Gradual Release of Responsibility

I’m not a fan of I/we/you lessons.

I/we/you is the default lesson structure for lots of math teachers. Start by modeling a skill. Then work through the skill as a class. Then give students some independent practice.

The tagline for this type of teaching is “gradual release of responsibility.” A graph of the lesson might look like this:

Take the task you want students to be able to do. Start by offering a lot of support, typically by modeling or looking at examples, then gradually have the students do more of the work themselves until they’re doing the task on their own.

I don’t think this is a good model. Instead of I/we/you with gradual release of responsibility, I think it‘s more helpful to think of a gradual increase in difficulty.

Gradual Increase in Difficulty

Gradual increase in difficulty might look like this:

But that’s actually not realistic. The stuff we want kids to learn doesn’t break down into nice neat steps that are all the same size. Maybe a lesson looks more like this:

I’m not putting teacher support on here, because it’s not some predetermined gradual release in responsibility. Instead it’s adaptive: some steps are small and students can make the jump without much support. Others are trickier and require more support.

Here’s what this might look like in terms of I/we/you:

You/I/you/you/I/you (this is a bunch of review questions about relevant prior knowledge, with some quick reteaches as necessary)

I/we/you (there’s a jump in difficulty that students need some support with)

I/you/I/you (this is two quick cycles for small, manageable chunks of new learning building on the last step)

You/you (this is a few more jumps in difficulty, but smaller jumps that students can do on their own)

I/you (one final model and then some more practice)

The key to making all this work is to break learning down into small, manageable steps, and help students connect each new step to what came before it. This is a big mental shift from teaching one objective at a time. It requires knowing your content well. It also means tossing out some of the curricular resources you might’ve been given.

I’m sure some people are saying, “Hey, this is how I teach, and I call this I/we/you.” Great! Glad we agree. My experience is that what I’m describing is very different from how most teachers conceptualize I/we/you. This is not a “gradual release” model — the support varies across the lesson, with students doing plenty on their own very early on. There’s some I/we/you within the lesson, but it doesn’t start with the “I” chunk and I don’t think I/we/you is a good way to describe this type of teaching. I/we/you is a tool. It’s useful at some specific places in a lesson, but not a structure for entire lessons.

Some Benefits

Here are some benefits of the gradual increase in difficulty approach:

• Review is so important. Review to improve retention of what was taught yesterday, to activate prior knowledge, to check prerequisite knowledge and reteach if necessary. When done well, review can also build confidence early in a lesson. I realize there is no rule saying “no review is allowed in I/we/you lessons.” But if the name of the teaching strategy begins with the “I” section, that will inevitably push teachers away from starting with review.

• There are no sudden jumps in difficulty. I’ve seen — and taught — plenty of I/we/you lessons that are a bit of a mess. The jump in difficulty is just too big. The teacher knows it’s a bit of a mess, so the “I” and “we” stages drag on. There’s not much time left for independent practice, half the class is confused, and it all ends in a muddle. I can’t promise you that a gradual-increase-in-difficulty lesson will go smoothly. That’s not how teaching works. But by approaching learning one small step at a time it’s much less likely to fall apart completely. Maybe students are shaky on some of the early steps, and they take longer than you would like. Maybe you don’t get through everything you planned. Much better to teach the first few steps well than to bite off more than you can chew and have to start from scratch the next day.

• There are fewer artificial divisions between objectives. I/we/you lessons break content down into lesson-size chunks. Here is today’s objective, then tomorrow’s, then the next day’s. Unfortunately, learning doesn’t always fit neatly into those chunks. Some days will be too much, some will be too easy. Focusing on a gradual increase in difficulty throws out those distinctions. It’s a gradual ramp, and you get through what you get through in each lesson.

• There are more opportunities to check for understanding. It is possible to check for understanding in the “I” and “we” stages of an I/we/you lesson. But it’s not easy. The entire premise is a gradual release of responsibility, so students aren’t doing the task independently until the “you” stage. A gradual increase of difficulty lesson involves lots of “you” throughout the entire lesson. You have lots of chances to check for understanding, reteach, support specific students, and adjust as you go.

