NEETs, the million plus young Brits not in education, employment or training, are scrabbling to find work in a Hunger Games style rat-race, seemingly designed to punish. Reliance on benefits is increasing, and many find themselves unemployed for years on end.

A NEET-eye view:

“To say that my adult life didn’t shape up how I thought it would is an understatement. I have been out of work for just over a year and it’s tough. It has been the single most soul crushing experience of my life so far.

Sites that I was told are good and reliable places to look, such as LinkedIn and Indeed, are now riddled with scam postings. [There’s] listing after listing where you spend hours perfecting the cover letter, rewriting the CV, giving them a picture off you, the blood of your first-born child and a lock of your hair, and they never get back to you.

It no longer feels like getting a job is possible, even one that’s not perfect or just something to pay the bills. It’s like being employed is something that happens to other people. Meanwhile, one has to go onto benefits just to survive while you send application after application after application.

It feels like there’s no longer anything I can do to fix the situation I’m in.”

The toll on young people’s lives from these struggles, and from our aggravating culture of mindless carping, is enormous.

The game terrain

UK unemployment is at a 5-year high of 5.2%. Job applications are heavily oversubscribed, with 2.4 jobseekers for every vacancy and graduate jobs typically receiving up to 140 responses per advert.

Young job seekers are caught in a catch 22. Employers now seek an average of 2.5 years’ experience for many entry level jobs. As a result, 33% of applicants are rejected because they lack sufficient experience.

Graduates hit the job market also saddled with £50,000+ of debt. Being a UK graduate NEET:

“Exposes a common lie about our education system which we … hear from parents and teachers - that a degree in the right subject, or from the right institution, or with the right grade is a recipe for success.”

The employment Hunger Games have also shifted fully online. As our first NEET above observes, days are filled with endless applications in an anonymous screen-world, devoid of face-to-face human interaction. The interminable rejections are conveyed through silence.

Businesses won’t touch real paper CVs now and buildings that say ‘Job Centre’ are not actually job-finding centres.

Additionally, large language AI has triggered a fall in demand for human input, with the UK service sector concentration leaving us particularly exposed to large-scale job displacement.

AI constitutes a double insult to NEETs. It not only ruthlessly adjudicates their online applications but is also soaking up swathes of NEET employment opportunities.

Limbo

The challenge of finding employment currently looks overwhelming. Instead of reaching the traditional milestones of adulthood, NEETs find themselves in an unstable limbo, endlessly repeating the “humiliation ritual” of chasing work that has the seeming rareness of hens’ teeth.

Aspiration is deeply strained - only 48% of young people believe anyone can succeed in Britain if they work hard enough.

Alan Milburn’s recent NEETs report distinguishes between NEETs actively looking for work, (39%) and inactive NEETs (61%). A proportion of ‘inactives’ have never worked, but it’s worth noting that others in this cohort may have been active but eventually gave up precisely because there’s a limit to human endurance.

Try harder

As NEETs wake to face another round of application checking, the continuing online silence is broken only by the steady thrum of government and society urging them to try harder - ‘You just need to get more savvy at working the system’; ‘your problem was that you didn’t put enough freelance projects and student society leadership positions on your CV’; ‘try doing (yet) more volunteer work to stand out’ (assuming you can find it). ‘Tell AI what’s special about you’ (even if you don’t feel special after months of relentless failure).

This thoroughly undermining ‘advice’ tells NEETs they aren’t doing quite the right thing, as if the right thing can somehow even be done - anymore. It’s a grotesque pantomime testing the endurance of even the wiliest.

Getting work, rewarding or otherwise, is now random, rare, and has very little to do with how hard you try.

Stop slacking

When society isn’t delivering ‘advice’, it’s busy caricaturing these Hunger Gamers as snowflake scroungers. Since their brains, it’s presumed, have been melted by social media and ‘me’ culture, they lack the ‘gumption and fortitude of their forefathers and allow themselves to fall lazily into the pernicious habit of exploiting our hard-pressed benefits system’.

Here, NEETS, again fall under society’s mindless sledgehammer: ‘If that kid is fiddling the system, you must all be’. But it’s the critic’s reasoning here, not ‘youth’, which is lazy where it slithers, as it’s so often inclined to do, from ‘one / a few’ to ‘most / all’ without reflection or hesitation.

Waking up on day x of your dogged ‘job seeker’ marathon to hear that you’re a ‘feckless loafer robbing the state’ is just the ticket for compounding pre-existing mental health issues, or, frankly, even creating them.

