 

I. 

 

The big news story of the day: the UK government has announced a social media ban for under-16s. It will be introduced in early 2027. 

 

Keeping children off social media is the best way to keep them safe online, said Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, adding that he wants to give children back their childhoods. 

 

Hearing this made me smile, as I had just finished reading Mark Fisher explain how children know more about technology than parents, teachers, or politicians and their early encounter with cybernetic systems immunises them against much of the moral-metaphysical bullshit that the adult world still lives by and seeks to enforce. 

 

Children, says Fisher, "increasingly live in a Gothic Materialist chaosmos" [1] and, in many ways, they "occupy the frontier-zones of capitalism, operating as probe-heads in what, for adults, is the future" [2].

 

Indeed, it might be argued that the average thirteen-year-old has a better understanding of hyperreality than Starmer and his entire front bench put together. 

 

 

II.

 

Of course, I'm quoting Fisher writing back in the day when he was part of Nick Land's Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and it was common practice to think of children as probe-heads [têtes-chercheuses] rather than innocents in need of safeguarding.  

 

He may well have changed his tune after becoming a father and I don't pretend to know for certain what the late Mark Fisher's likely view of the UK government's under-16 social media ban would have been. 

 

However, while Fisher was deeply critical of smartphones - calling them the ultimate tools of capitalist distraction - one strongly suspects he would oppose a top-down state ban on social media and insist that the mental health crisis of young people - hedonic depression - is part of a wider problem than the use of TikTok and Instagram. 

 

What's more, Fisher also explicitly warned against the temptation to retreat from technological modernity. Simply trying to force a withdrawal treats the problem as a failure of young individuals and parents, rather than recognising that cyberspace in its present form has been designed to capture and commodify human desire. Ultimately a legal ban is a vain attempt to mandate a nostalgic, pre-digital childhood that no longer exists, instead of imagining (and attempting to build) a post-capitalist internet. 

 

Further - as many critics are already pointing out - to enforce an outright ban for under-16s would oblige social media platforms to adopt age-verification tools, including biometric facial scanning and ID uploads. Fisher would view this as a sinister expansion of the digital panopticon. In other words, instead of curbing the power of corporate tech giants, a ban forces citizens to hand over even more personal data simply to prove they are over sixteen years of age, reinforcing mechanisms of surveillance and control. 

 

And finally, for all the harm smartphones may cause, Fisher also recognised that social media is where modern communication, community, and political dissent happen. By completely shutting out under-16s from virtual public squares and denying them the chance to collectively express ideas and organise, the state effectively de-politicizes them and places them under state curfew. 

 

Again, as I say above, Fisher would most probably argue that the solution to algorithmic harm is not a retreat to a model of the past and banning children from the online world, but seizing the digital platforms from corporate tech monopolies - revolution is what is called for, not ill thought through bans.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (Zer0 Books, 2025), p. 222. 

 

[2] Ibid., p. 223. 

 

 

This post is a (slightly revised) extract from a forthcoming post on chapter four of Mark Fisher's Flatline Constructs (2025).