私たちが今抱える空虚さと、オーストラリアのSNS禁止から見る若者の文化The Emptiness We Carry, and Australia's Social Media Ban: Where Youth Culture Will Come From

When you attempt to catch your breath at the end of a demanding day, do you not feel an inexplicable sense of absence, or perhaps a desolate emptiness spreading through the depths of your chest? Looking back upon the day, surely you have fulfilled numerous tasks and duties, exchanged words with others, and enjoyed your meals. Yet, remaining at the bottom of your heart is a coarse sensation, like chewing on dry sand—a sediment of the spirit. It is a quiet, yet sharp suspicion asking: "Did I truly live this day?"

The true nature of the suffering we all hold equally now may stem from a side effect of seeking efficiency too greedily: we have come to perceive the time known as "life" merely as a series of obstacles to be processed, a succession of tasks. Living in the modern age, from the moment we awake, we must constantly respond to an avalanche of notifications and information, or the unexpected troubles caused by the unreasonable behavior of others. We deal with them as if flicking away defective products flowing down a conveyor belt. We believe that if only this obstacle were gone, if only this trouble were resolved, a time for the peaceful, intellectual, "true self" would be waiting beyond it. Believing this, we view the reality before our eyes as an obstruction and become desperate to eliminate it. But that is not what it means to believe. True human belief is not such a thing.

To begin with, what if the peace that is supposed to be waiting beyond them exists nowhere at all? That is to say, there is no promised peace in life.

Life is such that the older one gets, the more the small frays we never once considered turn into great fissures, descending upon us all at once. Though the timing and degree may vary, this happens to everyone; it is a phenomenon that appears inevitably as a result of daily accumulation. In other words, the mindset of modern people—who define such risks as obstacles, attempt to process them thoroughly in advance, and scheme to improve the future through those days—may be correct as a form of social risk management. However, in a world where the unpredictable happens as a matter of course, such a mindset is far too brittle.

In reality, most people have no time even to make such preparations. Their hearts are shaken by events, they are swallowed by a great muddy torrent, and they lose sight of themselves. This "losing sight of oneself" is synonymous with losing life itself, and is the risk we should truly fear.

The quiet question harbored by many—"Have I ever, even once, lived my own life?"—is correct as a standpoint. However, there is a fatal fissure here as well. It is the view that the very structure of opposition between the "ideal self" and the "other" (other people, society, the world, things, phenomena) that obstructs it is itself the cause of the anguish. In short, I would like you to ask once more whether the problem truly lies within the "Other."

When we are irritated by troubles at work or friction in human relationships, we inevitably think, "If only this trouble didn't exist, I could have remained calm and intellectual." However, the moment we actually face such events, almost all people find their hearts tossed about, unable to avoid becoming emotional. Or when wounded by someone's heartless words, to think "If only these words didn't exist, I could have been happy" is the same. And in our time, once the online world is included, we carry this anxiety twenty-four hours a day. We cannot truly relax, nor even think earnestly about life.

Above all, no matter how much one loves peace and is thoroughly committed to living at one's own pace in silence, these ripples are thrown into one's daily life from outside without a second thought.

As a fundamental premise, it is impossible to maintain a state where such ripples do not occur throughout a life, or a world from which unstable risks have been removed. The world is simply not made that way. More precisely, reality is not an overprotected clean room. Today the failure of a sense of reality estranged from reality itself is plain to everyone as the failure of modernity. To keep painting over it without seeing this is the ugliest side of human beings, who push their problems off onto the future. For those who truly think about the future, it is a problem that cannot be avoided.

And the event that symbolizes how people still act, even at the scale of nations, as though they had misunderstood this reality is the law that came into force in Australia on December 10, banning social media outright for those under sixteen.

Since the pandemic, the explosive increase in mental problems among the youth has garnered global attention, and the primary cause has been discussed, without exception, in connection with social media dependence. Indeed, all of us know that, at the very least, excessive use of social media is not good for one's mental state.

In fact, I myself possess no accounts for what is generally called social media—Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Reddit, Snapchat, and the like—nor do I look at them. In Japan specifically, I do not look at Yahoo! at all, though it remains the main source of news there and runs an enormous business, even though it has been banned elsewhere over serious defects in privacy protection. Nor do I use LINE, through which almost everyone in Japan exchanges messages.

Therefore, I agree that the excessive use of social media causes immense problems for human mental health. However, that is not necessarily limited by age, such as being under sixteen; it is the same for any generation. Bans on social media for those under a certain age will probably spread across the world. But while everyone admits that social media harms the mental health of the young, I want to ask where the overprotective intention lies in a legal intervention in which the state reaches even into whether people use social media at all.

