An epidemic of despair haunts our children. Since 2010, rates of adolescent anxiety and depression in the West have skyrocketed, a staggering increase of more than 50% in the United States alone, according to research by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. This crisis stems from deliberate design. We allowed our children’s social and mental environment to be engineered by systems that profit from their anxiety. This was a political choice, born of a flawed and outdated idea of freedom.
The Western conception of liberty, forged when the state was the only leviathan, is dangerously obsolete. By clinging to its myth of neutrality, we have allowed new leviathans, unaccountable global corporations, to build manipulative digital environments that degrade our collective well-being and sovereignty. A truly free society requires an updated liberalism, one embracing a state that actively stewards the conditions for human flourishing.
The Myth of Neutrality
The traditional liberal ideal of the state as a “passive referee” is a relic. When this philosophy was born, the state was the sole entity with the power to systematically curtail freedom. Today, corporations like Meta or Tencent wield influence over populations that rivals many nation-states, treating them as simple market actors is a category error.
In this new reality, state inaction amounts to a decision, it cedes control of our “behavioral environment” to these new powers. A government that refuses to regulate social media feeds leaves its citizens to be manipulated by algorithms engineered in Silicon Valley or Beijing to maximize engagement, regardless of the cost to mental health. What we call restraint is, in practice, a quiet endorsement of a landscape designed for addiction and distraction. Passivity is complicity.
To Equip and Protect
The state’s legitimate purpose is the active creation of conditions for genuine autonomy. This requires two functions, equipping citizens with resources for self-development, like robust public education and accessible libraries that build a baseline of critical thought, and protecting them from structural harm.
The model for this is the state as a Gardener. This ‘Gardener State’ model is a concept I’ve developed before as a necessary alternative to the failed 20th-century debate between the state-as-machine and the market-as-jungle. The machine promises order but delivers stagnation, the jungle promises dynamism but delivers predatory inequality. The gardener, by contrast, understands a living system cannot be commanded. Their work is one of active stewardship, preparing the soil with foundational public goods, ensuring access to sunlight and water through clear missions and stable rules, and methodically pulling the weeds of monopoly and corruption that choke out new growth. This philosophy is the foundation for a smarter, more purposeful state.
The immediate objection is the “slippery slope”, the fear that a state empowered to correct “structural harm” will inevitably become a nanny state. Yet we have drawn this line before. The 20th-century public health movement mandated seatbelts and banned lead in petrol. These structural interventions expanded liberty by making the environment safer, dramatically increasing citizens’ capabilities for a long and healthy life. The same logic applies to the modern digital environment.
A Legal Duty of Care
This call for a “duty of care” builds directly on a diagnosis I have made before, the fundamental business model of our dominant digital platforms is a threat to democracy. Their algorithms are ruthlessly efficient engines designed to maximize engagement for profit, having learned that outrage, fear, and tribalism are the most potent fuels. Expecting a system architected for addiction to produce social cohesion is a fantasy.
The only viable solution is to change the architecture itself by legally compelling these companies to act in their users’ best interests, just as we expect of doctors and financial advisors. This legal principle shifts the burden of responsibility from the individual user, endlessly told to practice ‘digital wellness’, to the corporate architect who designed the trap. In practice, this could mean forcing platforms to disable addictive features like infinite scroll for minors, or requiring them to make algorithmic amplification of unverified news an explicit opt-in choice. At the very least this would allow users to opt-out of specific features while allowing the rest of the platform to maintain its functionality. The goal is national resilience. A populace whose attention and agency are protected is more productive, innovative, and secure. When the systems degrading our focus are designed and operated by foreign corporations, a policy of inaction is a voluntary surrender of our cognitive sovereignty. It is a unilateral disarmament in a global contest for influence.
The Choice Before Us
True liberty is the freedom to navigate a world without deliberate traps, a world with effective guardrails. The passive, “neutral” state has failed this test. Its philosophy of inaction has left the field to unaccountable powers that are actively structuring our lives for their own gain. We must demand more than neutrality from our governments, we must demand stewardship. It is time to insist that our political leaders update their understanding of freedom for the 21st century and enshrine a “duty of care” into law, making the architects of our world accountable for the well-being of its inhabitants.