• Students are more motivated when they can successfully solve problems early in a lesson. Get students doing math and building confidence as early as you can, and use that confidence to tackle more challenging problems.

• The teacher support is dynamic. For some tasks, students need a lot of guidance. You can provide that. For others, students can extend what they know with much less support. You can do that too. The key is the gradual increase in difficulty, and that helps to reduce teacher talk and get students doing as much of the thinking as possible.

• It’s easier to interleave. Interleaving different skills is a key aspect of increasing difficulty that’s often forgotten until the review day before the test. Students need mixed practice, identifying different types of questions and applying different solution strategies. In a typical I/we/you structure, each objective lives in its own world. In a gradual increase in difficulty, many of those small steps are just interleaved practice between distinct skills.

• It’s easier to include challenging, non-routine problems. In an I/we/you structure, more challenging problems are often saved until the end of the unit, or for specific objectives like “solve multi-step problems.” In this model, the gradual increase in difficulty means that I can often end classes by challenging students to apply what they’ve learned in a few different and non-routine ways, rather than being laser focused on one very specific objective.

• I spend less time explaining. Lots of explanations go on too long because students don’t have solid prior knowledge, or the jump in difficulty is too big, or the teacher feels like they need to explain everything about a topic before students try it. In a gradual increase in difficulty model, there’s a bunch of work to prepare students for the explanations I do include. But those explanations happen in small chunks that are only slightly more difficult than the last step, and when students can figure something out themselves I let them do so. All that adds up to way less time explaining. I’m not against explaining — teachers should explain things to students! But those explanations should be short, and should get students doing math as soon as possible.

I realize that the difference between a gradual release of responsibility and a gradual increase in difficulty may seem small. But I think it’s a really valuable paradigm shift, and it opens up a ton of opportunities that are lost in a typical I/we/you structure. I/we/you isn’t totally broken — I use it as one element of the gradual increase approach. But it’s just one strategy for me, rather than a way to structure an entire lesson. Whenever I think about teaching a new topic, I start by finding ways to break that topic down into small chunks and sequencing those chunks in a gradual increase in difficulty. It’s not easy as first. But the more I’ve practiced breaking topics down into small, manageable bits, the more this type of teaching makes sense to me.

Deep down in the dark voids of HTML specs long gone sleeps a terrifying thing. Imagine, if you will, a DOM node so mighty, that it can change the content-type of parts of the document. An HTML element that makes the parser tremble and withdraw, and that cannot be stopped even by its own end tag.

The wise people of W3C try to keep the knowledge of this terror away from the mere mortals’ eyes to spare us the danger of its madness. They advise us not to use the magic tag name that is the incantation for this ancient malice.

We will, of course, do exactly this today. We’ll take a deep look at the

<plaintext>

element and what fun things we can use it for.

A Quick Warning

This being said, I’d like to point out one important thing: Do not use this element in production. The HTML living standard is quite clear about this:

Elements in the following list are entirely obsolete, and must not be used by authors: [...] plaintext

So, what does <plaintext> do that earned it its place on HTML’s list of deprecated elements? In a nutshell, it ends the HTML parser and instructs the browser to interpret everything following as plain text.

That is to be taken literally. Really everything, including any closing </plaintext> or </html>, will be printed as if a rogue, unclosed <pre> would suddenly go haywire and slurp up the rest of the page. By the way, this makes <plaintext> the only non-empty element that has no end tag at all.

What Do We Use this Power For?

On first sight that sounds like a really stupid superpower. On second sight, it still does. We look into how that element became part of HTML below. But now we will use it for one specific purpose: debugging server-side code.

Of course, specialized debuggers like XDebug for PHP or built-in error pages in frameworks like Django take over the heavy lifting here. And even the good ol’ print "<script>console.log('here!')</script>" is often helpful. Those tools should be high up in your utility belt.

But imagine this: You are deep in your code, chasing an elusive bug that affects only part of the HTML output, and you want to spot on the rendered page exactly where it shows up. The fastest way is to put a quick <plaintext> close to the offending place, reload the page, and presto! Just scan down to where the markup starts to show through.

