Reportedly, the on again, off again debate between Ruth Richardson and Nicola Willis may be on again. Fabolous. Nothing can help us better understand a wildly contentious issue than having someone from the ultra-right debate someone from the extreme right as to what the truest, bluest policies should be on tax, debt and government spending. If Andy Warhol hadn’t got there first, we could have called it From A to B and Back Again.
If the Richardson vs Willis debate does happen, we shouldn’t stop there. The obvious follow-up: Don Brash debating David Seymour on the Treaty of Waitangi, and whether Māori have it too easy.
Getting down with the kids’ social media ban
Let kids be kids. Even if it means banning their access to a social media account, and forcing them to go outside…to make a friend, skip a rope, build a treehouse or play rounders, if anyone can still remember the rules. Like most parental attempts to put children into suspended animation, the R16 social media ban has always looked like a virtue-signalling gesture destined to fail.
That outcome would be likely because the kids most committed to social media are going to lie, get a VPN, cajole an older sibling or friend to set up an account, and/or head off into the less regulated parts of the Internet. The kids for whom a R16 social ban might work are likely to be the ones least at risk.
As we keep being told, the world is watching how Australia fares with its experiment in social engineering. It is all about the kids, right? No doubt by accident, the social media ban also enables politicians to be seen to be on-side with parental anxiety. Not to mention the branding opportunities (by looking family friendly) that social media ban offers to the corporates who climb on board.
For a prime example: a few days ago, the Crikey website revealed that one of the prominent groups pushing the R16 social media ban in Australia packaged an event at the United Nations as an opportunity for corporates to gain access to, and “influence” with the Australian politicians and foreign diplomats in attendance. (The Australian celebrities invited to this event included Cate Blanchett, Hugh Jackman, and Russell Crowe.) The reported entry fee for the corporates seeking to win access and influence at this allegedly kid-focussed event? $A150, 000 a head.
No doubt, the tech platforms have a commercial interest in getting kids online ASAP. It is a win /win situation for them though, either way. For Big Tech, the upside of an R16 social media ban is that the age verification process delivers them an opportunity to harvest valuable information about the entire population. Since some of the mooted methods of age verification include facial recognition and the trawling of Internet usage (including emails) for age signifiers, the R16 social media ban looks like being a bonanza, further down the track. In the name of protecting the kids, we are at risk of handing Big Tech new and lucrative forms of personal data, thereby delivering them even more market leverage.
Kids and Their Toys
There’s another key player with an obvious commercial stake in any social media ban aimed at extending the duration of childhood: the toy industry. Let me explain with an example. Thirty years ago, the first Toy Story movie launched a billion dollar industry of Woody and Buzz Lightyear toy merchandise. At that time, the toy industry was on the brink of the Internet becoming a revolutionary disruptor of their old business model.
That tension has since been played out again, and again over the course of the Toy Story franchise. The plot of Toy Story 3, (released in 2010) for instance, was based on the sense of abandonment felt by toys as their child owners grow up and leave them behind. Toy Story 4 (released in 2019) expanded this theme with a plotline about more generalised feelings of obsolescence, and the struggle of “lost toys” to find a meaningful role for themselves in a new and challenging world. In Toy Story 5 (due to arrive in theatres in mid 2026) this malaise gets blamed directly on the Internet. Buzz and Woody are in battle against a villainous tablet called Lily Pad. Reportedly:
Lily Pad is a “sneaky” and “prickly” tablet that convinces 8-year-old Bonnie Anderson that friends and games on a device beat dusty ol’ toys in the closet. As you can probably foresee, this is a battle between analogue toys and always-on tech… The premise of Toy Story 5 is that Bonnie Anderson gets a Lily Pad for school chat and online games. But the tablet decides that Anderson’s toys, including Woody, Buzz and Jessie, are holding her back.
The plotline sounds familiar. Saving kids from their allegedly evil screens and sending them out to do analogue play has been the major theme of the R16 social media ban. Note: according to Toy Story 5, even a school-based computer can lead children over to the dark side.
As I’ll explain below, the fact that the next Toy Story movie has an 8 year old protagonist is also commercially significant. For the last two decades, the toy industry has been worried about the problem of ‘age compression’– i.e, the notion that since children are acting older at a younger age, the length of time they’re in the market for buying and playing with toys is steadily shrinking. (The aimed-at-parents tagline for the upcoming Toy Story film is “The age of toys is over.”)
In a related move, children are also reportedly switching the focus of their play activity away from toys and into video games, at a younger and younger age. The toy industry acronym KGOY – Kids Growing Older Younger – makes the same point.
