Why I am siding with TikTok in its brave fight to keep our children scrolling for eight hours a day

I was sipping a remarkably complex Sancerre at a private retreat in Sun Valley last month when the conversation turned, as it inevitably does among those who shape the global economy, to the youth. A prominent venture capitalist—whose name you would immediately recognize from the board of several companies currently reinventing how we purchase groceries—leaned over his Chilean sea bass and asked me if I thought the next generation had the raw stamina required to compete. The table grew quiet. It is a common anxiety among the elite: will our children have the grit to sustain the endless growth curves we have so painstakingly modeled for them? I dabbed my mouth with a linen napkin and assured him they did. After all, I have seen my own nephew stare unblinking at a looping twelve-second video of a teenager dancing in a bathroom for two consecutive hours. That is not distraction. That is focus. That is dedication.

This is why I found myself so profoundly disappointed, though hardly surprised, by the news out of Florida this week. Attorney General James Uthmeier, representing a state that normally understands the absolute sanctity of commerce, has filed a lawsuit against TikTok. Uthmeier has accused the company of violating a draconian state law limiting teenage social media access, complaining bitterly in public about what he calls addictive features like unlimited scrolling and push notifications.

At a press conference that frankly lacked the production value of even a mid-tier makeup tutorial, Uthmeier claimed that kids are on TikTok for upwards of six, seven, or even eight hours a day. He presented this statistic as if it were a tragedy. To a provincial government lawyer, I suppose a child staring at a screen is a crisis. To anyone who actually understands the modern attention economy, it is nothing short of a miracle of product-market fit.

Let us examine the word addictive, a term thrown around by regulators whenever a corporation succeeds too wildly at giving the consumer exactly what they want. Do we penalize Ford because its trucks are too useful? Do we sue Nabisco because its cookies are too delicious? Of course not. We applaud them. Yet when a Chinese technology conglomerate manages to engineer an algorithmic Skinner box so flawlessly compelling that a twelve-year-old will willingly forego food, sleep, and basic social interaction just to consume another hyper-compressed micro-trend, Florida wants to step in and regulate it.

Uthmeier clutched his pearls at his press conference, warning that the platform exposes children to harmful sexual content. Let us be adults here. I have sat on enough corporate advisory boards to know that what a regulator calls harmful content, a visionary calls high-engagement proprietary media. If a child is drawn to specific content, the algorithm is simply serving the market. We cannot blame the mirror for the reflection, nor can we blame the algorithm for realizing that early-stage demographic market segmentation requires serving the youth exactly what their developing brains are evolutionarily hardwired to click on.

Furthermore, we must address the sheer economic ignorance of the Florida lawsuit. For centuries, societies struggled with how to make children economically productive before they reached working age. The industrial revolution had its clumsy attempts with looms and coal mines, but those were messy, physically dangerous, and rightfully outlawed. TikTok has solved this historical problem elegantly. Today, a child sitting in their bedroom scrolling for eight hours is engaged in clean, modern resource extraction. Every swipe, every pause, every micro-expression captured by the front-facing camera generates invaluable training data for artificial intelligence models. These children are not wasting their lives; they are the unpaid data-miners of the twenty-first century, laying the foundation for our technological supremacy.

The state also takes issue with push notifications, framing them as some sort of sinister disruption. I call them a necessary tether to the digital marketplace. When I had lunch with a senior product engineer at ByteDance last spring—a delightful meal, though he barely touched his truffles because he was optimizing a monetization funnel on his phone—he explained it to me perfectly. The human mind is naturally prone to wandering. Left unchecked, a child might daydream, read a physical book, or simply stare at a ceiling, allowing their attention to dissipate into the ether unmonetized. Push notifications are merely the sealant for this leaky bucket of consciousness. They remind the user that their attention is needed back on the platform, where it belongs, generating shareholder value.

When I reflect on the sheer genius of the infinite scroll, I am reminded of the great American frontier. There is always another video, another lip-sync, another heavily filtered influencer trying to sell dropshipped LED lights. It is the purest distillation of the pioneer spirit, packaged into a frictionless digital interface. Florida wants to put a wall up at the edge of this frontier, simply because a few million teenagers are experiencing minor developmental delays and a complete inability to form sustained thoughts.

Uthmeier boldly declared to the press, "We are going to get our kids their lives back." I must ask the attorney general: what lives, exactly? Is he suggesting we return these children to the analog drudgery of the twentieth century? Building forts out of unbranded sticks? Looking at trees that do not even have a comments section? Engaging in unstructured play that cannot be interrupted by an unskippable ad for a mobile gacha game? I shudder at the thought of such severe intellectual and commercial poverty.

It is time we recognized TikTok not as a threat to our youth, but as a rigorous, eight-hour-a-day training program for the fully digital, metaverse-integrated economy that awaits them. If we coddle them now with screen time limits and bedtimes, how will they ever survive the grueling, gamified gig-economy jobs of tomorrow? How will they maintain the necessary dopamine baseline required to navigate a world mediated entirely by screens?

I, for one, will not be apologizing for the six to eight hours a day my children spend staring into the void of the algorithm. I consider it an investment in their future adaptability. If Florida and James Uthmeier want their state's attention so badly, perhaps they should stop filing lawsuits, hire a better choreographer, and learn how to do the Renegade. Until then, the free market has spoken, and it is doing a synchronized dance to a sped-up Doja Cat song.