It’s a testament to modern British culture that within hours of the watershed social media ban being announced, we had already homed in on a viral soundbite to capture the mood. Like Brenda from Bristol’s horror at a snap election – ‘not another one?!’ – the despair of a generation found its spokesperson, this time in the dry humour of a teenage girl. Quizzed by a BBC reporter on what she’ll do with her spare nine hours at the weekend now that TikTok is for the chopper, the Lancashire schoolgirl quickly droned, ‘stare at a wall’.
Yes, I know. A think-piece on the social media ban nearly three weeks after it was announced hardly seems well-timed – much like the proposed law itself. When the outgoing PM set out his stall for the landmark legislation, following months of hesitation, consultation, and capitulation, the reaction was understandably polarised. 90% of parents back the ban, while an almighty despair could be heard from the collective population of under 16s. To me, whether there should or shouldn’t be a ban, is besides the point. The point is there should have been one in place for decades.
Regardless, that viral moment has stuck with me, far more than you might expect. Staring at a wall is a byword for boredom. Whether the Lancashire teen wants to pursue a career in standup comedy or painter-decorating, her wry remark is one many can recognise. But there’s also a deep psychological, metaphorical power to her words. Because there’s hardly a more powerful symbol than a wall.
Walls are how we carve things up, mark out boundaries. They also give structure.
While our politicians have been tearing their hair out over borders, the walls to a nation, the internet generation have been erecting and demolishing their own.
Indeed, children have always treated their bedrooms as sovereign territory. Adorned with posters and pictureframes, a bedroom wall is one of the earliest canvases of identity we have, while pencil notches mark our growth towards the kitchen ceiling.
I grew up at a time where those walls started to get thinner – or so it seemed. Coming home from school, I could reunite with my friends on group chats and game lobbies. Who needed to stay over, when we could stay online?
Of course, walls are also profoundly psychological structures. We need our own boundaries to define ourselves. Roger Waters, the lead songwriter and bassist for Pink Floyd, built the band’s landmark rock opera The Wall on the concept of an artist whose traumatic upbringing has erected barriers to the outside world. At the same time, Waters’ wall represents collective conformity. If you’re not part of the wall – ‘another brick’ – you’re trapped on the wrong side of it, an outcast.
I have an odd relationship with that song. The Cambridge High School for Boys was obviously an unhappy time for the Pink Floyd mastermind. His experience of abusive teachers and bullying peers continued to haunt him for decades, later fuelling his melancholic, rage-fuelled songwriting. Nearly half a century later, I found myself at what is now Hills Road Sixth Form College completing my A-levels. Well, most of the time. Barely at the half-way point in lower-sixth, Boris Johnson made his fateful TV address, plunging the nation into lockdown.
The college vacated the red-brick complex in south Cambridge and set up shop on Microsoft Teams. While Roger Waters had clung to his poetry and ducked between the classrooms, I carved out a portion of the dinner table and my day to do my schoolwork – alone.
Even when restrictions eased, the college continued a 50:50 policy with one week on site, one week at home, until we finished. I was there, but I was not there. The hybrid way of being I had toyed with as a young teen, where playground games continued on shared servers and chatrooms, had suddenly become the norm.
There’s lots about that time that I remember fondly, nostalgically, even. For a start, I began teaching myself video editing – a skill which, five years later, has formed the basis of my dream career. I spent hours building and exploring with my friends on a Minecraft Realm, constructing a replica of our old school for no explicable reason. Freedom without became freedom within.
For this period of state-mandated solitude, culture retreated indoors. It moulded itself to the edges of our screens. Square-eyes hardly seemed a credible warning anymore – this was how you made do, now. Many people I knew treated this time as an extension of a lifestyle they had already mastered. Spending nearly half of your waking moments interacting with a screen and the digital world taking up more time as an interface for reality than reality itself used to sound like a feature of dystopia. Now, it’s a norm.
Attempting to regulate the shared otherworld that whole generations have grown up within, this late in the game, is like drawing a boundary around a landmass that splintered and drifted centuries ago.
Of course the normalisation of this digital world as just an extension of our own has not gone unnoticed. Though we’re hardly facing a neo-Luddite retaliation, the conversation around downing phones and limiting our screen time has become louder, from which the social media ban can be seen to follow. These are conscious, active reactions to a way of life that, being artificial, can feel profoundly unnatural.
But there are unconscious reactions, too, echoing across the very platforms themselves. The resurgence of brainrot, since its coinage in the 1800s, can be attributed to internet users growing weary of the mindnumbing content-consumerism they’ve grown addicted to. Gen Z humour, from what I can still comprehend of it, is defined by irony and postmodern irreverence. At some point in the last couple of decades, the fourth wall, the dividing line between art and audience, fell like the Iron Curtain. Through its breach streams a flood of nonsense, brainrot, that is as inane as it is transgressive. Meme culture articulates a reverence, as well as a disgust, towards the viral culture it thrives on.
The success of 21-year-old Kane Parsons’ film Backrooms, a horror movie set in an endless netherworld of bland corridors, might largely be down to its masterful manipulation of that surprisingly primal fear: walls that have no end. The backrooms are familiar, yet unfathomably large and uncharted. They capture the creeping dread of being online, in a space that gives you free rein but leaves you inexplicably isolated from the rest of the world.
Arising from the anonymous lobbies of the internet – first a post on 4chan, then Reddit, then YouTube – the ‘Backrooms’ legend plays on this creeping suspicion that a screen is a portal we don’t truly understand. One enters the Backrooms by ‘no-clipping’, slipping unconsciously out of reality. A concept derived from video game glitches, it’s depicted in the film by the protagonist stepping formlessly through a basement wall and into the uncanny expanses of the otherworld.
With social media set to switch off for Britain’s young people, that screen will return to a black mirror – a wall. Years of unregulated internet access has created a sprawling interior with a structure of its own. Politicians welcomed ‘innovation’, turning a blind eye to the development of harmful algorithms and cannibalistic techno-capitalism. Upon leaving office, many of them like Nick Clegg went to work for Zuckerberg’s Meta – one of a host of companies now blamed for society’s fragmentation.
We, meanwhile, made ourselves at home in the House that Mark built.
Post-Covid life has in some ways been about recovery. But culture has largely kept its shape within those walls that were inconspicuously erected. And in turn, the culture and psychology of young people have mapped its floorplan, largely encouraged by a society that has left them to wander its corridors alone.
In this sense, the introduction of a total ban must be grasped at a deeper level than just legislation – it is a cultural and indeed psychological act.
Attempting to regulate the shared otherworld that whole generations have grown up within, this late in the game, is like drawing a boundary around a landmass that splintered and drifted centuries ago. Years of irresponsible governance hasn’t created a jungle or wasteland that needs clearing. It has provided the space for a vast superstructure to be erected, with its own laws, culture, and psychological framework so alluring and powerful that the vast majority are barely even aware of its edges.
To bring people out of the maze, the backrooms, and break down these walls, we need to confront things as they are, to acknowledge this cultural layout.
The goal should be the restoration of spaces where young people can genuinely be together. Youth clubs, activity centres, places for cultural and social skills to be fostered and nurtured – spaces which, through austerity, have seen a real-terms funding cut of over 70%. Children should feel safe to walk the streets that will, or should, one day pave their working lives. Instead, a growing statistic of NEETs – young people not in education, employment or training – speaks to a generation that fears the world that expects its stewardship.
While our culture at large still pins its hopes on the structures of social media, hemming in our adult fears and desires, how can we expect a vacant screen to be anything other than a barrier to those who grew up with what lies on the other side? What choice do they have but to stare at a wall?
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