People need to pay more attention to the sci-fi dystopia of today’s quasi-carceral schools—the intense electronic surveillance, pervasive monitoring of communications, and behavioral control. So many people are unaware of this, even as the high-tech school surveillance industry has grown to a multibillion-dollar market.

The healthiest students must be depressed and suicidal as wild animals confined to a cage: The smart, self-directed, self-possessed youths, who are endowed with a mature sense of their human rights to privacy and autonomy.

Only the pliant and compliant mental weaklings can be well-adjusted to such an environment. Not incidentally, they are the domestic livestock who are cultivated to vote for an authoritarian regime. Anyone who is well-adjusted to today’s schools will always need someone to tell them what to do—and they will ever feel safer at being watched all the time, having their communications monitored, knowing that Big Brother loves them.

The mindless, mind-killing, and personally intrusive authoritarianism of the schools was bad enough when I was young. If I were young today, my brain would explode.

Fuck Jonathan Haidt. I say that as someone who hates “smartphones” and social media. Haidt is merely an ideologue playing to cultural tropes about the young, as a pretext for more age-segregation—and more of the aforesaid authoritarian control. I encourage people of all ages to stop using (and being used by) “smartphones” and social media. Learn to use a real computer, and taste the freedom that the Net had once upon a time.