PIP

The growing number of youngsters claiming PIP (Personal Independence Payments) for neurodevelopmental or mental health disorders has only amplified society’s grievances. But is their use of PIP surprising? After failing repeatedly to find employment, plenty begin to feel they don’t fit into society, that there might be something wrong with them. ‘Neurodivergence’, if nothing else, floats an explanation to NEETs themselves and their judges for ‘feeling dysfunctional’ and for a predicament they feel helpless to change.

Of course, PIP is exploited by the work-shy. But, again, we should pause before making assumptions since reasons for PIP applications are nuanced.

Some NEETs use PIP to protect themselves from the despotism they often experience in the world of Universal Credit (UC). In the easily abused power relationship with their ‘work coach’, receivers can get sanctioned with little provocation. Perhaps they missed a UC meeting as their bus was cancelled; perhaps they couldn’t face attending a job interview for nightshift work cleaning toilets a 1.5 hr train-ride away. Sometimes reasons for sanctions are too buried in red tape to discern.

Harried by the government’s shrill promise to ‘make life (even) harder for UC receivers’, young people live under the constant threat of waking up skint. And, in our atomised society, they don’t invariably have a ‘bank of mum and dad’ as last resort. So, who can blame them for using a PIP safety net that protects them from capricious UC decisions, and provides certainty about their next meal in a world where ‘if you work your socks off, you’ll gain security’ is a promise that simply never materialised?

The future

Andy Burnham plans to reduce NEETs by revolutionising education in ways that help engage young people with work. But this is only a solution if there’s work to be had.

There is a fundamental contradiction in our NEETs narratives – we firmly believe people’s lives should be orientated around work and that young people should be encouraged with carrots and sticks to find it. But we are simultaneously moving towards a world when employment opportunities are disappearing.

There’s a school of thought according to which, as per past tech revolutions, the AI revolution will ultimately give rise to sufficient alternative forms of human employment. But this optimism is hotly contested. The National Foundation for Educational Research, together with Mustafa Suleyman, the head of Microsoft’s AI division, Geoffrey Hinton (Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist) and prominent economist, Daniel Susskind, all argue that we’re moving, at the very least, towards a world of dramatically reduced human labour, with AI “creating massive unemployment”.

Plumbers and electricians look safe. But Susskind predicts that “task encroachment will displace workers” from a wide range of jobs across most blue- and white-collar sectors. Economics and employment are de-coupling, creating the novel spectre of “jobless growth”.

Beyond the work gospel

We aren’t preparing young people for this fast-approaching new world of significantly reduced work. Instead, we’re foisting on them an old model that they can see withering before their own eyes.

There’s a parallel here between NEETS and Thatcherite deindustrialisation. In neither case was the promise of life-long, regular work and security honoured, or preparation made for the consequences of trashing those promises. Then and now, the neo-liberal assumption was that market forces will kick in, driving people to find other work, by relocating, if necessary. This ‘try harder’ diktat no more fitted reality then than it does now. Are Thatcher’s lost northern towns, still stuck in poverty and disillusionment, a metaphor for our future youth?

So much is premised on the value of work as life’s provider of structure, meaning and security. Yet young people are facing a future where this prop is shrinking. Faced with precarious, unfulfilling jobs and the prospect of their Hunger Games only getting harder, NEETs are losing faith in the “gospel of work”, disengaging wholesale from the point of it. Depression, suicide, crime and drug use will all increase unless we give young people aspirations for worthwhile lives that are no longer noosed to employment.

To this end, education will need to build the kind of value, purpose and meaning into young people’s lives that enables them to cope in a ‘work-lite’ world. We may need universal basic income; but education must also cultivate stronger moral and societal responsibility, together with other specifically human endeavours such as creativity, physical life, and the rewards of human interaction.

Instead of looking backwards to an obsolescent model of work, making empty promises to young people, and feeding the NEET mental health epidemic, we must equip them with the skills, confidence and imagination to flesh out this potentially exciting and culturally advanced new world for themselves as adults.

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Good morning, all.

Yesterday, the 31st of July, marked the three-year anniversary of me starting to shout into the internet.

Now, all of you will have noticed that I have been particularly quiet over the past two weeks, and there are some very good reasons for that, which I’ll discuss properly in a minute. One of the…

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You may have noticed that I’ve been a little bit more quiet.

It is unfortunately not because I’ve been too busy getting my sleeve tattoo for my 40th birthday/chosen midlife crisis (I can’t at this stage, have you seen how expensive they are?!), but rather because I have a slipped disc actively trying to destroy my will to live.

