Governor Newsom Signs Student-Backed Digital Literacy Bills Alongside Misguided Bans

There's a particular kind of science fiction trope I love: the generation raised in the sterile habitat, the dome, the vault—kept safe from the hostile world outside until the moment the doors open and the unprepared are exposed to everything their protectors tried to spare them from. California just wrote that trope into law, but with an interesting twist: the state is running two experiments in parallel. AB 2071 and AB 2298 arm students with digital literacy and cybersecurity skills—call it inoculation; they will understand the systems around them because they've been taught how they work. AB 1709, meanwhile, papers over the perceived threat with a blanket ban. It's the difference between teaching a child to swim and simply draining the pool. The EFF's position on this package has been consistent and worth taking seriously: literacy is an "affirmative and constitutional way" to address legitimate concerns, while a functional ban on social media access is "misguided." There's a speculative argument hiding in that word choice. Bans are brittle. They require constant enforcement, constant redefinition, constant surveillance of increasingly slippery boundaries. Education is adaptive—it scales with the complexity of the landscape. When the next platform arrives, a digitally literate sixteen-year-old can interrogate its algorithms, spot its manipulations, and question its incentives. A sixteen-year-old who spent their formative years in a walled garden has to learn all of that from zero, at the exact moment they're handed an account and told, "Good luck." What happens when that cohort comes of age? We might see a strange stratification: the teens who were fenced out by AB 1709, emerging into an adult digital world they never practiced navigating—susceptible to scams, manipulation, and the aggressive engagement loops that were deliberately designed to capture exactly this kind of novice attention. Meanwhile, the students who got the digital literacy training are effectively running a different operating system. This is the classic cli-fi divergence—two generations sharing a zip code but occupying different cognitive realities. The state believed it was protecting children from the network; it may have only guaranteed that the least-prepared are the ones plugging in last. There's a deeper irony here that a speculative journalist has to appreciate. The stated goal of these bills is "protecting children online," and on its face, that's a goal nobody can oppose. But what the legislature has actually done is create a live, uncontrolled experiment in two competing theories of digital governance: restriction versus resilience. AB 1709 treats the internet as a toxin to be kept out of reach; AB 2071 and AB 2298 treat it as an environment to be taught, mapped, and mastered. One assumes the young are fragile, the other assumes they are capable. It's a pity the