Internet and “new kids”

I’ve been hearing about this for a long time, but my brain somehow scattered these facts into the void; now I finally decided to think about it.

With the advent of WWW and 4G Internet, a lot has turned upside down in the world.

Among other things, laws and stereotypes of society collapsed.

14 year olds,

writing comments for money and leading Instagram accounts of popular brands.

10 years

TikTokers with millions of subscribers and contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

17 years old

environmental activists speaking from the UN rostrum.

15 year old musicians

whose creativity is scattered billions Spotify plays.

and every day this list only grows, and there are more names on it.

This is all wonderful and inspiring, of course... if not for one BUT

These people, who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars and are idols for many, cannot even get a credit card now.

This is not only a new phenomenon for social life, but also a huge miasma for political, economic and social systems.

So, the American economist Walter Block proposes to set the age of majority as the age at which a person begins to support himself independently. That is, if you can start supporting yourself at the age of 12, you have some kind of personal brand on Instagram, a lot of subscribers on Patreon, or you sell some advertising space on Telegram - you become an adult.

All YouTube and TikTok children according to the Block must be considered adults.

But, on the other hand, people who, for example, live with their parents until the age of 30, cannot support themselves, can they be considered adults?

According to the current legislation of Russia, a citizen becomes an adult upon reaching 18 years of age, but does he become independent at the same time?

If a person cannot support himself, and lives somewhere in the basement of his parents’ house, plays games and drinks cola. Can such a person be considered independent? and adults?

This is all fun and interesting in words, but not when we get to legal practices. Because coming of age is not just about some kind of independence, but it is a rather serious legal aspect of the social life of society.

In many countries, adulthood is the age at which you can fully own property and assets. You can vote, take part in elections, you can choose and be elected. From a certain age, you can invest, open companies, and so on...

As a result, we get a funny picture... children of 2000 did not have nearly as many opportunities for creative self-realization as children of 2020.

And this trend is only gaining momentum.

Society is increasingly beginning to face the problem of legal restrictions for young people, and increasingly these young people are beginning to dissolve the fossilized aspects of legal law.