A different kind o…

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If you did feel the need to listen to a very nearly 40 year old South African speak at his laptop, you can do so at the link below:

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It started with Farage losing his rag at the airport on his way back from the States when approached by Sky News, led to his bombshell, somewhat pompous grievance-fest dressed as a press release, and then to that bombshell turning right around and blowing up directly in his face.

The political atmosphere in the country, rather nicel…

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Well, sort of.

Not resigned in the traditional sense of leaving public life, spending more time with his family, or finally being sealed in amber inside a golf club bar. No, Farage has resigned in order to force a by-election, one he intends to contest himself, over the growing scrutiny of all …

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I don’t know if it’s just me, but it feels like there’s something in the air.

And no, I’m not talking about the immense levels of pollen currently suffusing absolutely everything right now and leaving me looking like I’m a fountain frog, dripping from every visible crevasse in my face.

I’m rather talking about the political…

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Reform UK have a serious problem with women.

Now, from the outset, I’m fully aware that I’m writing this as a near 40 year old man, and that there is sometimes something deeply suspect about men who solemnly explain misogyny to women as though we’ve just discovered it hiding behind the good plates. Women, as a group, do …

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Look, I moved away from South Africa for a reason.

It wasn't just the politics (though yes, that too). It was the heat. The smothering, oppressive, wall-of-fire summer heat that melts your will to live faster than ice cream on a braai plate. Growing up in SA, I spent December through February basically hibernating indoors, emerging only when absolutely necessary, like a sweaty vampire with a deep appreciation for air conditioning.

I came to Britain expecting drizzle, cardigans, and seasonal affective disorder. I wanted grey skies, wet pavements, and an entire national mood that could be described as "slightly damp." I was promised a country where people apologise for the weather and carry umbrellas as a religious practice. Where the most exciting meteorological event would be someone saying "bit nippy today" while wearing three layers in July.

What I absolutely did not want - what I most certainly did not sign up for - was a June in London that feels like I'm being slowly roasted in a microwave built by Satan's middle managers. It was 31 degrees yesterday. It’s set for 29 degrees today. Tomorrow it will be 32. I am 6'3", heavyset, and made almost entirely of sarcasm and sweat glands. I am not coping.

I have taken to lying very still on the sofa like a Victorian invalid, occasionally making pathetic groaning sounds for sympathy. My cat has abandoned me for the cooler bathroom tiles, shooting me judgmental looks as if this is somehow my fault. My husband keeps cheerfully suggesting we "go for a walk" or "sit on the patio," which I can only interpret as a hate crime.

The inside of my thighs feel like they should be classified as a heritage site. My desk chair has developed what I can only describe as a permanent human-shaped puddle. I've started rating my days not by productivity but by how many times I've had to peel myself off various surfaces.

And this is just June. June. We haven't even reached the bit where the government starts issuing heat warnings and the tabloids run headlines about "BRITAIN BURNS."

And yet - and yet - here comes the inevitable tweet. Every single time. Like clockwork. Like a particularly irritating cuckoo clock that only tells the time in bad takes.

Right.

Let's talk about that.

Why '76 Isn't the Smoking Gun You Think It Is (And Why That Narrative Persists Anyway)

The summer of 1976 was, yes, very hot. It was dry. It was unusual. And it was an outlier. That's why people still talk about it. You know what they don't do? Talk about the summer of 1983. Or 1994. Or that bank holiday in 2002 when it rained sideways for six days straight. Because those weren't weird enough to remember.

Here's what '76 actually looked like: it was the hottest summer Britain had recorded at that time. Temperatures peaked at 35.9°C at Cheltenham. It was also, crucially, a single year.

Since then, we've smashed that record multiple times. 2022 hit 40.3°C in Coningsby. We're not talking about slightly warmer weather - we're talking about temperatures that break critical infrastructure and kill vulnerable people. The problem isn't that we're having a hot summer - it's that we're having them every single year. 40°C is no longer a freak outlier but something we now plan for.

But here's what's particularly insidious: the "remember '76" narrative isn't just wrong - it's deliberately cultivated. This is weaponised nostalgia.

Every heatwave triggers the same media cycle. Telegraph op-eds about how "the Edwardians had it just as bad." Mail photo galleries of children in fountains captioned "When Britain knew how to enjoy the sun." Radio phone-ins flooded with melted ice lolly memories.

