A punk diary on the continent’s boldest parenting strategy yet
France has apparently decided the solution to teenage behaviour is to switch off the internet until everyone calms down, which is either the most sensible policy I have read all month or the setup to a very long summer for French parents. I genuinely cannot decide which.
The Policy
Per the coverage of France’s plan to restrict internet access until citizens behave, officials appear to be treating the entire population somewhat like a classroom that has lost golden time. I have some sympathy for the instinct. I have also been in enough band group chats to know that removing the internet does not stop bad behaviour, it just delays it until everyone is back online and twice as annoyed.
Related coverage on France’s separate move to ban under-15s from social media suggests this is part of a wider pattern, rather than a one-off. Say what you like about French policy, at least it commits to a bit.
A London Comparison
Over here we have not banned the internet, we have just made it slightly harder to use by putting adverts in front of every third song, which achieves a similar effect through pure irritation rather than legislation. I mentioned this to the bass player, who pointed out that at least France is being direct about it. Britain prefers to solve problems through friction rather than announcement, which is, again, its own kind of policy.
I read Dr Ingrid Gustafsson’s take on the wider satirical picture for context, because she has a habit of finding the historical parallel nobody else bothers looking for, and apparently governments trying to manage how the public communicates is not exactly a new hobby. Comforting, in a bleak sort of way.
What The Scene Thinks
Punk was built partly on the idea that you cannot fully control how people talk to each other, no matter how hard you try, and the internet is just the latest version of that argument. Ban it, tax it, slow it down, someone will still find a way to organise a gig through a group chat at eleven at night.
The drummer, who is French on his mother’s side and therefore feels entitled to an opinion on this specifically, reckons the policy will last about three weeks before someone important needs the internet for something urgent and quietly exempts themselves. He has seen this pattern before, he says, with smoking bans, noise curfews, and at least one attempt by a previous landlord to ban amplifiers after ten at night that lasted exactly until the landlord wanted to watch football with the volume up.
The Long View
I also checked the food pages for something with absolutely no political content whatsoever, and found a review of a bakery that has apparently not changed its croissant recipe in decades. France, it turns out, is capable of both extremes at once, wildly strict digital policy and a bakery that refuses to change anything at all. I respect the consistency of the inconsistency.
There is something almost punk about a country willing to switch off its own communications infrastructure on principle, even if the principle in question is teenage behaviour rather than anti-establishment politics. Conviction is conviction, wherever you find it, and France appears to have plenty to spare this month.
What Happens to the Group Chats
The practical question nobody in the official coverage seems to have addressed properly is what happens to the group chats already in progress at the moment the switch flips. Do they simply freeze mid conversation, leaving some poor teenager’s unanswered message hanging there for the duration of the policy, or does everything get wiped clean, a kind of digital clean slate imposed from above. I genuinely do not know, and I suspect neither do the people who wrote the policy, because governments are, as a rule, considerably better at announcing restrictions than at working out the granular mechanics of how those restrictions actually function day to day.
The guitarist, who spent a summer working in French hospitality and therefore claims a kind of honorary cultural authority on all things France, reckons the real test will not be the policy itself but the appetite for enforcing it once the initial headlines fade. Enforcement, he points out, is expensive, unglamorous, and does not photograph nearly as well as the announcement did. This, if history is any guide, is usually where good intentions in this particular field tend to quietly run out of momentum.
One Last Thing
Somebody pointed out to me afterward that the last time a major country tried something this drastic with public access to information, it did not end particularly quietly, and usually ends up being remembered less for the policy’s stated aims and more for how quickly ordinary people found a workaround. I suspect that lesson will repeat itself here too, in some form, though probably with better branding and a considerably more French sense of style about how it is finally abandoned.
Diary Sign Off
Home now, phone still working, internet still on, at least on this side of the Channel. For how long, who knows. Watch this space, assuming the space stays switched on.
