this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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fascist encroachment on civil liberties and the normalization of surveillance and over policing is always sold as some shit to protect the kids.
when i was a little kid, we rode bikes around the neighborhood, ran around in the quiet streets, and explored undeveloped lots. so signs went up telling us we couldn't go to places where there weren't cop patrols and cameras, because SAFETY. and when we stayed in the places left to us, cops would stop us and ask our identities and tell us to go home because they didn't "like" kids loitering, riding bikes, skateboarding, or any of the other shit people once called "playing outdoors". the parks were torn up because SAFETY, since i guess merry go rounds and swingsets are death traps that killed 1 billion children. unlike cars and cops guns.
when i was a teen, we would congregate in the malls. but never in groups larger than half a dozen, or that invited policing. trespass orders for the older kids. no no, no playing, no socializing, no loitering: you must come to the mall and efficiently make purchases or work for $4/hr being a retail/food court pain sponge. when you got off work, you must leave the mall. because you're a teen now, and teens are DANGEROUS. they have NO BUSINESS HERE.
the parks are gone, the malls are dead, parking lots and abandoned lots are hostile places where police cars sit to take naps and accost pedestrians and the poor cutting across on the way to wherever.
outside is BANNED for SAFETY, so kids go online to be social and guess what: that's DANGEROUS. so that space needs to be just as overpoliced, surveilled and controlled until all that's left are places to purchase and places to work. for SAFETY.
every place people invent to find some kind of community beyond the eyes of the bosses and their thugs is a place that is DANGEROUS and must be annexed for SAFETY.
many businesses now have high pitched buzzers on the outside of their buildings that emit a sound adults cant hear but is painfully annoying for younger people, to stop them from "loitering". you can get them for your house now. they're called Mosquitos.
https://mosquitoloiteringsolutions.com/
society treats children and teenagers like a nuisance, a problem to be solved, then wonders why they get frustrated and lash out.
The "turmoil" of adolescence is entirely a product of industrial capitalism and its mistreatment of teenagers.
In fact, I recently learned that the popular notion that the brain isn't "mature" until age 25 is probably a myth.^[I learned it from this infographic. I haven't fully vetted everything on it, but I'm sharing it to promote discussion:
] ^[https://www.sciencefocus.com/comment/brain-myth-25-development]
Personal anecdote
I grew up in the Deep South (Georgia), and when I was 16, my high school girlfriend and I were dying to fuck, but we never could, because every adult in our lives made it their life's mission to prevent all "kids" from having literally any privacy whatsoever.
The closest we got was brief, ten minute periods after Friday night football games, while we waited for our parents to pick us up. Band kids like us would hide in the auditorium and make out, but the band directors were constantly sweeping the building, trying to catch kids being "naughty" in order to traumatize and admonish them. I recently learned that that was also a plot point in Handmaid's Tale—my best friend was unable to finish the book because that scene was too triggering.
It's been over twenty years and I'm still resentful about it.
I really wish that Epstein(real unfortunate name) cited some actual peer-reviewed research papers. Otherwise this "research" paper is just a vibes based analysis without a works cited.
We're talking about my first source, right?
References
I wish the article included links (a common complaint in science writing), but I doubt Scientific American would have allowed the article to be published if the referenced studies were all hallucinations.
Magazine articles like this are often reduxes of formal literature reviews. I'll see if I can find a more formal one.
Edit: Not by Robert Epstein, but related papers:
https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1099_861
https://sci-hub.ru/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11343525/
https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00767-3