This is especially useful to access formatted debugging output. A var_dump() in PHP, for example. Or an error.stack stack trace in NodeJS. Slap a <plaintext> in front of it before writing it to the HTML output, so that the string is immediately readable:

<?php
# TODO delme!
echo '<plaintext>'; var_dump($strange_variable);

If you’re working on an expressJS application, it could look like this:

try {
    some_method();
} catch (error) {
    response.send(`<plaintext>${error.stack}`);
}

The History behind this Evil

How ended this seemingly fringe feature up in all mainstream browsers? It was indeed there from the very beginning of HTML as this historic W3C document from 1992 proves:

Plaintext

This tag indicates that all following text is to be taken litterally [!], up to the end of the file. Plain text is designed to be represented in the same way as example XMP text, with fixed width character and significant line breaks. Format:

<PLAINTEXT>

This tag allows the rest of a file to be read efficiently without parsing. Its presence is an optimisation. There is no closing tag.

This also tells us the reason for its invention. Back at the time Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s high-end NeXT PC that he used to write the first web browser had a quarter of the power of a hand-me-down 2009 smartphone. It was important to optimize wherever you could.

Given that the early WWW was meant as a place to share scientific information, having a large blob of plain text as part of your fancy new HTML page was relatively common. The possibility to end the costly HTML parser and fall back to simply printing the remainder of the file as plain text was a powerful tool.

Such a feature isn’t unique to HTML, either. For example, the programming language Perl uses a special marker to tell the Perl parser to stop processing the remainder of the file:

print 'this is Perl code';
__END__
cout << 'this isn’t anymore';

(Perl programmers use this not for performance reasons but to embed additional data into their programs.)

Of course, nowadays, in the face of multi-megabyte JS payloads, this optimization has become completely unnecessary.

How Safe Are We?

But the element is still looming in all browsers, so it's worth keeping a bit of a working knowledge of it at the back of our minds.

To give you an example of how this feature could be mis-used, assume a comment function on a blog, where the commenter was able to smuggle in the string <plaintext>. As good developers we know never to trust users’ input, so we put the comment through a sanitizer. Let’s take a look at where things can go south from here.

We use the test string

<p><b>hello<plaintext>world!</plaintext></b></p>

to check how several sanitizer libraries react to it.

There Goes the Sanity!

We run each sanitizer in the most minimal configuration that produces any output. This is by design: sanitizers are security products. They should produce safe output by default.

The results are quite surprising, though. (Click on a library’s name below to reveal the horrifying details.) You will notice that no two libraries (apart from the Sanitizer API and DOMPurify, where the former was directly inspired by the latter) agree on how to sanitize our test string.

console.log(Document.parseHTML(TEST_STRING).body.innerHTML);

<p><b>hello</b></p>

const div = document.createElement('div');
div.innerHTML = TEST_STRING;
console.log(div.innerHTML);

<p><b>hello</b></p><plaintext><b>world!&lt;/plaintext&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</b></plaintext>

Document.parseHTML(TEST_STRING, { sanitizer: { removeElements: []}}).body.innerHTML

echo -n "$TEST_STRING" | tidy

<p><b>hello</b></p>
<pre><b>world!</b></pre>

import xss from 'xss';
console.log(xss(TEST_STRING));

<p><b>hello&lt;plaintext&gt;world!&lt;/plaintext&gt;</b></p>

import { JSDOM } from 'jsdom';
import DOMPurify from 'dompurify';

const purify = DOMPurify(new JSDOM('').window);
console.log(purify.sanitize(TEST_STRING));

<p><b>hello</b></p>

<?php
$config = HTMLPurifier_Config::createDefault();
$purifier = new HTMLPurifier($config);
printf($purifier->purify(TEST_STRING));

<p><b>helloworld!</b></p>

<?php
use Symfony\Component\HtmlSanitizer\HtmlSanitizer;
use Symfony\Component\HtmlSanitizer\HtmlSanitizerConfig;

$config = (new HtmlSanitizerConfig())->allowSafeElements();
$sanitizer = new HTMLSanitizer($config);
printf($sanitizer->sanitize(TEST_STRING));

<p><b>hello</b></p><plaintext>world!</plaintext>

echo -n "$TEST_STRING" | xmllint --html -

<p><b>hello<plaintext>world!</plaintext></b></p>

import bleach
print(bleach.clean(TEST_STRING))