Pity the poor toy peddlers, then. The old reliable games stopped doing the business for them quite some time ago. In the distant past, the likes of Monopoly, Scrabble and Battleship could keep the finances of major toy companies reasonably healthy, and able to sustain the turnover in the flashier toys du jour. That market is now saturated. Nearly every family has board games in the cupboard, and the formats can’t be updated all that successfully.
True, there have been efforts to link Monopoly with Google Earth so that players can buy any street on Earth, and to include in the box an electronic calculator that eliminates the need for the bank to deal in paper money, but this has only gone to prove how desperate things have been getting. Toys and board games, if not quite headed for complete extinction just yet, seem bound to play a smaller role in childhood experience, as digital games and electronic novelties increasingly dominate the field. The crossover age from creative play with physical toys to more abstract Internet -related play is estimated to occur at around 8 years of age.
As mentioned, the plotline of Toy Story 3 in particular, treated the transition involved (it is a key trope in many classic children’s stories) as the stuff of tragedy. The film’s drama hinged on the fact that the boy who owns Woody, Buzz Lightyear and Co. is now 17, and heading off to college. Faced with the grim options of (a) being dumped in the rubbish bin or (b) left to gather dust in the attic, the toys almost accidentally found a third alternative…and became involved in a rearguard action that brought a range of emotions into play. Most of those feelings were to do with bidding farewell to childhood, and with the fear of being left at the mercy of arbitrary adult decisions.
At the heart of Toy Story 3 was the notion that playing involves a transfer of identity. The toy is not to be seen as merely a passive vehicle for imagination, but receives a life of its own over the course of these transactions. In turn, the toy enables the child to be transported; as when children play with dolls, assign them voices and create the rules and the pecking order that governs the dollhouse.
In Toy Story 3, the notion of toys receiving a life from their owners was treated as a positive development, give or take a couple of notable exceptions. (While it is a pretty rare occurrence, it is not entirely unknown for toys to turn bad). In the Child’s Play horror movies for instance, Chucky the doll receives a human soul – from a serial killer, no less – and things turn out badly for nearly everyone. The bear in Toy Story 3 wasn’t a happy camper, either.
Context is everything. The assumption behind the R16 social media ban is that for 15 year olds and younger, the harms inflicted by social media platforms outweigh the benefits. If that is true (and for some young kids, it isn’t ) then a related assumption is that an arbitrary age ban that expires at the age of 16 is the best way of preparing teenagers for the task of managing the social harms associated with excessive Internet use. Good luck with that stop start “cold turkey, then feast” approach.
There are other obvious options (a) of regulating the harmful social media content via an independent regulator, and (b) exposing the algorithms to greater personal scrutiny and self-monitoring. Currently, these options are not being taken. Labour’s broadcasting spokesperson Reuben Davidson however, reportedly has a draft bill incorporating some of those features.
Digital or analogue play?
In passing, one can ask a different, but related question…namely, what is the best tool for stimulating the imagination: physical toys or video games? Arguably, toys provide a different environment compared to the pre-determined rules, game settings and challenges involved in playing video games, where the scope for imaginative play and self-expression is reduced. Basically you either play by the rules of the video game, or you die.
At the same time, cynics would probably argue that this is a more realistic way of preparing the child for the modern workplace, since the usual workplace has a lot more in common with a video game than a playground – in that being able to solve a given problem by the established rules is valued far more highly by most employers, than the imaginative ability to make up one’s own rules, and be true to them. Not many jobs leave room for creative play.
Still, a few mule-headed romantics will always hold out for toys over video games, if only because toys don’t pre-determine the pattern of play. The time-out aspect that toys provide is also pretty important. After all, children have to live almost entirely in situations where adults hold all the power.
This parentally- imposed state of physical and emotional dependency tends to create the need for a free zone, where a child can get to have fun and call the shots, strictly on their own terms. Ultimately, so much effort goes into this process that it can’t readily be abandoned without some feelings of regret – which is the problem that Woody, Buzz and Co had to wrestle with throughout Toy Story 3. How much allegiance, if any, did they still owe to a ruler who had grown up and abdicated the kingdom?
This is an extremely old story. St Paul, typically, treated it as a cut and dried issue (1 Corinthians 13.11) of just sucking it in, growing up and moving on: “When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things…”All very straight forward. More often though, the process of leaving toys (and creative child play behind you) is portrayed in terms of loss and betrayal, or abandonment.
On the last page of The House at Pooh Corner for instance, Christopher Robin makes an abortive attempt to warn Pooh that he soon won’t be able to hang around doing nothing with Pooh quite so much, anymore. Maybe even, not at all. ‘”They don’t let you,” he explains.