It’s climate denial rebranded as heritage - a Union Jack comfort blanket pulled over the eyes while the planet burns.

This serves two purposes: it shifts responsibility backwards (why worry about something that's "always happened"?) and immunises against future action (why spend billions on adaptation if we "coped fine in '76"?). The media amplifies this because nostalgia performs brilliantly. Politicians enable it because it's easier than governing.

The result? We're sleepwalking into a crisis while telling ourselves bedtime stories.

Weather ≠ Climate - But Climate Shapes Weather

Let's do the basics, with actual numbers.

Weather is what you get. Climate is what you expect. And what we should expect has fundamentally changed.

The UK's average temperature has risen by 1.2°C since the 1960s. That might sound modest, but in climate terms, it's seismic. The difference between our current climate and the last ice age was only about 6°C.

Here's what that 1.2°C increase actually means:

Frequency changes: The probability of 40°C days has increased tenfold since the 1970s. According to the Met Office, without human-induced climate change, the 2022 heatwave would have been virtually impossible. The odds have shifted from 1-in-300 years to 1-in-15.

Intensity changes: The UK temperature record has been broken three times since 2003: 38.7°C in 2019, 40.3°C in 2022. The 1976 record of 35.9°C stood for 27 years. We've shattered it multiple times in four years.

System changes: UK winter temperatures have risen even faster, by 1.7°C since the 1960s. Spring arrives earlier, growing seasons extend longer, and rainfall patterns are shifting toward more intense but less frequent events.

The crucial point: a 1.2°C rise doesn't mean "slightly warmer summers" - it means the entire probability distribution has shifted. What were once extreme outliers become regular occurrences.

I’m in no way saying that 1976 didn’t happen. But it was a statistical outlier in a stable system. What we're seeing now are outliers in a rapidly changing system, occurring with increasing frequency in a new baseline reality.

Even the Hot Countries Are Breaking

If you need proof that this isn't just "weather being weather," look at what's happening to countries that actually know how to handle heat.

India hit 50.5°C in 2024 - temperatures so extreme that airports had to suspend flights because planes couldn't take off safely. Roads literally melted. The power grid collapsed under air conditioning demand. These are people whose ancestors have lived with serious heat for millennia, in cities designed around surviving summers that would kill most Europeans. And they're struggling.

In Pakistan, temperatures reached 53.3°C while the country was already dealing with devastating floods - the kind of extreme weather whiplash that climate scientists have been warning about for decades.

Even Canada - Canada - saw temperatures hit 49.6°C in British Columbia, literally cooking entire towns off the map. Lytton, a town that had stood for over a century, burned to the ground the day after setting the national temperature record. The heat dome was so intense it created its own weather system.

Australia, a continent that built its entire national identity around surviving hostile weather, recorded its hottest day ever at 50.7°C. These aren't places that shut down because of a bit of sunshine - they have infrastructure, culture, and centuries of experience dealing with extreme heat. And they're being overwhelmed.

Meanwhile, we're sitting in Britain debating whether 40°C is "really that unusual" because someone's granddad once had a memorable sunburn in 1976.

The countries that know heat are struggling. The countries that don't know heat are in crisis. And we're still arguing about whether this is normal because we remember a single hot summer from nearly 50 years ago.

The Heat Is Real. The Denial Still Isn't.

I’m very sorry to say that your soiled childhood shorts, the tar on the roads, and the bollocking you got from your mum aren't data. They're not a peer-reviewed study. They're not even helpful. They're just a memory. And if we're being honest, one that's been polished and repeated so many times it probably owes more to folklore than fact.

We're not living in 1976 anymore. We're living in 2025, where heatwaves now threaten critical infrastructure, hospitals don't have cooling systems, and vulnerable people actually die from preventable overheating while politicians wax nostalgic about hosepipe bans and garden paddling pools.

This isn't just a bit of weather. This is what climate collapse feels like at first: uncomfortable, uncanny, and wrapped in denial that looks suspiciously like national identity.

And if we don't snap out of it, it gets worse. Not just hotter, but harder. Harder to grow food. Harder to stay healthy. Harder to keep the systems running that make modern life even remotely bearable.

So yes, remember '76 if you want to. That’s fine. But remember it properly. Not as an excuse to dismiss the crisis, but as a warning of what a single hot summer once did to a relatively stable system. Then multiply it by every year from now on.

That's where we are. That's what we're living through. And no amount of nostalgic bollockings or melted tarmac memories is going to get us out of it.

Start paying attention.

And for the love of god, someone install air con on the Northern Line.

