I’m blaming Santa. As 2025 reaches its inevitable endgame, I can’t help thinking we have all become gullible children enthralled by the promise of tech cornucopia, refusing to see the folds in our logic because deep down we don’t want to break the magic.

While the federal government prepares to take the toys off the children with its world-first social media ban, it is hanging out the stockings for the self-same tech overlords to fill with new goodies via its light-touch National AI Plan.

These inherently contradictory policies punctuate a year where, for all the focus on the one-sided domestic contest, the main political challenges have moved into a virtual arena built and controlled by the most powerful corporations the world has ever seen.

While the Albanese government has emerged triumphant on the home front, its stewardship of the national interest in the helter-skelter advance of technology has been less than glorious.

As our final Guardian Essential report of the year reinforces, the under-16s social media ban that comes into force on Wednesday is an effective piece of retail politics that purports to wind back the clock to a simpler time where teen angst was not a commodity for commercial exploitation.

While the policy has been criticised by experts and activists as being more performative than substantive, it speaks to the justified anxiety many parents feel about the impact of the surveillance and attention economy on young minds.

My beef with the ban is not its breadth but its shallowness; it concedes the model of extraction, outrage and exploitation for everyone over the age of 16 by giving the algorithms a new status as a point of aspiration for those reaching maturity.

Of greater concern is that while the government is recognising our desire to keep social media away from our children, it is hanging out the mistletoe for more powerful and untested AI products: deepfake apps, intimate companions, industrial-scale fraudsters, oceans of........

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