No. 120 — Locked out ⫶ 200 children ⫶ My First Errand
Who rakes the leaves?
My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.
Last week I was in Copenhagen, where I gave a talk at Rebuild. Rebuild is a work sprint to rebuild European social platforms, intended for protocol designers, product builders, and policy people.
I was, once again, the odd one out. A children’s book author who has been spending an increasing amount of time with urban planners, landscape architects, and playground designers doesn’t scream social platforms.
But I’ve known Thomas, one of the organisers, for years, and I trust his taste in event curation. He asked me to talk about children. So I did. And through the process found a way to say some things about children and the internet that I've wanted to say for a long time.
1.
There are roughly 80 million children under 13 in Europe. That’s about 15 percent of the population. I keep repeating this number to myself because what follows is so strange. We, the technology industry, collectively decided it was easier to pretend they don’t exist.
In 1998, the US passed COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which says you cannot collect data from children under 13 without parental consent. Europe followed with GDPR’s Article 8, setting the digital age of consent at 16.
In practice, this means the default experience for a child on the internet is to either be locked out or to lie. The pattern continues in 2026. Australia banned under-16s from social media entirely. France passed a bill to do the same for under-15s just weeks ago.
Children are the most imaginative, wild, full-of-potential users of technology, and the entire social internet is built as if they didn’t matter.
2.
There is a story I keep coming back to.
In 1966, a documentary producer named Joan Ganz Cooney was asked by the Carnegie Corporation to study whether television could be used to educate preschool children. The consensus on TV at the time was similar to today’s discussion on social platforms. They were considered uniformly bad for kids. A passive, ad-fuelled, commercial, brain-rotting medium.
The question was: what would she build for them to watch?Cooney spent months interviewing child development experts and television producers. She came back with a fifty-five-page report, The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education , that made a big argument. She noted that 96% of American homes already had television sets running sixty hours a week. Children were already singing advertising jingles.
That report became the blueprint for Sesame Street. The show was produced at the level of the best commercial television, but grounded in developmental research from the start. Sesame Street was the first show to put inner-city children and diverse families on screen. And it never stopped testing what it made: every segment was studied with real children, revised, studied again. Fifty-five years later, they’re still doing it.
Right now, we’re having the exact same conversation about social platforms that people had about television in 1966. And mostly we’re stuck on the same answer: keep kids away.
A 2026 version of Cooney’s question: what would the Sesame Street of social platforms look like?
3.
One of my favourite details from the Cooney story is the Distracter.
When Sesame Street went into production, the research team invented a method they called “the Distracter.” They would seat children in front of a television showing a Sesame Street episode. Next to it, they placed a second screen playing a slideshow of random, bright, constantly changing images.
Every time a child looked away from Sesame Street toward the Distracter, the researchers marked that moment. They compiled the data, mapped it against each segment of the show, and found which scenes held attention. Then they redesigned the segments that failed and tested again.
James Bridle recreated a few years ago an installation version at Kunsthaus Zurich of The Distractor. The original Distracter was built to make children's television better. Today, the distractor is the platform itself.
4.
I think architecture understands something about scale that the social internet has mostly ignored.
Christopher Alexander spent his life arguing that the most humane built environments are composed of smaller, semi-autonomous parts. They have places that feel alive, that draw you in. They work at multiple scales simultaneously: the doorknob, the room, the building, the street, the neighbourhood.
What if a social space for 200 children in a neighbourhood was considered a success? A year ago, the economics would have made that absurd. But the cost of building software has dropped so dramatically that a neighbourhood-scale platform is no longer a fantasy.
5.
At the gathering, Rebuild also worked on a taxonomy of social platforms. I kept thinking about what happens when you replace “social platform” with “playground.”
When I design playgrounds, I think about things that sound mundane. Is the space visible from the street? Are there edges and nooks where a child can find a quiet corner? How is the playground maintained? Who rakes the leaves? What are the rules, and who enforces them?
Now imagine we asked the same questions of a social platform designed for young people. Can you see who else is here? What if a platform wasn’t available 24/7, but opened at 3pm and closed at 8pm, like an after-school club? How would it change come winter?
6.
So we’ve arrived at the easiest answer: keep the children out of social platforms. I understand the instinct. Of course children should not roam the internet or social media freely.
But safety is something you build. And I don’t believe that locking children out gives them the experience of managing on their own. We prevent their fumbling attempts at independence. Social trust, cooperation, imagination: all of it goes missing too.
In Japan, there’s a television show called Hajimete no Otsukai (“My First Errand”) where preschool children run small tasks in their neighbourhoods. They are terrified at first. They try again. They ask for help. And when they come home, they are proud. The children aren’t safe because the dangers have been removed. They are safe because the city has been designed: narrow streets, visible neighbours, shopkeepers who know their names, older children who look after younger ones.
Instead of helplessness, I’d like today’s children to approach the internet the way a child moves through a Japanese neighbourhood. Free, brave, and a little wild, trusting that the space has been built to support them. And I'd like us to start designing those streets.
7.
I’ll be honest: I feel conflicted about the framing of this as a European project. The internet I grew up with didn’t have borders. The weird, handmade, personal web of the 2000s wasn’t Finnish or American or Japanese. It was just ours. The fact that we now need to specify “European social platforms” says something about how much has been lost.
And there is really interesting work happening beyond any single continent’s initiative. New_ Public is rethinking online public spaces. Metagov is working on online governance and if I were a political science student right now, their PolicyKit would be the most interesting thing in the world. In Taiwan, the g0v civic movement has been building open-source alternatives to government websites since 2012. Just this week, the Resonant Computing community launched its first gathering in New York.
Something is stirring. It doesn’t have one name or one address yet. But if you feel it too, check out letter.rebuild.net.