Beware the iPad Children, the Crack Babies of Today

Ever since Steve Jobs fucked off to the big Foxconn in the sky, it's become much more difficult to tell him how much we hate him, short of going to his grave in Alta Mesa and banging our shoes against it. So when, for instance, we learn that a four-year-old girl is entering a treatment clinic for her obsession with the iPad, our range of responses is generally limited to, a) smashing our fists into Apple LCD screens until they resemble a decent ragu, or b) crying. Neither of which seems particularly appropriate or effective. Dr Richard Graham, from the Capio Nightingale Clinic in London, is the psychiatrist who is treating an anonymous little girl who has been increasingly wedded to her iPad since the age of three. She already plugs into it for several hours a day. There have been many blowout tantrums when she is separated from it. None of this is good. So naturally, instead of sending her to bed and telling her "no" in a firm but loving voice, her parents have decided that their child is a junkie. They have booked her in for treatment at the Capio Nightingale, which reportedly charges £4,000 a week to treat adult internet addiction sufferers. (At the time of going to press no one seemed quite sure what the kiddie discount was.) Dr Graham has praised the girl's parents, saying that, had they not noticed the signs early and done something, their child would likely have ended up a full-blown addict by the age of 11. Pretty soon, on the message boards, other parents were posting up similar experiences. “My youngest is 3 and is addicted to iphones n ipads same as this girl :o,” said Rak in Milton Keynes. “Ah! My 15 month old loves my mobile phone,” said Fran in North Wales. “I can't get him off it!! He prefers playing on my phone then playing with his toys,” she added, semi-poignantly. “Would love it if he spent more time playing with his toys then my phone. I've noticed a lot of babies/children prefer it too.”

It's now obvious that internet-addicted tots are the crack babies of our era. Born doped up to the tits on digital living, withdrawal for them is torture by another name. Except that these aren't the product of ragged teen mums in inner cities. They are the products of money-rich, time-poor middle class households. These children will never have a chance at a normal life, but that's OK, because pretty soon "normal lives" won't exist in the new world our lax parenting and hyper-accessible tech is inadvertently building. For decades, computer scientists have been trying to make machines that more closely mimic human brains. Our children's will be the first generation to build human brains that more closely mimic computers. From year dot, their spongy cerebellums will be moulded into a new OS that we won't be able to upgrade to. We can philosophise all we like about the distinction between the real world and the virtual one: they simply won't understand the question. We could talk about distributed cognition or micro attention spans. They'd just blithely keep on flitting between 19 separate IM conversations while downloading a pizza on their 3D printer. Instead of a life at special needs schools, followed shortly by expulsion and prison, these addicts will be the vanguard of a future society. A future society in which anyone who hasn't had their digital upbringing will be left flapping about like blue-footed boobies, incapable of keeping up with the blinding pace of technology and information-absorption needed to hold down menial white-collar jobs. Then us farting gruntfuttocks will look to them like they've just invented fire. We will need them to wind down windows for us. To input our tax forms. To reboot our suicide machines. Think back to your mother trying to install a printer in 2005. Now imagine a society built by your children, in which everything you could possibly need is a 2005 printer. Of course, there will be a backlash. There will be those pushy mums who claim that little Graham is strictly limited to 90 minutes a day online, of which 30 must be McSweeney's. But in the main, the tide only goes one way. The era of having a soul and a body that carted you around outside of the bounds of the internet officially ended around 2008. What we have now is not so much a generation gap as a Generation Mariana Trench. Watching a baby play with an iPad, I empathise with those supermarket workers charged with manning the self-service machines that will eventually replace them. I know the baby will one day be writing me my redundancy papers on an e-tablet made of graphine. And I would like to kill it now, before it has the chance to sack me. But sadly I know that there are millions like it. So even if I did, it wouldn't make the blindest bit of difference. Yet there remains hope. Even now, if we were to just wake up to the threat, there's time for the world to agree to exterminate every child under eight. Then we could start again. Maybe get it right this time. Impose strict controls. Smash up some of our more child-tempting bits of kit. It might seem sad to start with: the Herod-like slaughter on every corner. But this a fight for species survival: if you think about it in terms of the next aeon, it soon becomes utterly insignificant. Our descendants would no more weep over it than we commemorate the extinction of 5 percent of the world's population in the Lushan Rebellion of 755. In the broader context of humanity's ability to pursue the things that make it happy – climbing trees, watching sunsets, fucking, dancing, all that shit – agreement on this one item would be more uplifting than any kind of global warming treaty or strategic arms limitation talks. Best of all, it would put Dr Richard Graham out of his lucrative trade, and back onto wards of greasy grey smack addicts, vomming methadone jellies onto his shoes and trying to steal his stethoscope.

Follow Gavin and Marta on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes / @MartaParszeniew

Illustration by Marta Parszeniew

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