Of course, since the law has the approval of the majority of citizens, its purpose is presumably to protect children's mental health, as Prime Minister Albanese of Australia has said. That is true as far as it goes, but a total ban looks to me like nothing more than excessive state intervention.

There is no doubt that dependence on social media destroys our spirits. Everyone acknowledges it. Even influencers who have made their living from social media would find it hard to deny the problem. But taking that as one side of the truth, let us change how we think here.

We who lived through the years before and after the pandemic have seen social media become the main resource through which anti-establishment movements of every kind broke out and spread around the world. To put it plainly, there is no tool more threatening to the established order of rulers than social media. Before its rise, in the days when smartphones were still held only by the affluent in a few developed countries, the discontent of one nameless young person almost never grew into a major social movement. However many people shared similar grievances, they could not physically gather the energy for a large movement.

But since the Arab Spring, which began in the early 2010s after the Lehman shock, anti-establishment movements no longer stop at one nameless person; they bring the discontent of many together. Social media gathered the energy of movements that had once been scattered, and through algorithms it became possible to ignite that energy instantly on a massive scale.

In the Arab Spring, regimes that the West then regarded as dictatorships fell one after another. What marks the revolutions of this era is the power to gather people's scattered anxieties under a single purpose and raise them into a movement of one energy. No speech has to be made anywhere; it can unfold from a bed, and an offhand remark can mobilize tens or hundreds of thousands of people in an instant. To believe that humanity, having once tasted this tremendous exhilaration, can easily walk away from it is far too reckless, and out of step with the times.

I am interested in the Japanese student movement of the late 1960s, and have done my own research into the materials and films of that time. For an anti-establishment movement of that scale to arise then, it took an enormous amount of time and money. It began with raising substantial funds, building a clear organization, and the patient work of recruiting members. It went on to asking intellectuals to lecture in order to earn social credibility, and to studying policy in depth. And the grievances people hold are scattered. To gather them into a single movement, everything depended, without exception, on the discretion of the person at the top. Put simply, the only question was who led the movement. A cause might attract people for a while, but the ability to carry out the aim rested with the leader. If the leader had charismatic gifts, the movement could grow large; if not, its energy scattered and quickly died out.

Building a circuit that channels the differing discontents of a multitude of people toward a single purpose, gathering them into one, giving direction to the energy that erupts and mobilizing great numbers at once—something that was absolutely impossible in the past—has come to pass in proportion to the spread of smartphones and the rise in social media use. I say "has come to pass" deliberately, because it is extremely inconvenient for those in power. Whether one is a country's leader, a prime minister, a president, or a prominent intellectual, the force of social media can let a nameless person gather the discontent of an unspecified multitude and rise overnight to lead a movement. This is the greatest risk for those in power, because it makes maintaining the present regime extremely difficult. Personally, I see the Arab Spring as the first great manifestation of a new era. It showed, for the first time on a large scale, what happens when people who previously had no access to smartphones or social media take these tools into their hands.

And in the wake of that movement, among the main users in developed nations too, an explosive current spread, driven by algorithms that lift individual dissatisfactions into dissatisfaction with society and the regime. This is the simultaneous leftward shift across the world, led mainly by the young. Thus we enter an unprecedented era in which countless movements erupt at once in every country. If this goes on, what will become of the world? Everyone had begun to feel that question, yet no effective measure could be clearly put forward, and then the pandemic began. But the pandemic came in an age when people around the world were already using smartphones and social media, so even under strict state restrictions on movement, users could keep exploring ways to set off one anti-establishment movement after another from their bedrooms.

In music, countless people once took part in releasing a single song, but that is now ancient history. Just as the age of the "bedside producer" has given way to musicians who command AI generation, the same is happening in social phenomena today. At the same time, mental health problems erupted among young people whose social ties were severed by excessive pandemic measures. The WHO has declared social media dependence a public health crisis, but we should remember that one side is never the whole truth. The WHO itself faced sharp criticism and anti-vaccine movements spread through social media, so it may also be that all the responsibility is now being placed on social media dependence.

There have been currents that correct digital excess: DJs bringing back analog records, film cameras coming into fashion, knitting becoming a source of calm, more people seeking paper books. The bans on social media look, at first glance, like an attempt to pull us back to the time before social media. Older people who enjoyed their youth and grew up before the iPhone will strongly agree, and some young people, seeking what they have lost, are indeed moving closer to that generation's way of living. But what I question is the extreme, divided thinking itself, in which if one way fails, the other must be chosen. When has that ever been examined? That way of thinking is the very source of the exhaustion of our age, yet people keep looking away from the heart of the problem and take measures that are superficial and for show.

