Three in the morning, a teenager can't stop thinking about a stranger's comment on social media. She'd like to ask her best friend for advice, but she doesn't want to wake her up. She picks up her phone and starts whispering. Eleven at night, another teenager is doing homework when a playground argument comes back to him, swirling around in his head. He trembles, he wants to text his best friend for advice, but he's embarrassed. And he also picks up his phone and starts whispering. Both opt for a synthetic confidant who will attend to them at odd hours and won't judge them. A confidant designed to generate emotional dependency. In two decades, the digital economy has undergone enormous evolution: it started with data, until with social media platforms we discovered that attention was the scarce resource to compete for. Today, with the irruption of chatbots, what they monetize is our need to connect. Emotional support is one of the three most common uses of chatbots, both for adolescents and for the adult population. And the reason is that they promise availability, immediacy, and constant validation, generating a sense of complicity from synthetic intimacy – otherwise known as the attachment economy.

It was only a matter of time before the Spanish government announced restrictions on social media. This was foreshadowed by the interest in examples like Australia and, soon, France. The first spark of the debate on age restrictions ignited in the summer of 2024, with the controversy surrounding the consumption of pornographic content at very young ages. At that time, the government announced the Beta Digital Wallet, a digital passport that includes age verification—commonly known as pallaporte–. The restriction is also mentioned in the draft bill for the protection of minors in digital environments, which is currently being processed.

Australia has just become the first country in the world to ban access to social media for those under 16. The diagnosis is clear: mainstream social networks have become toxic because they only seek profit at any cost, even at the expense of the physical, mental, and relational health of their users. What we reject is the business model, based on addiction and data exploitation. And therein lies the Australian mistake: instead of attacking this gravitational model that traps users, they have expelled the users themselves.

Elon Musk is the darling of ultraconservative neoliberalism. With his aura of eccentric genius, he provokes and ignites debate, but his role is not to entertain, but to reprogram power. Grokipedia is not a toy or a directionless experiment. It is an ambitious ideological project, catapulted by technological supremacy, with the objective of conquering and automating the narrative. Musk is the visible face of an elite, and Grokipedia is the icon of a system that disguises the dominance of knowledge. The manifest enemy to combat is Wikipedia, for all that it represents.

Death The recent video by Jean Pormanove, a French strummer known for broadcasting marathons of humiliation and abuse on the Kick platform, has been shaking Europe for days. In this case, we have been able to see how suffering, broadcast by the thirst for likes, ceases to be a human experience and becomes a commodity. The images, broadcast live in front of thousands of viewers, confront us with uncomfortable questions about regulation and civilization. Is life turned into a spectacle, in the purest style of gladiators in combat, the kind of digital society we want? Let's ask ourselves carefully and in all directions.

The bicycle is, of all modes of transportation, perhaps the most revolutionary. Literally and symbolically, it allows us to go further using only the power of our own legs, and that's why it has often become a symbol of freedom, autonomy, and rebellion. We see this in The green bicycle, a Saudi film that tells the story of Wajda's dream of buying a bike like her friend Abdullah's, although in Saudi culture it is frowned upon for girls to cycle.

Since France questioned the presence of mobile phones in classrooms in 2018, we've looked to it as a pioneering example of digital education. Last year, they piloted a "daily digital break" during school hours in more than 200 schools, and next year it will be extended to all students under 16. Mobile phones will not be allowed in any French classroom, nor in the UK.a studyfrom the University of Birmingham concludes that banning screen time alone does not improve children's well-being or increase academic performance, reducing daily screen time by only 30 minutes.

We are symbolic beings and we need objects on which to project the stories that give meaning to what we experience. That the battery-powered radio has become the symbol of resistance during Monday's blackout is a poetic blow that brings together all the debates about sovereignty, resilience, and interdependence. The mandatory strike is a fabulous reminder that energy infrastructure is also the foundation of digital and communication systems. Therefore, the dual transition—green and digital—must necessarily converge into a single one. However, the solutions for how to achieve this can follow multiple paths.

A couple of weeks ago the MIT Media Lab presented the AHA project (Advancing Humans with AI), a research program that brings together 14 research groups from the prestigious university around the question "How can we design artificial intelligence in the service of human flourishing and fulfilling lives?" Amidst the corporate festival of generative AI models, it is encouraging to see how research projects are proliferating to understand how interaction with AI is modifying behaviors, expectations, and imaginaries.

The success of Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, creators ofAdolescence–the series of the moment–, has been bursting the bubbles of the generational and gender filter by transferring the cultureincelFrom the screens of teenagers locked in their rooms to a commonplace frequented by adults like Netflix. The series chronicles how the sinister influence of toxic masculinity floods and expands into digital environments. It comes at an opportune time, now that there's no shortage of moral panics about social media. Its virtueAdolescence It's a shock, but the challenge after watching it is to avoid falling into a reactive, prohibitionist, and short-sighted mode. How can we take advantage of the buzz the series has generated to better support our teens?

Change is scary. Uncertainty can be distressing. When the ground beneath us is shaky, our survival instinct drives us to seek firmness. And when we find it, we cling to it without question. The illusion of stability is comforting, especially when we are young and in the process of defining ourselves. What do you do if the gender stereotypes that were meant to guide you are in question and new identities are yet to be defined? Well, look for certainty in the most nostalgic versions of virility.