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talk to him, he has his own kids, and he’s quite critical of it all and thinks it’s all going in a horrible direction.” Lindstrom’s understanding of the child’s mind, as summarized by Bakan, is alarmingly on point: “Emotions drive everything for children . . . and marketers, to be successful, must engage the most fundamental emotions at the deepest level. Love, which connotes nurturing, affection, and romance, is one of these fundamental emotions . . . Fear—as in violence, terror, horror, cruelty, and war—is another. Then there is mastery, kids’ aspiration to gain independence from adults.” (Italics in original.) This deft analysis is not intended to help the child’s mind develop toward health, dignity, genuine mastery, and authentic independence, but the polar opposite: to deliberately turn that mind into prey and a lifelong captive of profit-driven market forces. It aims at the direct sabotage of childhood: the period of growth in which the young human is designed by Nature to move toward her full capacities, mature emotionally, deepen in empathy and self-understanding, learn how to connect with others in mutually beneficial ways, begin to realize her creative potentials, and acquire the template for nurturing the next generation. Everything the corporate juggernaut foists upon children—prefabricated play options, video games, mass-manufactured toys, gadgets, peer-centric online platforms, and saccharine and superficial television programs targeted at toddlers and preschoolers, along with the mainstreaming of glossy, soulless, porn-inflected depictions of sexuality available to teens and, increasingly, even younger kids—has detrimental effects. “We are forcing the brain in the wrong direction,” Lindstrom confessed to Bakan. Psychologically and neurobiologically, the marketing whiz was 100 percent correct. That Facebook (recently rebranded as “Meta”), through its Instagram brand, has knowingly marketed programs that harm the mental health of teenage girls is only the latest revelation of the corporate assault on children’s minds.[10] Although the threat posed to children’s brains and minds by the ubiquitous, compulsive, commercialized world of digital devices and media raised profound alarm from the start among those who were observing the impacts, it continues to burgeon and metastasize. I refer here both to the use