This movement is not limited to Australia. It is spreading to European countries, the US state of Florida, China, South Korea, Brazil, India, and others. But is state intervention truly the only right answer today? Looked at differently, the question is what interests are at work in sealing social media off from the young. Even if it began in parents' concern for their children, little attention seems to be paid to the risk that banning outright tools already woven into society, for young people who must survive the twenty-first century, may leave them in a state of being unable to survive, a worse trouble than any mental problem. However many measures a state takes to prohibit social media or AI for the young, the world is already deeply divided. It is no longer the single globalization of before the pandemic. In a liquefied world, each country pushes its future forward regardless of international alignment.

In such an era, by the state intervening legally to ban the use of social media and AI for the youth, there is a high probability of bringing about a fatal rift between the youth born and raised in countries of legal prohibition and the youth born and raised in countries where it is fully legal. History offers a clear lesson. Great Britain, the model student of modernity, enacted the "Red Flag Act" in 1865, requiring a person to walk ahead of an automobile waving a red flag or lantern to warn pedestrians. In doing so it gave up its own chance at motorization, lost to Germany and the United States, and has never revived its motor industry to this day.

The advancement of digital technology certainly brings many problems, but at the same time, it is a tool that gives form to the possibilities one person holds. I touched briefly in an earlier article on "people used by tools" and "people who master tools and create works one after another," and this is the same. In the past, making music meant learning an instrument, forming a band, writing lyrics and composing, going into a studio to arrange, handing mixing and mastering to specialists, and signing with a label to sell it. By today's standards the process was cumbersome, and it was not open to everyone.

But with the arrival of the bedside producer, who makes global hits on a single computer in a bedroom at home, the tide began to turn, and we have now entered an age in which hit songs made with AI generation are produced without limit. It is an age in which music made by a five-year-old could become a global hit, a world where what was once impossible becomes possible one thing after another. A child born and raised in a country where social media and AI are legal will grow up touching these tools, and may release a global hit at five. A five-year-old in a country with a ban does not even have the chance. At best, like their parents or grandparents, they can pick up a guitar. The five-year-old in the country where it is legal makes music and releases it instantly through social media, and new possibilities open. The five-year-old in the country with a ban has no such chance.

When they reach twenty, the young person raised in the country where it is legal will be fluent in AI as an everyday matter, while the one raised in the country with a ban must learn from scratch. In the twentieth century that might have been fine, but for young people who must live through the twenty-first century, an "unmanned era," is this measure truly right?

Technology that sparks debate in any age can be called a chance for the future or an enemy that strips the future away. But in an age when even staying alive is hard for those who only speak lofty words, such problems carry the risk of bearing directly on survival. The question I would like you to ask calmly here is this:

Does the government truly want to protect the young?

Or does it want to protect its own vested interests?

Honestly, it comes down to this question.

However, we must not overlook that a complete ban may let new possibilities sprout for the young people raised in that country. For the past decade or so, "entertainment handed to them by the platforms" has been everything to the young. With that forcibly cut off by the state, children and young people must find new entertainment and new manners in a world without social media. I see this as a great possibility.

If we discard the modern way of thinking that tries to raise them overprotectively in a clean room, the privilege of youth is the unpredictable possibility of devising play that adults could never conceive of and, before anyone notices, raising it into culture. And importantly, even today's social media companies began when young people started experimenting with new entertainment. The same is true of the personal computer and the smartphone. Young people who are half-forced to create the next entertainment because social media was forbidden will use VPNs to slip past their parents, look into social media day and night, and keep partial access to the world where their generation gathers across the globe. At the same time, their reaction against the pressure of state intervention, and against the platforms, will grow. They hold the potential to give birth to a new culture.

If Australia is the canary in the coal mine, then seeing this development clearly, whether it proves good or bad, will become the model for the next generation.

Young people always create culture in reaction. The stricter the intervention from the state, society, parents, or anyone else, the more they produce a culture charged with intense life force. The Beats, at the source of the American counterculture, were the same. For young men of that time like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, travel was the most radical anti-establishment act, and in it lies the core of the origin of the hippies, the backpackers, and the digital nomads who followed. Today's digital nomads, though, are merely people who carry a laptop from café to café, with none of the rebellious spirit those precursors had. Even the iPhone most of us hold now was once the very symbol of a counterculture charged with intense life force.

Thinking this way, it seems worth asking whether there was such an intense, rage-driven rebellious spirit at the beginning of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Reddit, Snapchat, and the like. In my view, this is where the mistake lay from the very start of the twenty-first century, and so the result we see today was inevitable.

Culture is always born from the edge of an intense reaction against pressure. This is the basic principle of culture, unchanged in the world, now and in the past.

Will the next culture be born from the young people raised in Australia?

Or will it repeat the British Red Flag Act?

A great upheaval has finally begun. The wave of young people shifting to the left across the world at once will go on shaking, one after another, the world we believed in.