&lt;p&gt;<b>hello&lt;plaintext&gt;world!&lt;/plaintext&gt;</b>&lt;/p&gt;

import org.owasp.html.PolicyFactory;
import org.owasp.html.Sanitizers;

public class Sanitize {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        PolicyFactory policy = Sanitizers.FORMATTING.and(Sanitizers.LINKS);
        String safe = policy.sanitize(TEST_STRING);
        System.out.println(safe);
    }
}

<b>helloworld!&lt;/plaintext&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</b>

import nh3
print(nh3.clean(TEST_STRING))

<p><b>hello</b></p><b>world!&lt;/plaintext&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</b>

With 11 sanitizing methods we managed to produce 10 different outputs!

Just to be crystal clear here: we are not criticizing the result of any of these libraries. Each one has a good reason to do what they do. And each one serves a slightly different purpose.

But it emphasizes the point that one should be absolutely sure about the aim of a chosen sanitizer and the extent as to which it will change its input. Is the library for removing only potentially dangerous things but keeping as much HTML intact as possible? Is it to scrape all HTML off the string, or to only escape HTML-special characters? The results will differ tremendously.

We enter the danger zone when mixing several tools together without taking a cautious look first.

For example, look at how DOMPurify and HTML Purifier would interact in a potentially hazardous way. DOMPurify would remove any <plaintext> including its content. A later check for any malicious payload would be negative. HTML Purifier on the other hand just strips the <plaintext> tag, while its content remains on the page. If we’d trust the previous DOMPurify result, we’d be surprised by sudden new content being placed verbatim in the HTML code.

If one library is used for input validation and another one for output quoting, that’s a cross-site scripting disaster waiting to happen, unless we know exactly what we’re doing.

Letting the Evil Sleep Again

In the case of <plaintext> itself we are most likely in a safe place. Since <plaintext> has built-in HTML escaping, doing something dangerous with it is severely limited. It takes quite rare a constellation of errors and oversights to appear together in order to run malicious code.

For the sake of the argument, let’s create such a constellation. Assume that you embed a Content-Security Policy on your site in a <meta> element instead of an HTTP header:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy" content="script-src 'self'">

This prevents loading 3rd party scripts sufficiently. If an attacker finds a possibility to load HTML prior to this element, they can nullify the CSP:

<script src="https://example.com/malicious.js"></script>
<plaintext>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy" content="script-src 'self'">

But again, for this to really have any effect, several things must come together:

• The attacker must be able to place HTML in the <head> (because CSP meta tags can only be used there)
• The CSP is not set via HTTP
• The complete remainder of the page is converted to text/plain, which makes this definitively not a stealthy attack

So we can conclude: It is important to know about <plaintext>. But if we follow tried and tested security rules (for example the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard), we will remain safe from this ancient evil.

I’d like to thank Tom Schuster, Christian Vogl, and Daniela Strehl for valuable input to this article and Elise Hein for an extremely helpful review.

This essay was originally published in The Free Press on Tuesday, November 25th.

Earlier this year, someone started a viral trend of asking ChatGPT this question: If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation, without them even knowing it?

Chat’s responses were profound and unsettling: “I wouldn’t come with violence. I’d come with convenience.” “I’d keep them busy. Always distracted.”

“I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly, silently. And the best part is, they’d never know it was me. They’d call it freedom.”

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As a social psychologist who has been trying since 2015 to figure out what on earth was happening to Gen Z, I was stunned. Why? Because what the AI proposed doing is pretty much what technology seems to be doing to children today. It seemed to be saying: If the devil wanted to destroy a generation, he could just give them all smartphones.

My work over the last decade has centered on one question: Why did the mental health of Gen Z — the cohort born between 1996 and 2012 — plummet in so many countries starting in the early 2010s? I first focused on the role of overprotection (“coddling”). But since then, there’s been a growing body of evidence implicating technology, particularly smartphones and social media.

So, borrowing from the cybersecurity concept of red teaming — the practice of hiring an entity to pretend they are the enemy, seek out vulnerabilities, and hack into a network or organization — I decided to ask ChatGPT myself how its “devil” would stunt adolescent development in the digital age. Because what better way to stop the ongoing invisible corrosion of the human spirit than to get in the devil’s head?

