In the closing chapters of Thrones of the Invisible, I argue that whatever we place in the highest place is revealed less by what we say than by what we allow to consume our days. My proposal there is deliberately plain: the deepest measure of a life is not how high a person climbs in an external order but how far they grow inward — in wisdom, patience, compassion, the ability to love. I call this inner progress, and I insist it cannot float free of material conditions. It needs what I named outer balance: food, shelter, rest, dignity, and one condition modern life hides almost completely from view — unbroken time and undivided attention. "If every hour is monetised, every silence invaded, every glance pulled toward alerts and manufactured urgency," I wrote, "the inner life thins." Limits on the deliberate harvesting of attention are not a comfort for the few. They are a precondition for anyone to become fully human.

I bring that vision to the news of this month because, for the first time in my adult life, governments across the democratic world are acting as though children's attention were something worth protecting by law. I welcome the instinct. I distrust almost everything about the execution.

A wave that crossed every region at once

The timing is remarkable. On 22 July, both chambers of the French parliament passed a sweeping ban on social media for children under fifteen, the first blanket ban of its kind in the European Union, bundled together with a ban on phones in schools. Nine days earlier, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had told a Brussels press conference that the EU needed "age-appropriate restrictions," citing an expert panel that recommended supervised, time-limited access under thirteen and no screens at all under three. Denmark has agreed to bar under-fifteens; Spain, in February, moved to lift the threshold to sixteen with age checks its ministers described as "not just checkboxes, but real barriers that work"; Portugal has approved its own under-sixteen legislation.

The Anglosphere is moving in parallel. Australia's world-first under-sixteen ban took effect in December and has since become a cautionary tale: a July study found that testers opened fifty accounts and were asked for age proof on almost none, while an earlier report showed roughly seventy per cent of children kept their accounts. Undeterred, New Zealand's Prime Minister Christopher Luxon confirmed his government will legislate before the election, and Britain is preparing what commentators call an "Australia plus" version while investigating whether TikTok's age checks work at all.

Asia and Latin America are not spectators. South Korea has written a classroom phone ban into national law, effective this coming school year. Brazil's Digital Statute of the Child and Adolescent — the Digital ECA — came into force in March, demanding "effective and reliable" age verification and threatening fines in the tens of millions. Only in South Africa did I hear a different note: Communications Minister Solly Malatsi argued in July that his country should deepen digital literacy among parents and schools rather than mimic what he called unenforceable age bans.

Where the coverage agrees, and where it quietly diverges

Read across a dozen countries and the convergence is striking. Almost every press treatment — French, Danish, Korean, Australian, Brazilian — opens from the same premise: the child is the problem to be managed, and the lever is the age at which access is switched on. The disagreements that make headlines are disagreements about the number on the dial. Thirteen in Brussels, fifteen in Paris and Copenhagen, sixteen in Madrid, Lisbon, Canberra and Wellington. The debate is framed as a contest between protection and freedom, with each government presenting a firmer threshold as a firmer act of care.

The divergences are more revealing than the numbers. In France, the left-wing bloc France Unbowed opposed the bill on the ground that it would end online anonymity and was probably unenforceable. In South Korea, the more progressive teachers' union declined to endorse the classroom ban, warning it might infringe students' rights. In Spain, even Telegram's founder warned that mandatory age checks hand the state greater control over what people may read. And in New Zealand, critics noted the uncomfortable truth that any workable method of verifying a child's age will, in practice, drift toward digital identity for everyone. South Africa's minister put the enforcement problem most bluntly: most platforms have no local legal presence, and many children use an adult's device anyway.

The throne no one is naming

Here is where my book's argument cuts against the whole cross-country consensus. Every one of these laws regulates the child. Almost none of them regulates the extraction. The business model that harvests a young person's attention for profit — the recommendation engine tuned to maximise time-on-platform — is left almost entirely intact. We are, in effect, rationing access to the slot machine while leaving the machine, its payout schedule, and its owners beyond question.

In the chapters of Thrones of the Invisible on algorithmic power, I described a teenager opening her phone and feeling that she is "wandering freely through news, jokes, rumours, music, and adverts, while an unseen system quietly narrows the corridor through which her attention can move." I argued that earlier forms of divine power built temples and cathedrals to gather attention and mould belief, and that today "the feed on a phone often serves a similar function, and code plays the role of stage manager." The feed is the altar of our age. What these laws do is forbid children to enter the cathedral until they are fifteen, while leaving the cathedral standing, its incentives untouched, waiting for the birthday that admits them.

This is the recurring move I traced through the whole history of divine power: an order that manufactures a wound and then sells us the management of its symptoms. The mental-health harm is real — France's own public-health watchdog concluded that social media damages teenagers, especially girls — but in my chapter on the medicalisation of struggle I warned against treating a structural injury as a private condition. When a system is engineered to capture attention and a child cannot look away, the honest question is not "how do we keep the child out?" but "why do we permit anyone to build a machine like this in the first place, for children or for the rest of us?"

Who bears the cost

My book offers a small instrument for exactly this moment — four questions I ask of any design: What is happening to the person? What conditions of attention, dependence, or predictability is it creating? Who bears the cost of its efficiency? What god does it really serve — visibility, or control; care, or capture?

Apply the third question to the age-verification wave and the picture darkens. To prove a child is a child, a system must in principle check everyone. Across more than two dozen United States jurisdictions this already means uploading government identity documents or submitting to facial scans before entering large parts of the internet; privacy advocates rightly call these surveillance systems sold as child protection. The European Union is piloting a cleaner path — a wallet using zero-knowledge proofs that returns only an "over-18" signal — and I hope it prevails. But the political gravity is toward the cruder version, in which the price of protecting the young is a permanent identity layer binding every adult's name to every site they visit. That cost falls on the domestic-abuse survivor, the journalist, the dissenter — precisely the people whose anonymity is a public good.

So we arrive at the pattern my book predicts. Faced with a genuine harm caused by an attention economy we have refused to confront, we reach not for the balance that would limit harvesting at its source, but for a new machinery of sorting and identification — the very apparatus of predict, rank, and record whose expansion I spent chapters warning against. The remedy risks extending the disease.

I do not think the answer is to do nothing. Outer balance is real work, and South Korea's quieter reform — protecting the shared, phone-free hours of a classroom so that attention can rest and thicken — is closer to my vision than any national ban, because it changes a condition rather than merely locking a gate. But the deeper task is the one no parliament this month has been willing to name. Before we decide at what age a child may enter, we should ask by what right anyone is permitted to harvest a human being's attention for profit at all. That is the throne behind the throne. Until we question it, we will keep raising the drawbridge while leaving the castle exactly as it is — and calling it care.