Norway's prime minister just announced a near-ban on generative AI for elementary school students. A TechCrunch writer just bought a $59 piece of plastic called the Brick to stop herself from scrolling. The distance between a national education policy and a consumer gadget review is, apparently, about $59 and a few thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean. Both are attempts to introduce friction where frictionlessness has become pathological. Both are workarounds for systems that were designed to be irresistible.
Friction as Policy, Friction as Product
The interesting thing about the Brick is what it admits. After years of digital wellness apps, screen time dashboards, and parental controls, the most effective intervention is a physical object that blocks your phone's functionality. The product is successful precisely because software solutions to software addiction have a structural ceiling: the platform that addicts you also sells you the cure. Norway's approach is the state-level version of the same logic. When the commercial incentive cannot police itself, someone external has to introduce resistance. Whether that is a government, a piece of plastic, or a parent matters less than the underlying agreement: the default environment is hostile to attention.
The Real Debate Is About Agency, Not Screens
A 2024 paper in Nature Human Behaviour by Orben et al. argued that the effects of screen time on adolescent wellbeing are statistically real but contextually dependent, shaped more by what is being consumed and whether it is active or passive than by raw hours. That distinction is doing a lot of work in the policy debate. Norway is responding to a genuine concern. But blanket bans on AI tools in schools risk conflating the problem, a pedagogical environment shaped by engagement-maximizing systems, with the technology itself. The Brick is honest about what it is: a blunt instrument for people who cannot negotiate with their own impulses. The question is whether we want our children's education policy designed on the same premise. See also: Marcus Bösch on epistemic exhaustion and vibocracy.