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).    

 

 

Free the Probe-Heads! Once More into the Uncanny Valley with Daniel Silver

Daniel Silver: Angel Dew (2024)

Statuario Altissimo marble and bronze (172 x 66 x 104 cm)  

frithstreetgallery.com

 

Beyond the face lies an altogether different inhumanity - free the probe-heads!

 

 

I. 

 

One of the things I like about Daniel Silver's Uncanny Valley exhibition at the Frith Street Gallery, is that it has given me a new appreciation for the astonishing beauty of that metamorphic rock formed from limestone or dolomite (and composed of calcite crystals) that the ancient Greeks called mármaros, with reference to its gleaming character, and that we know today as marble. 

 

Previously, I've expressed concerns with this material long-favoured by sculptors keen to work within a Classical tradition; concerns mostly of a political nature to do with marble's high-ranking status within what Barthes terms a hierarchy of substances [a].  

 

But, after seeing Silver's new works up close, it becomes impossible not to admire the grandeur of the marble sourced from an old Italian stone yard - particularly as Silver essentially leaves the rock as quarried, only lightly treating the surface or making sculptural marks upon it. 

 

Even without the bronze heads that sit atop them, one could spend many hours happily contemplating these rocks and their geo-aesthetic qualities.

 

But, talking of the metal alloy heads ...

 

 

II.

I'm pleased that Silver seems to privilege the head over the face; that he leaves the latter inscrutable and unsmiling. Because, like Deleuze and Guattari, I have problems with the face which has long held a privileged and determining place within Western art and Western metaphysics in general [b].

 

We like to think our face is individual and unique. But it isn't: it's essentially a type of social machine that overcodes not just the head, but the entire body, like a monstrous hood, ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance. 

 

The smile and all our other familiar facial expressions are merely types of conformity with the dominant reality. If men and women still have a destiny, it is to escape the face, becoming imperceptible. 

 

And how do we do that? 

 

Not by returning to animality, nor even returning to the head prior to facialisation. We find a way, rather, to release what Deleuze and Guattari term têtes chercheuses ...

 

 

III.

 

The primitive head is beautiful but faceless: the modern face is produced "only when the head ceases to be part of the body ..." and is overcoded, as we say above, by the face as social machine in a process "worthy of Doctor Moreau: horrible and magnificent" [c].  

 

But we can't go back: neo-primitivism is not the answer. As Deleuze and Guattari note, renegade westerners will "always be failures at playing African or Indian [...] and no voyage to the South Seas, however arduous, will allow us to [...] lose our face" [188].

 

But perhaps art can help us here: not as an end in itself existing for its own sake, but "as a tool for blazing life lines, in other words, all of those real becomings that are produced only in art, and all those [...] positive deterritorializations that never reterritorialize on art, but instead sweep it away with them toward the realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless" [187].

 

In other words, perhaps art can liberate probe-heads that "dismantle the strata in their wake, break through the walls of significance, pour out of the holes of subjectivity" [190] and steer inhuman forces and flows along lines of creative flight. 

 

 

IV.

 

To be honest, I'm not entirely convinced that Daniel Silver is on board with this project; he's a self-confessed Freudian after all and what we're proposing here is very much anti-Oedipus. Ultimately, I fear there's something a little Allzumenschliches about his vision. 

 

But, you never know: he clearly finds heads fascinating and there's definitely the promise of something vital in his work; something that "exists between the human and non-human, intertwining rocks with bodies, minerals with flesh, embodying multiple temporalities" [d].

 

 

Notes

 

[a] See the post dated 1 December 2012 - Why I Love Mauro Perucchetti's Jelly Baby Family - click here. And see Roland Barthes, 'Plastic', in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Paladin, 1973), pp. 104-106, where the phrase 'hierarchy of substances' is used.  

[b] See the post dated 13 September 2013 - The Politics of the Face - click here.

[c] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 170. Future page references to this text will be given directly in the post. 

[d] Paula Zambrano, Curator of Programmes at the Contemporary Art Society, writing in a short piece posted on 6 December 2024: click here. 

Readers might be interested in an earlier post published on Daniel Silver's Uncanny Valley exhibition  - From Victory to Stone (17 Dec 2024): click here. 

 

This post is for Poppy Sebire (Director of the Frith Street Gallery) for kindly sharing her insights into Daniel Silver's artwork.