It began:

If I were to think this through as a thought experiment—imagining “the devil” in a metaphorical sense—the most effective way to destroy the next generation without them realizing it would be through slow, invisible corrosions of the human spirit, rather than obvious attacks.

I approach spirituality as a social scientist who believes that whether or not God exists, spirituality is a deep part of human nature, shaped by natural selection and cultural evolution, and central to human flourishing and self-transcendence. Our “better angels” call us upward and out of our daily concerns. Our inner demons pull us downward, where we become more selfish and easily tempted.

In The Anxious Generation, I devoted a whole chapter to “spiritual degradation” because so much of life online pulls people “downward.” Growing up online, kids learn to live in ways that directly contradict the advice given to us by the world’s great spiritual traditions. Meditation, forgiveness, and sacred boundaries that must not be transgressed? Forget about it. Online, kids get constant stimulation, pressure to judge others instantly, and videos showing violations of every conceivable taboo.

You can see a sudden change in the spiritual health of young Americans in a long-running national survey of high school seniors who were asked whether “life often feels meaningless.” The figure below shows the percent who answered that they “agree” or “strongly agree.” The numbers were low and even declining a bit back when Gen X and millennials were in high school. But as soon as Gen Z entered the dataset, around 2013, meaninglessness surged.

Figure 1. Percent of high school seniors who selected “agree” or “strongly agree.” Source: Monitoring the Future study, graphed by Nikolaus Greb.

In the rest of this essay, I reprint Chat’s seven-step plan, in italics, followed by my own commentary.

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1. Erode Attention and Presence

If young people can’t focus deeply, they can’t learn, create, or love well. The subtle trap is to addict them to constant stimulation—endless scrolling, notifications, micro-bursts of dopamine. They’ll feel busy, “connected,” even informed, while in reality their capacity for sustained thought and presence erodes. They won’t know what they’ve lost.

So many of us in the education world have seen this precise change in our students over the past decade: They have more difficulty reading books, sitting through a 75-minute class, or doing their homework. This isn’t just a “kids these days” observation; it’s what the kids themselves began to say around 2015, when American high school seniors suddenly started reporting a lot more “difficulty thinking or concentrating.”

Figure 2. From Monitoring the Future. As reported in The FT by Burn-Murdoch (2025).

As soon as life and consciousness moved onto smartphones, students found it harder to engage in what Cal Newport calls “deep work,” and what the devil calls “sustained thought and presence.” When young people lose the ability to be fully present with a task, a book, a friend, or a romantic partner, they become less likely to be successful in love and in work — the two areas that psychologists since Freud have agreed are crucial for human flourishing. When constant distractions make love and work shallower and more fragmented, it makes sense that life suddenly feels more meaningless.

2. Confuse Identity and Purpose

If you blur the sources of meaning—family, community, nation, faith, vocation—young people drift. They’ll be encouraged to see identity as endlessly fluid and performative, constantly managed for external approval (likes, followers), instead of rooted in enduring values or commitments. This makes them malleable, anxious, and dependent on external validation.

Here the devil uses the word that best explains why some kids have been pushed into a pit of despair while others have stood their ground: rootedness. In our research for The Anxious Generation, Zach Rausch and I found that those who were rooted in binding moral communities had some protection from the negative mental-health effects of the new phone-based childhood. Teens who said “religion is important in my family” suffered smaller increases in depression and anxiety. So did self-described conservatives, who generally live in a more constraining, binding moral matrix, while progressive moralities aim to grant people more freedom to choose their values and create their own identities. So what happens when we re-graph the data from Figure 1 by politics and religiosity?

Figure 3. The sense of meaninglessness increased most for secular liberals. Data from Monitoring the Future, graphed by Nik Greb.

We find that the differences between the four groups were relatively small between 1991 and 2011, but then the lines fan out. Figure 3 shows that liberals from secular families were most likely to be washed away into meaninglessness during the “great rewiring of childhood,” the period from 2010 to 2015 in which teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones loaded with social media apps.