Still with his eyes on the world, Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh’s paw. ‘Pooh,’ said Christopher Robin earnestly, ‘if I – if I’m not quite –‘ he stopped and tried again. ‘Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won’t you ?’
‘Understand what?’
‘Oh nothing.’ He laughed and jumped to his feet. ‘Come on!’
‘Where?” said Pooh.
‘Anywhere,’ said Christopher Robin.
So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.
One doesn’t need to know the grim life story of the real Christopher Robin to see that the poignancy of that passage rests in knowing that the boy and his Bear are going their separate ways and that at best, only memory traces of the enchanted place will survive. Bar for the occasional sentimental side trips, toys and their childhood associations are always headed for the rubbish tip, or for the dusty box in the memory attic.
Footnote One: A few authors have tried to find a way out. In The Velveteen Rabbit for instance, the toy is not merely facing the prospect of being left behind, but of being tossed onto a bonfire in order to dis-infect the nursery. It is its own grief that finally brings forth the tear that helps to transform the toy into a real rabbit, and he escapes into the woods.
Footnote Two: If there was a word for a melancholy attachment to one’s toys, you can bet that German would be the language to provide it. Something like schadenfreude and weltschmerz perhaps, but with fur and button eyes attached. Maybe we could call it something like…. Spielzeugtraurigkeit, or toy-sadness.
Footnote Three: The best dramatized version of that sentiment would have to be the 1986 book Peabody by the American writer, Rosemary Wells. Wells is best known for her Max and Ruby series for small children, as well as for her Christmas classic, Morris’s Disappearing Bag. She has also written several excellent ‘ how the outsider kid at school found a soulmate’ stories, such as Timothy Goes to School and Yoko.
Peabody though, is something else again. Peabody is a bear, and the plot of this simple picture book takes you from his out-of-the-box acceptance by Annie, the child to whom he has been given as a birthday present, and from the depictions of their initially happy days together. That is, until…the child gets a new toy, a monstrous walking, talking doll called Rita who is programmed to say things like ‘Good morning! I love you!’ incessantly. The child is entranced. Peabody is upset about the turn of events, but what can you do?
Soon, poor Peabody is being left on the shelf, where his eyes go dim and his heart turns sandy and dull from neglect. Until one day an accident befalls Rita and her wiring (it involves coffee and being dumped in the bath) and she is silenced forever. Peabody gets hauled back into action as the old reliable stand-by. Except in the light of what has happened, he is understandably wary.
The last panel in the book – of Peabody dancing uncertainly on Annie’s bed in the moonlight – is quite haunting. What the panel (and the book as a whole) seem to be saying is that once the spell of unconditional love has been broken, it can’t be re-made. A sadder bear, Peabody appears to be trying to get into the moment, before the arrival of his next betrayal. Gulp.
Footnote Four: Toy retailers can take some consolation, at least. The fact that people are writing books and making movies about our relationship to childhood and its artifacts is a sign that ‘age compression’ also has a mirror image. Call it ‘age expansion’, whereby the childhood being compressed at one end is being elongated at the other. It is happening mainly because many of the former signifiers of adulthood (career, settling down, marriage, children etc ) are now being pushed out well into the 30s, especially among the trainees for the ‘knowledge industry’ parts of the economy.
These well-educated and (in some cases) well-paid new parents – and their kids – are the core audience for the Toy Story films, and other Pixar titles. Barely out of their own extended period of relative dependency, such parents are taking on responsibilities that previous generations began to shoulder a decade or so earlier. They seem to be ripe for waxing nostalgic about a condition of dependency that they’ve really just left behind, and which they are now vicariously re-entering with their kids. Playtime is over, long live playtime!
For that reason, St Paul would probably regard Pixar movies – and the Internet – as the work of the devil.
Cumbia, not Kumbaya
While she was only six years old, the Colombian singer Aurita Castillo recorded two albums in the 1960s steeped in the drum and maracas-led rhythms of cumbia. Compared to salsa’s brassy urban intricacies, cumbia is relatively simple and slower, for reasons directly linked to the colonial history of Central and South America. Reportedly, the slower, simpler rhythms (punctuated by pauses) made it possible for slaves to still move to the music, while in their shackles.
By the mid-1970s, Aurita Castillo had vanished, and no-one knows what happened to her. Her 1960s trackl “Chambacu” was her biggest hit. The song was a celebration of the lives of the marginalised inhabitants of the Afro-Colombian neighbourhood of Chambacu, in the city of Cartagena.
In a sense, it is something of a protest song, since Chambacu was regarded as a slum by the city government, and it was razed in 1971 to make way for tourism development. The inhabitants were forcibly displaced.