Chips for Children (and How They’ll Sell It)

’90s me was sunk into a lopsided couch off 6th and Pearl in Boulder, a living room that smelled like bong water, thrift-store patchouli, and wet ski gloves. We’d flip between local news and reruns, argue whether The Sink or Dot’s Diner had the better hangover eggs, and swear we could see faces in the Flatirons if the sunset hit just right. That night, two stories bled together through the haze: pets getting microchipped and breathless chatter about barcodes for people.

We were not “if you’ve got nothing to hide…” guys. We had plenty to hide. This was dial-up and pagers, a shoebox of Dead tapes—Jerry was still alive—and gravity bongs made from 2-liter bottles. In Boulder you could be a stoner and a citizen; in a lot of places it was a felony back then. Boulder’s acceptance made you lax when you visited anywhere else—you’d forget the rules changed at the county line. Our consensus was simple: no chips, no codes, no thanks—and besides, “No one would ever go for that, dude.”

We also assumed no one would ever agree to get digitally tagged. Then came COVID, QR passes, the whole “papers please, but make it an app” era. Turns out you don’t need jackboots; you just need a good story and the right soundtrack.

Looking back, the ’90s were already handing us the syllabus for the century: Waco and Ruby Ridge on TV, America’s Most Wanted turning fear into entertainment, scanners crackling through the O.J. chase, a rising drumbeat of “live at five.” Postman warned we were amusing ourselves to death, McLuhan had already told us the medium was the message, and Debord called it the spectacle—a society where images choose the facts. We thought we were just getting high and watching the news. The news was getting high on us.

Here’s the play I’ve believed since that couch, and I still think it’s the one:

1. A slick company—call it Acme—launches affordable child chips. Soft colors, lullaby ads, “peace of mind,” a teddy-bear logo winking from a billboard on 28th Street.

2. Within weeks, two kidnappings dominate every screen in the country.

Case A: photogenic child, chipped at birth. The coverage is operatic. Helicopter shots. Ring-camera loops turned into prayer wheels. A sizzle reel of Navy-SEAL-ish heroics—breach video, thermal cams, slow-mo hugs. Anchors doing hushed cathedral voices. “Experts” in perfect blazers selling certainty in 12 seconds. Hashtags, prayer vigils, a branded ribbon at halftime. Police PR gets a halo. Acme gets a stock bump. A governor gets a podium.

Case B: an unchipped kid from a family coded as “noncompliant.” Less telegenic, less glossy, much poorer. The updates arrive mean and efficient: missed pings, missed windows, missed child. The chyron verbs sharpen: FAILED, REFUSED, UNPROTECTED. Pundits chew on “responsibility” like dogs worry a bone. True-crime podcasts go feral. A prosecutor announces a task force. A senator promises a bill named after the kid.

And because hell makes great content, every player gets a little heaven: ratings, budgets, promotions, retweets, IPOs. Your grief becomes somebody’s quarter. The spectacle farms outrage, and outrage clicks. The story did the work. By Monday the line is around the block. In a year, 95% of under-fives are chipped. Once those fives turn to tens, enough people will have it that we’re not going backward without a revolution. Then the commercials start over in the “developing” world with fresh faces and the same script.

If that sounds too cynical, crack a few books:

• Availability heuristic → availability cascade. Tversky & Kahneman showed vivid events hijack our sense of probability; Kuran & Sunstein showed how saturated images harden into policy. One perfect rescue + one perfect horror and the debate is over before it begins.

• Risk society. Ulrich Beck: we’ve shifted from making wealth to managing dread. When the subject is kids, the only tolerable number is zero. Tech arrives dressed as certainty.

• Panopticon with a pacifier. Foucault: you don’t need towers when the camera lives in your pocket—or in your kid’s ankle. With children, surveillance ships in pastels. The hardware is the leash; the app is the ritual; the data broker is the priest. We call it peace of mind, and we pay a subscription.

• Seeing like a state (and a platform). James C. Scott: power craves legibility. Chips turn messy little humans into tidy rows—timestamps, “last seen at,” heartbeats. States, insurers, and platforms nod in unison.