It appears that we are on the cusp of yet another new Prime Minister.

You would think that with the past decade of experiencing a rotation of them we’d be used to it by now. That this would feel like just another turn of the political musical chairs we’ve become so used to.

Cameron to May, May to Johnson, Johnson …

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Tomorrow, a year ago to the day, I came to all of you with an ask. At that time, there were approximately 2,700 of you guys subscribed to what was, up to that point, a vehicle for me to shout into the void.

The ask was whether I should add a soft Paywall as a way to help me get to the point of making this, my writing in…

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As I wrote last week, we decided to come to Spain, very specifically to Sitges, during Pride week. I didn’t actually know it was Pride week when we booked it, it was sort of semi-coincidentally booked, but God, what a week it turned out to be. Just the gayest, most fabulous, most queer, lovely, friendly week I …

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The overt negative influence on X has only grown more apparent since then, and my feeling that it should be banned as a platform has only increased.

The government should have acted then. I’m not optimistic that they’ll act now

Something decidedly odd was happening on BlueSky last night. No, it wasn’t a new influx of patrons celebrating their departure from X as usually happens when Musk’s platform does something particularly horrific.

It was different - slightly more low-key, but potentially far more telling. It was first picked up (by my reckoning at least) by Alex Ip from Xylom, who noticed that the BlueSky team was working particularly late doing masses of verifications - very specifically, verifications of political parties in Canada. This led him to speculate that there may be a coordinated move happening between the governments of Canada, Australia and the UK to potentially ban X.

A move like this would be, and I’m not underselling this, monumental. Since its founding in 2006 (20 years ago?!), X was the go-to platform for breaking news across the world. It has been instrumental in the communication strategies of nearly all governments globally, played incredibly important roles in the mobilisation of revolutions, specifically in 2011 during the Arab Spring.

X, however, is no longer that platform. Now more than ever, with X’s robot happily allowing for the creation of non-consensual sexual imagery of women and children, I think it’s time for our government to depart the platform - or, even better, ban it completely.

Which brings me to the meat of this piece: the possibility of a ban. The idea first started growing legs late last week when The Telegraph reported that a ban was under consideration. This came off the back of comments made by Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, who commented that:

“Sexually manipulating images of women and children is despicable and abhorrent... I, and more importantly the public, would expect to see Ofcom update on next steps in days not weeks.”

She also noted that the Online Safety Act:

“…includes the power to block services from being accessed in the UK, if they refuse to comply with UK law” and that “if Ofcom decide to use those powers they will have our full support”.

At the time of writing, there have been no official announcements about a ban, however, as Alex Ip noted, where there is smoke, there is most certainly fire - and this potential fire could be a full-on conflagration, especially in certain parts of society that have become increasingly dependent on X.

I would personally be very much in favour of banning X - there is no good reason for it to still have a presence in the UK.

The lack of moderation, an algorithm that amplifies far-right conspiracies and this most recent scandal clearly demonstrate that the once go-to platform has become a shell of itself. I am likely not alone in this. YouGov found in 2025 that only 12% of Britons have a favourable view of the platform, with 63% being unfavourable. I can’t imagine that has improved over the past year given the multiple scandals (”Mecha-Hitler”, EU fines and now unregulated AI image creation) swirling around not only the platform, but its billionaire owner.

Many of X’s proponents will argue this week that this is nothing more than an authoritarian crackdown on free speech by the UK government. They’ll be, if I’m honest, uncomfortable arguments, because who really wants to defend a platform that has become as ignominious as X has - and I discussed a few of these on the very first episode of Bear and Monk Debunks.

The primary defence will be that there is undue focus by governments around the world on X, and that crime is prevalent on all the other major platforms. This argument was rolled out by the Telegraph in a piece written by Jake Wallis Simons this weekend, who noted that:

“Grok is not the only AI system able to carry out such intrusions. Clearly, this is part of a much larger problem involving the helter-skelter pursuit of super-intelligence with scant regard for the human consequences... TikTok is widely exploited by human traffickers, while paedophiles are known to target children using Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. None of those are facing a ban.”

What he’s saying is not untrue - there have been major issues across all major social media platforms. But he’s leaving out three things that make the situation X finds itself in stand out:

Scale, design and response.

Yes, crime happens on all platforms - however, there is a fundamental difference between a crime happening on a platform and a platform being architecturally optimised for harm, and what we’re seeing with X isn’t a failure to prevent abuse - it’s the systematic removal of the infrastructure specifically designed to stop it.