A child who constructs an adult identity while drawing from a stable and time-tested set of values, beliefs, and stories, given to her by trusted adults within a religious or philosophical tradition, will fare far better than a child who attempts to construct an adult identity by herself while drawing from a billion pieces of short and ephemeral content, produced mostly by young people and bots, which cannot be assembled into a coherent worldview.

3. Flood Them with Information, Starve Them of Wisdom

Make everything available instantly, but strip away guidance about how to weigh, sort, and interpret. Give them infinite answers without teaching how to ask good questions. In that haze, truth and falsehood feel equally slippery, so cynicism becomes natural. A generation that doubts everything believes nothing.

To write my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, I read all the wisdom literature I could find, East and West. I extracted 10 common psychological claims, and then evaluated them from the lens of modern psychology. The ancients’ insights into social relationships and consciousness were timeless and precious. It’s not that people in ancient Rome, Israel, India, and China were smarter or wiser than us; it’s that we have the benefit of reading only the books and ideas that our ancestors thought to be worth preserving across a hundred generations.

Yet anyone raised in a blender of social media and AI slop is immersed in content that was generated within the last few weeks. Content becomes popular not because it conveys wisdom but because it comes tagged with popularity via likes, view counts, or the prestige of the person who shared it. Without the ability to know what is true, without the ability to share a consensual reality with a stable community of fellow citizens over a long period of time, we are like the descendants of Noah in the days after the Tower of Babel was destroyed. We cannot understand each other or the world we inhabit.

4. Replace Real Relationships with Simulacra

Encourage digital substitutes for friendship, love, and intimacy. People will accumulate “connections” while feeling lonelier than ever. Superficial bonds are easier to monetize and manipulate than the deep ties of family, friendship, and community. The tragedy is that they may not realize what real connection feels like.

The devil targets real relationships because research consistently shows that having close relationships is one of the best predictors of happiness. He damages those relationships indirectly by pushing quantity over quality. Most young people have accounts on multiple platforms, so the time and effort it takes to keep up with trends and “friends” is mind-boggling. It’s currently estimated that teens spend five hours per day, on average, just on social media platforms. This makes it harder for young people to spend time, long stretches of time, talking or walking or just being with the small number of people who matter most. Some of the activities that are known to strengthen bonds, such as physical touch, sharing a meal, and synchronous movement, are impossible online.

But don’t worry! The tech industry has a cure for the diseases it causes. As Mark Zuckerberg explained, the average American has fewer than three friends, but wants 15. Meta’s AI companions will fill that gap! And it’s not just for friends. Meta’s AIs were specifically permitted to engage in “sensual conversations” with children, according to a leaked internal policy memo that was approved by Meta’s full leadership. Why should young people have to learn difficult skills like flirting, dating, becoming a good lover, and committing to another person — all of which bring risks of rejection — when they have an endless supply of virtual erotic companions with customizable bodies, voices, and kinks, who will never shame, abandon, or contradict them?

5. Normalize Hedonism, Pathologize Discipline

Convince them that comfort, consumption, and self-expression are the highest goods, while restraint, sacrifice, and long-term commitment are oppressive. That way, they’ll celebrate indulgence while mocking tradition and discipline—the very things that build strength and freedom across generations.

Children are antifragile. They need to do hard things, over and over, and suffer setbacks and losses, in order to become strong, independent adults. Key to this maturation is the fact that our brains give us a pleasurable pulse of dopamine every time we make progress toward a goal, and that dopamine increases our motivation to continue. We want our kids to pursue long-term goals and learn that it is profoundly rewarding when they succeed, especially when they overcome obstacles along the way. Discipline is the ability to persist on a path even when there may be no progress and no rewards for days at a time.

Smartphones give millions of companies a way to hack the reward system by offering young people small prizes on a variable ratio schedule, like a slot machine. Everything is gamified; everything brings more dopamine within minutes. Why pursue any long-term projects (diploma, romantic partner, job) when you can experience so much pleasure without getting up from your chair?

Many members of Gen Z are thriving in their 20s, but it’s a smaller percentage than for any of the five previous generations. One reason is that so many have fallen into “problematic use” of platforms designed to hook them, from social media and video games to porn and the new scourge of online sports betting, which has recently overtaken high school boys. Like the denizens of 19th-century opium dens, the heavy users of these products are addicted, unfree, undisciplined, and unhappy.