• Security theater. Bruce Schneier: it only has to look like protection at the right moment. The failures won’t trend. The one raid will.

• State of exception. Agamben: emergencies become habits. Carve-outs “for the children” metastasize: dementia patients, parolees, “sensitive roles,” freshmen, stadium fast lanes, your job badge. The ratchet rarely reverses.

And spare me “nothing to hide.” Everyone has something to hide: a route, a rendezvous, a dumb fight, a weekend you’d rather not immortalize, a kid who needs untracked room to be a kid. Privacy isn’t a crime plan; it’s adulthood.

“Yes, but chips can help.” Of course. Pets come home because of them. A few kids will too. The means of adoption matters because it sets the terms of life after. When grief and spectacle open the policy window (Kingdon), all the hard questions get bulldozed:

• What’s the false positive rate, and who pays when cops hit the wrong door?

• What’s the warrant standard, and did a parent’s tap waive a child’s future rights?

• What’s the sunset—age 13, 18, never?

• What blocks function creep—attendance today, geofencing friends tomorrow?

• What happens to the un-chipped—school pressure, insurance penalties, quiet suspicion?

We won’t start with those. We’ll start with a microphone in a mother’s face and a senator wearing empathy like a sash. Then we’ll backfill the ethics with a Terms of Service nobody reads. We’ll call it love. We’ll sign the terms. We’ll grumble about privacy while tapping “Accept.”

If you want more psych for why we cave: present bias (sleep tonight > dystopia later), authority effects (Milgram: white coats turn asks into orders), moral foundations (Haidt: the care/harm switch slams so hard the liberty switch snaps), surveillance capitalism (Zuboff: if Acme profits on data exhaust, Acme will invent “features” that need more exhaust). They’ll A/B-test us into compliance and call it onboarding. And, yes, COVID taught me how fast the Overton window slides when “safety” is the headline. I’m not here to re-litigate any of it. I’m saying the muscle memory is locked in. The next time a “for the children” device ships, we’ll have an army of influencers, a phalanx of experts, and a thousand blue-check scolds ready to call skepticism “anti-kid.” If there’s a spokesperson gig, Dr. Fauci will be there with a blazer and a slide deck. God bless the ghoul.

Do I think this ends with a law implanting everyone? Probably not. It won’t need law. It will be defaults and discounts. “Opt-in” that’s really opt-out. Insurance breaks, school “recommendations,” stadium “fast lanes.” A chorus of “why wouldn’t you?” and a spreadsheet that makes “no” expensive. We’ll tell ourselves a noble lie: it’s not control, it’s love.

Cards on the table: I don’t want chips in people as the default. You do you; keep it out of my kids. And if the sales job arrives the way I’ve described—two cases, one halo, one horror—don’t say we weren’t warned. We’ve seen the trick since the Boulder couch era; we just didn’t recognize the pilot episode.

If you care about freedom in any non-slogan way, here’s the move when the pitch drops:

• Refuse the default. Opt-in, not opt-out. Kill “implied consent.”

• Demand a sunset. Expiry by age, by time, by law. No “forever” devices on minors.

• Wall off the data. Single purpose, hard warrants, parent-visible access logs, a private right of action when companies cheat.

• Ban function creep. Put the “may not” list in statute, not blog posts.

• Price it honestly. Publish base rates, misses, harms. Re-authorize only if the math holds.

Or trust Acme. Sleep great—until your kid gets flagged for being somewhere the algorithm didn’t expect and you spend a weekend proving a negative to a bored detective reading from a dashboard.

This isn’t a call to smash machines. It’s a call to slow the story when the story is designed to make you sign. Every empire of control arrives dressed as convenience, with a child at the front of the parade. Every time we hand it the keys, it thanks us for our “partnership” and quietly changes the locks.

If they try to run this through the kids—and they will—the most subversive word left is no. Not the all-caps internet NO!!! Just the ordinary, boring, parent voice: no, not by default; no, not without guardrails; no, not forever. Love your children. Distrust the default. And remember the trick before it starts.