Independent researcher Genevieve Oh found that Grok was producing between 6,700 and 7,000 sexualised images per hour during peak periods in early January. By comparison, the top five dedicated deepfake pornography websites combined produced only 79 such images per hour. That’s 84 times more abuse content than platforms specifically designed for this purpose. The scale is just staggering.

In terms of design, when xAI launched Grok’s image generation tool, they made a conscious choice to include “spicy mode” - a feature explicitly designed to allow NSFW content with minimal restrictions. This wasn’t an oversight - it was marketed as a selling point, positioning Grok as an “unfiltered” alternative to what Musk characterised as overly censorious AI systems.

Competitors like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic all implement strict filters against non-consensual intimate imagery.

Grok deliberately didn’t, which was a design choice, not a technical limitation.

The most damning aspect of this all though, is the response - or rather, spectacular lack of one.

When journalists initially contacted xAI for comment, they received an automated reply:

“Legacy Media Lies”.

When Elon Musk himself was confronted with AI-generated images of women and children in sexualised scenarios, he responded with laugh-cry emojis.

When the Internet Watch Foundation confirmed finding criminal images of children aged 11-13 that appeared to have been created using Grok, xAI’s solution was to put the abuse tool behind a paywall - in effect monetising harm rather than preventing it.

When other social media companies discover child sexual abuse material, they report it and take immediate action.

They do not send snarky auto-replies.

They do not laugh.

They do not charge people for access to the tools creating the abuse.

What’s absent from Simons’ assessment is that X didn’t only fail to stop this abuse. Under Musk’s ownership, the platform systematically dismantled the infrastructure that could have and should have prevented it.

Musk fired 80% of the engineers working on trust and safety.

Musk disbanded Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council.

Musk reduced full-time content moderators from 107 to 51.

Musk was warned that Grok’s image generation function was essentially a nudification tool waiting to be weaponised.

Musk then proceeded to ignore those warnings.

So when we’re asked why X is facing potential bans whilst other platforms aren’t, the answer is simple - because X made deliberate choices to remove safeguards, to ignore warnings and to respond to criminal content with contempt. The very foundation upon which X is now built is architectural negligence at best, and complicity at worst.

Which leads me to the ultimate question: should the UK government ban X?

Five years ago, I would have said that question was unthinkable, and banning it would have been similar to shutting down the telephone network.

But, crucially, X is no longer that platform - and it hasn’t been for some time.

What we have now is a service that has systematically dismantled its safety infrastructure, deliberately designed AI tools to bypass industry-standard protections, and responded to the creation of child sexual abuse material with mockery and monetisation. This isn’t about one scandal, however horrific, but a pattern of choices that demonstrate fundamental contempt for user safety and the rule of law.

The inevitable cries of “censorship” and “free speech” ring exceedingly hollow, because a ban on X isn’t about silencing dissent or controlling the flow of information.

It’s about holding a platform accountable for enabling criminal content at industrial scale. Free speech and the freedom of expression has never included the right to create non-consensual sexual imagery of women and children - this is explicitly illegal in the United Kingdom, and there is no legal or moral framework under which what Grok has been doing is defensible.

Two countries have already acted - Indonesia and Malaysia implemented bans on Grok over the weekend, determining that X’s responses were insufficient and that the platform’s design posed inherent risks to women and children.

France has opened a criminal investigation.

India issued a 72-hour ultimatum.

Ofcom has made clear it’s considering all options, including a ban, with the full support of the UK government.

Would a ban cause disruption? Without a doubt.

Government departments would need to find alternative communication channels, journalists would lose a tool they’ve relied on for nearly two decades and public figures who’ve built audiences on the platform would need to migrate elsewhere. None of these are trivial concerns.

But the alternative - allowing X to continue operating with gross impunity - sends an equally powerful message: that platforms can architect harm, ignore warnings, fire their safety teams, and face no meaningful consequences as long as they’re sufficiently embedded in our digital infrastructure. This is a precedent that no reasonable government should be comfortable setting.

This is a watershed moment for tech accountability, and what happens next will determine whether we live in a world where platforms answer to the law, or where the law bends around platforms too large to fail.

I, for one, know which world I’d rather live in.

I wanted to send a quick note out to say a quick “totsiens!1”

After an absolutely non-stop few months since my dad’s funeral in South Africa, starting a new job that’s had me up and down the country like a blue-arsed fly, and politics in the UK (and the rest of the world) deciding to self-immolate on a nearly weekly basis, I am taking my…

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