6. Undermine Trust Across Generations

Sow suspicion between parents and children, teachers and students, elders and youth. If every authority figure is portrayed as untrustworthy or obsolete, the next generation grows rootless—cut off from inherited wisdom and forced to navigate the world with only the guidance of peers and algorithms.

For as long as humans have had cultures, the accumulated wisdom of a community has been passed down vertically, from older generations to younger ones, with some degree of variation and innovation at each step. The phone-based childhood has rerouted cultural transmission on a planetary scale, turning it sideways as peer-to-peer transmission pushes out the intergenerational. Even if parents work hard to pass on family traditions, the number of megabytes of information they can convey is small compared to the terabytes of content coming in from peers, influencers, and bots.

Of course, technology has been changing the transmission of culture for centuries, and as the pace of change sped up, our grandparents’ knowledge appeared less useful. Yet still, there were always wide avenues of intergenerational transmission, including books, which were much more widely read by young people before they got smartphones. Even television was a powerful connector, exposing Boomer and Gen X kids to vast numbers of movies and TV shows from previous decades. Edmund Burke made the case for the necessity of vertical transmission in 1790:

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.

The devil’s plan is to cut off young people from the wisdom of “nations and ages” and force them to make the difficult transition to adulthood with “only the guidance of peers and algorithms.”

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7. Make Everything a Marketplace

If every experience—play, art, sex, spirituality, even friendship—becomes commodified, then nothing remains sacred. Young people may mistake consumption for meaning, never realizing that depth requires some things to be beyond price.

It is widely said that the “users” of social media are not the customers. They are the product, whose attention is sucked out through their eyeballs and sold to advertisers. Young people are the most prized catch because if they can be locked into your platform, you can extract their attention for many years to come.

Part of the damage done during extraction is that young people come to see everyone and everything in life as a kind of commodity to be consumed, reposted, or exploited in the never-ending task of managing their online brand. Freya India, a Gen Z writer who is part of my team at After Babel, shows how the mad competition for likes on social media pushes girls to turn their boyfriends into full-time cameramen and to turn a father’s funeral or a visit to Auschwitz into an opportunity for a sexy selfie. The title of Freya’s forthcoming book is Girls®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything.

Conclusion: Learning from the Red Team

Chat closes the plan with this epilogue:

In short: if I were the devil, I’d destroy the next generation not by terror or violence, but by distraction, disconnection, and slow erosion of meaning. They wouldn’t even notice, because it would feel like freedom and entertainment.

Those three terms — distraction, disconnection, and the erosion of meaning — summarize the Devil’s project. In order to defend young people, we need technology in childhood to promote the opposite: focus, connection, and meaning. Basic phones and e-readers generally confer such benefits. But as we look back on the devastation of adolescent mental health, relationships, attention, and meaning that has occurred since 2012, I think we are forced to conclude that smartphones, tablets, and social media have been doing the Devil’s work.

In The Happiness Hypothesis, I wrote that happiness does not come from outside (from getting what you want), nor does it come primarily from within (from accepting the world as it is). Rather, it comes from between — from getting the right kind of embedding or relatedness between yourself and others, yourself and some kind of productive work, and yourself and something larger than yourself. Those embeddings take time and commitment. They grow slowly. They are less likely to grow to maturity when children go through puberty on smartphones and social media platforms.

So if we want the next generation to develop focus, connection, and a sense of meaning, we must delay the onset of the fully online life until the end of the period of rapid culture-learning and brain rewiring known as puberty, which is over for most kids by age 16 or 17. That was the goal of the four norms I proposed in The Anxious Generation:

• No smartphones before high school

• No social media before 16

• Phone-free schools, bell to bell, from K through 12

• More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

When enacted together, these four norms roll back the phone-based childhood and give children time and opportunities to play, develop friendships, read books, grow a stable identity, and learn to pay sustained attention.

We can save future generations from spiritual devastation. We can bring down those high rates of agreement that “life often feels meaningless.” We can — and must — defeat the Devil and reclaim childhood in the real world.

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