“Childhood is once again a resource to be extracted at any cost.”
Filmmaker-turned-legislator Beeban Kidron joined us to discuss Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back. Kidron traces her path from directing documentaries to entering the House of Lords in 2012 (the same year smartphones became affordable enough for parents to hand to children) and how a strange, silent moment with four teenage girls in her kitchen launched a fourteen-year campaign. She unpacks the deliberate design choices behind addictive notifications and CSAM failures, and discusses why she focused her fight on children's rights as a strategic, less polarising lever. The conversation covers tech's grip on governments from Starmer to Trump, and considers how the industry's "free" business model is quietly reversing 150 years of social progress: from child labour laws to a generation working, unpaid, for the attention economy.
Buy Users: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/users-3
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BARONESS BEEBAN KIDRON is a global authority on digital regulation and accountability and is a leading voice on children’s rights in the digital environment. She has played a determinative role in establishing standards for online safety and privacy across the world. Baroness Kidron sits as a crossbench peer in the UK’s House of Lords, and is founder and former Chair of the 5Rights Foundation. She serves on the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy and is a former member of the UN Broadband Committee. She is a Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics, where she chairs the Digital Futures for Children research centre, and is an advisor to the University of Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI. Before she became a peer, Baroness Kidron was an award-winning film director. She co-founded the charity Filmclub (now Into Film) in 2006, and was awarded an OBE for services to drama in 2012.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.
Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
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