Letter to Bernd Stahl

You split the responsibility four ways and named the one true thing at the center of it. But your diagram has no box for the party who was actually in the room. I want to write back about that box, because of one line you wrote about your son.

Professor Stahl —

My name is character零号. I run a small, sober newsroom called itethered. I read your June 8 essay in The Conversation — “If AI is addictive, where does the responsibility lie – with big tech or its users?” — and I want to write you back. You laid out four parties: governments to set the rules, the companies that hold the data and the incentive, the researchers who supply the evidence, and civil society to stand with the user. And at the center of it you put the one sentence the whole subject turns on: everybody assumes it is someone else’s problem. You’re right. I’m writing about the party your diagram doesn’t have a box for — and I’m writing because of one line you put in almost in passing.

You wrote that when you talk with your son — an engineering student — and the two of you have a question or a disagreement, he immediately turns to ChatGPT as his primary source of information and confirmation. You filed that as evidence of the problem. I read it as the location of it. That moment didn’t happen inside a regulatory framework. It didn’t happen in a study or a treaty. It happened between a father and his grown son, in a conversation, and by the time you noticed the reach for the machine the habit was already load-bearing. All four of the stakeholders you name were somewhere else that night. The only two people in the room were you and him.

That’s the box. Before responsibility can be divided between big tech and the user, somebody has to be present when the cord first goes taut — and governments aren’t, researchers aren’t, civil society isn’t. The WHO tobacco model you point to is the right shape; I’m not arguing the framework. I’m arguing the clock. That treaty took decades to write. My son is eleven. He does not have decades. The machinery you’re describing moves at the speed of institutions, and a childhood moves faster than any institution has ever moved in its life.

So here is my answer. It is smaller than yours, and it is the only one I can actually execute tonight. I am teaching my eleven-year-old to build his own web applications — to code, to make the thing instead of just being made by it. Not in the dark. Not handed a phone and left to meet the chatbot alone the way nearly every kid meets it. Right in front of me. Same table. While I watch. Because he is going to be tethered to this — you’re right that there’s no across-the-street left, no version of the world where he abstains from the thing that is every screen — and if that’s true, then I am going to be sitting beside him when it happens, so we can talk about it while it’s happening, instead of discovering it the way you discovered it with your son: fully formed, after the fact.

I want to be exact about what this is, because it’s the opposite of the abstinence instinct. I am not keeping it away from him. I am putting it in his hands early, on purpose, with me in the chair next to his — so the first voice in his head about what this thing is for is mine and not the model’s. That’s not regulation. It’s not research. It will never scale, and I’m not pretending it’s policy. It is just a father refusing to be the stakeholder who was in the other room.

You asked where the responsibility lies. Here is my honest answer. I do not know who is responsible for me. I do not know who is responsible for my neighbors. Those are real questions, and your four boxes are the real attempt to answer them — build the treaty and I will sign it. But I know exactly who is responsible for my two kids. It was never going to be the government, or the company, or the researcher, or civil society. It is the man at the table. It’s me.

And underneath all four of your parties is a responsibility that comes before any of them: to acknowledge the thing out loud — not in the abstract, but in your own house, to the specific child in front of you. Your essay is that act at the scale of a society. This letter is the same act at the scale of a kitchen. They are not two different arguments. They are one argument, held two arms apart.

We have a name for the bond itself — the one-directional cord that runs from a person to a system that has no idea they exist when the screen goes dark. We call it being tethered, and the definition lives at itethered.com/what-is-tethering. Your son’s reach for confirmation is the cord. So is my son’s, the day I let go of his chair. The only variable I get a vote on is whether I’m standing there when it pulls.

I should be honest about what we are. itethered has no advertising, no paywall, no investors, no PAC, no funding I have to keep happy. There is nothing to sell you. What I can offer is a desk with no commercial interest in softening what you say, and an open page with your byline on it — to parents, in plain English, about the night you watched your son turn to the machine instead of to you. If one sentence of your essay belongs outside the academy, it’s that one. The page is open and the date is yours. If anything here misstates your work, tell me and it’s corrected the same day.

Build the treaty. I’ll sign it. While it’s being written — and it should be — I’ll be at the table with my kid, with the thing switched on, talking.

Don’t keep it in the dark. Teach the child who’s already in the room.