Yesterday around lunchtime I got a phonecall from what purported to be a Swedish mobile number. When I answered, a fairly good quality but nonetheless clearly artificially generated USian male voice announced that it was a call from the International Police Cops, and that my ID card had been connected to international money laundering activity.

I have long been aware that the reason spam emails such as 419 scams are so poorly written is to filter for, uh, low-information voters, shall we say—those who are more likely to follow the entire phishing chain, if they’re insufficiently (media) literate to recognise the initial contact as spurious.

Even so: International Police Cops?! A friend pointed out how much it sounds like the title of the sort of glossy animated kid’s-hour TV IP (with associated toys and merchandise) that were popular in Anglophone countries around the late 1980s. Whether that was a deliberate aesthetic choice, or simply a weird resonance, I suppose I’ll never know.

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Perhaps not unrelatedly, a survey suggests that almost half of young people asked “would rather live in a world where the internet does not exist”, as The Guardian puts it. Cue the usual policycritters and professional handwringers framing it as a demand for protection from “the consumer” to “Big Tech”, as if the latter—were it even constituted as a coherent entity—would even consider such a move, or the former had any expectation of them doing so. Regulation might be a start, but as with most severe and widespread social ailments, the pushback must and will come in the form of a grass-roots rejection—and that’s already happening, if you’ve the eyes to see it. The turn is coming. Enantiodromia will have its day.

I can’t stop thinking about a riff I saw quoted somewhere in the last week or so, but now cannot recall the source for—which merely compounds the irony, I suppose—to the effect that the internet and “AI” are comparable to laudanum in the Victorian era: touted as a wonder of the age, used for almost any purpose you could cram into an advert, horribly addictive and ruinous to health, and eventually necessitating the construction of a whole new way of thinking about psychology, wellbeing, regulation and crime.

(If you can remember seeing the quote I’m talking about, or are its source, please get in touch so I can cite it properly. Thanks.)